Erotica, High Heels, and Handbags: Is This How The Beltway Press Should Cover Powerful Women?

[demmiblue]

Source: Media Matters

Avril Haines' extraordinary professional rise hit a new plateau this week when President Obama appointed the 43-year-old White House national security attorney to become the CIA's deputy director, replacing longtime career officer Michael Morell.

Haines' CIA promotion came just two months after Obama had nominated her to take over as legal counsel for the State Department. Haines will become the highest-ranking women ever at the CIA, just as she would have become the first female legal counsel a the State Department, if Obama hadn't changed his mind about her promotion. Haines' appointment comes in the wake of last week's news that Susan Rice had been appointed Obama's new national security advisor, and that Samantha Power would replace Rice as the United States' Ambassador to the United Nations.

Yet as women continue to rise in the Obama administration and on Capitol Hill, some in the press still apply a shockingly different standard when covering accomplished women in Washington, D.C.

The day after the White House made the Haines appointment, the Daily Beast published a strange article revealing how the CIA's new number two, when she was 25-years-old, used to host erotic readings at the Baltimore book store and restaurant she co-owned. (Salon accused the Daily Beast of "slut-sham[ing]" Haines.)

Read more: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/14/erotica-high-heels-and-handbags-is-this-how-the/194471

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Why is this not interesting? Is the story of a young entrepreneur...

reading excerpts from Anne Rice novels somehow shameful, or to be ignored or covered up?

If some guy he appointed to something once co-owned a boxing club, would it be wrong to mention that because it's male-oriented?

I'm a little more interested in why Haines, with no relevant experience, got the job, but stuff that illustrates how well-rounded she might be is good stuff. And might give a hint as to why she got the job.

[mercuryblues]

2. Why it matters

They skipped her experience:

Avril D. Haines is Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House. Prior to joining the White House Counsel’s office in 2010, she was Assistant Legal Adviser for Treaty Affairs at the Department of State. She previously worked in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the Department of State from 2003 to 2006, first in the Office of Treaty Affairs and then in the Office of Political Military Affairs. From 2007 to 2008, she worked on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Majority. Ms. Haines clerked for Judge Danny Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit from 2002 to 2003. From 2001 to 2002, she was a Legal Officer at The Hague Conference on Private International Law. She received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. That's from her resume-- not every background or...

puff piece has to include the stock resume. If you're trying to humanize someone, which is not a bad thing, the resume might even get in the way.

Complainants may be missing the simple fact that this was a complimentary piece aimed at a specific market and stop moaning that it wasn't written exactly the way they would like to see it.

[mercuryblues]

10. Hmm.

Even you said that she seemed to have no relevant experience. Perhaps you came to that conclusion because they omitted her relevant experience?

[Squinch]

3. "And it might give a hint as to why she got the job." Are you implying that she slept her way in?

[TreasonousBastard]

4. No-- I said she had an interesting past...

none of which had anything to do with her actual sex life.

What are you implying?

[Squinch]

6. So her interesting past reading erotic literature might explain how she got the job?

[TreasonousBastard]

7. The "erotic literature " included Anne Rice...

erotica comes in many flavors and those at her little bookstore seems to have appealed to educated women with refined literary tastes. Just one facet of her enlightened past.

That's what I got out of it-- but you seem to have gotten something else.

[Squinch]

8. So you are saying that you think that her reading of Anne Rice erotica explains how she

got the job as CIA Deputy Director?

I still don't see what you are referring to as "it" when you say "It might give a hint as to why she got the job."

[TreasonousBastard]

9. Then give up trying. "It" is more than the readings.