Action Alert: Thank ABC News for Forbes critique - transcipt to follow when available

ACTION ALERT from Women In Media & News (WIMN):
Thank ABC World News for Giving Voice to Women’s Media Criticism

[Editor’s Note: Quotes below were updated to reflect the ABC News transcript available on Nexis.com]

Every once in a while, a major corporate news outlet runs a piece so well reported that it bears a round of applause.

This evening, ABC’s World News ran a segment about the “fury of career women scorned,” in which ABC’s Nancy Weiner interviewed numerous professional women about their rapid and furious responses to Michael Noer’s ludicrous attack on independent, professional women in Forbes magazine this week.

Women bloggers were quoted describing Forbes’ attack as blood-boilingly misogynistic, female lawyers and women’s policy experts were given air time to rebut the piece as not only insulting, but inaccurate — and Weiner herself contextualized the piece this way:

“For most people, having a spouse who works is less a choice than an economic necessity. A recent survey found nearly 70 percent of working men have a wife who works, too.”

The segment ended with Weiner noting that although Noer claimed scientific studies supported his thesis about working wives leading to misery, filthy homes, divorce and poor health for men, one of the authors of those studies says that Noer misrepresented his findings in a way that may have “missed the big picture. He says while staying at home can make a wife happier, it ranks well behind having a husband who listens, shows affection and does his fair share of the housework.”

ABC also reported that by late Friday, “Steve Forbes, the company’s president and editor-in-chief, issued an apology. He says the article profoundly offended career women everywhere.”

A companion piece by Nancy Weiner on ABCNews.com included much of the same information and experts as the broadcast.

In the meantime, WIMN encourages everyone who was frustrated by Forbes’ sexism to thank ABC World News for running a segment that turned to female sources, who properly contextualized the Forbes article as offensive and inaccurate.

You may also want to let ABC know that although Forbes is now labeling Noer’s article as “Opinion,” one of the reasons it provoked such outrage among women was that it was originally packaged as a news piece, along with a slideshow justifying Noer’s inane claims by relying on selective misrepresentation of specious, inconclusive research and widely-debunked statistics.

Email ABC World News : netaudr@abc.com

Also, after Nancy Weiner tossed the segment back to World News anchor Charles Gibson, he wrapped it up by encouraging anyone who has an opinion about Forbes’ article on working women to log on to ABC and share their thoughts. So, after you send your letters to the editor, post them on ABC’s website.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, American Culture, Domestic Politics, Economics, Feminism, Pop Culture, WIMN’s Executive Director’s Blog, Workplace Discrimination, Girls and LGBT Youth, Issues in the News, Outrages & Responsibilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.