We’re in your home each and every night. You turn on the television and there we are, boom, front and center. As an anchor and reporter, I love sharing information with you. I love connecting with you. I love feeling a part of your day.
We know it’s there. We get hundreds of comments on our station’s facebook page and calls into the newsroom. The ‘nasty viewers’, as we call them. We try to shrug them off as someone who is so unhappy with themselves. They can’t help but call our place of employment. They comment on their displeasure in our hair, our outfit, or our weight. It's never about the information coming out of our mouths.
It happens more and more. Often, it’s geared towards female journalists. I am a part of an all-female multimedia journalist facebook page. It's horrific to
see the stories they share with us on the messages they recieve. Those stories shared day in and day out. We’ve seen It. Men can wear the same suit everyday for a year and get away with It. A station even tried
it in the past… no one noticed. A show of sexism
going strong. Male anchors have spoken up, trying to right these wrongs. Women journalists take to the airwaves about this toxic culture. It continues.
Often, these messages comes from faceless accounts. Cowards. Keyboard bullies, who can’t put a face to their toxic words.
But, there’s a person behind the screen, a person
who worked damn hard to get to be the journalist she
is today. Yet, I too have insecurities, like the rest of us.
What do you gain by pointing out my flaws?
I’m not sure if the disconnect comes from the thought
of the TV industry being ‘glamorous’ (It isn’t.) Or, that
women throw away a dress after one wear because we make a lot of money. (We don’t.) We don’t have professional stylists or makeup artists.
Every piece of clothing usually comes off the sale rack. Our closet paid through a few bucks I can scrape from an already tight budget. I know I have dark circles, even after packing on the concealer. You fail to notice I'm back on air at four a.m. after pulling a 15-hour shift the day prior, due to breaking news.
So please, be kind to us. We are people too. We are trying to do our job. Like you, some days we are just trying to get by until it’s time to clock out.
I grieve, too, when I speak to the families who just lost a loved in a senseless tragedy. I feel the hopelessness, as the police chief is on the verge of tears, talking about a three-year-old hit by a stray bullet through a day care window. I swallow back emotions, as I try to remain straight faced during a report on how a family will never feel closure as their daughter’s killer was found guilty.
The stories we tell are hard enough, please don’t make It harder.
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