By now, if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog,
you’ve heard the story of WKBT-TV La Crosse news anchor Jennifer
Livingston. Above is a picture of her as
she appeared on Channel 8 yesterday, delivering her response to a viewer who
wrote in and told her, essentially, that she’s too fat to be on TV, is a poor
role model, and that her “choice” to be obese was disgusting.
Just to give you a bit more perspective, here’s a photo of
Jennifer taken four years ago, covering an Obama rally at UW-LaCrosse with
Professor Joe Heim.
And here’s another picture of Jennifer, from
Facebook.
I speak to the subject of the appearance of TV people with
some authority, having been married for the past 15 years to a woman who spent
the first decade of our marriage as an on-camera TV reporter for Channel 3 in
Madison, and having done on-camera TV myself for many years. During her decade of being on TV every
weeknight, my wife summoned great discipline to keep her weight lower than what
her body and metabolism “wanted it” to be.
During her TV years, no one ever implied that she was overweight,
because she wasn’t. I’m overweight; like
Jennifer, I’m “obese” on the doctor’s charts.
But in my 7 years of being on TV every weekday morning, I never heard
one word about “being fat”.
The first thing they did with my wife, when she traded in
her desk job as Assignments Manager at Channel 3 for an on-camera reporter’s
job, was to direct her to change the color of her hair. The Dallas-based consulting company that
Channel 3 used back then said there were already too many blondes on the air at
Channel 3. So she became a brunette with
dark red accents in her hair. At least
they paid for that, through an arrangement with a local salon.
They told her what kind of clothes to wear. Oh, and that business about TV people getting
“free” wardrobes? Maybe in New York and
LA, but in markets like Madison, you used to get a SMALL amount of money every
month as a “clothing allowance”, which probably doesn’t even exist any
more. When the consultant said “wear
scarves”, my wife bought scarves.
My wife was on the receiving end of nasty, anonymous
comments about her appearance, the color of her hair, the color of her
lipstick, the kind of clothes she wore, and other superficial things, which
very seldom had anything to do with the content of her stories. (But there were those complaints, too.)
How many women over 50 years of age do you see doing news on
your local station? Rhetorical
question. For a while, it was fashionable
in the TV news industry to have the local nightly news anchored by “a
grandfather and his granddaughter” – pairing a 50+ year old man with a
20-something woman.
My point is, TV news, whether anyone will admit it or not,
is as much about appearance as it is about journalism. And it’s grossly unfair to women.
So when Jennifer Livingston pushed back, the story quickly
went viral. Like any other woman on TV,
she said she’s gotten plenty of unsolicited feedback about her appearance. But when she shared the “bad role model”
e-mail with her newsroom colleagues, they were angry, and encouraged her to
speak out. She did, and she did so
eloquently.
Anyone who thinks TV is a glamour business is only partly
correct. It’s a very brutal business for
women, who are constantly judged by their appearance alone.
As Oprah would say, “you go, girl”! Good for you, Jennifer. Nobody should have to take that kind of crap.
