Washington Post's Sexist TV Critic
05/11/2010 by Peter HartWashington Post critic Tom Shales (5/11/10) didn't think much of the debut of the PBS show Need to Know. Given the reactions from viewers at the Need to Know website, and those published by PBS ombud Michael Getler, he's not the only one who found the show a disappointment--or, as Shales put it, a "monstrosity" and "a specious wheeze."
But he seemed to save a special kind of scorn for co-host Alison Stewart. Responding to the show's fawning interview with Bill Clinton, Shales wrote that "she looked as though she would have been much more comfortable in Clinton's lap."
Uh huh.
When ABC announced that they had hired CNN's Christiane Amanpour to be host of the Sunday morning show This Week, Shales (3/23/10) seemed genuinely upset, balking that Amanpour lacked inside-the-Beltway credentials (I think he meant that as a criticism) and noting that some conservatives believe her to be too critical of Israel. Shales even insinuated that Amanpour's upbringing could be a problem: "Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity."
Shales went back for more in a Post Web chat, writing:
And neither you nor I has stooped to mentioning that hair of hers--yipe. What's the deal with that, as David Letterman might say.
The blog Jezebel headlined a roundup of his worst commentary, "WaPo TV Critic Tom Shales Has a Lady Problem."
Indeed.
Tags: Alison Stewart, Need to Know, Tom Shales
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May 11th, 2010 at 11:01 am
[...] Washington Post's Sexist TV critic [...]
May 12th, 2010 at 1:14 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by The Hacktivist and TZ Asia, T B. T B said: FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Washington Post's Sexist TV critic http://bit.ly/9q5vMa [...]
May 12th, 2010 at 8:33 am
Oh and he is soooo appealing himself. UGH.
June 12th, 2010 at 1:06 am
Allison Stewart of Need to Know does come off as a fluff head, especially every time their "comic" comes on. Allison Stewart starts laughing even before he makes his first joke and continues cackling all the way through. I wonder if she does it because she genuinely thinks he is funny (hard to imagine but possible); or if she is dating him; or if she does this just so others will think it is funny, kind of like canned laughter.
July 29th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
[...] rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried that the show focuses on "inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area [...]
July 29th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
[...] rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried that the show focuses on "inside-the-Beltway palaver, an [...]
August 1st, 2010 at 9:52 am
[...] a fairly recent arrival to the Post's Style section who's mostly taken over from the reliably misogynist Tom Shales. I've got a Harpy crush on Hank, because he's brilliant at picking apart all the sexist [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 3:50 pm
[...] Post critic Tom Shales, still apparently enraged that Amanpour got the job in the first place, slammed this performance: Perhaps in keeping with the [...]