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Jessica Valenti
Hateful Fox News Rhetoric Can Do Real-World Harm
‘I am more afraid than I have ever been’
Last week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham ran a segment about new hires at NYU’s journalism school, two adjuncts who will teach classes on feminist journalism and reporting on the far right, respectively. Ingraham called them “little journo terrorists,” and she described NYU’s decisions to hire them to teach a single course “terroristic tactics.”
One of the women targeted, Talia Lavin, told the Daily Beast that she had received death threats and thousands of harassing messages. She tweeted, “I am 29. I have no full-time job. I am teaching a single course, for $7k, as an adjunct. This is insane. And irresponsible. It is incitement. It is not okay.”
We cannot go on like this. As a feminist writer, I’ve been on the receiving end of serious harassment for more than a decade. I’ve left my house with a one-year-old in tow after a threat against my life. I have FBI agents in my contacts, and have taken dozens of security precautions that I can’t write about lest I make it easier for harassers to bypass them. And in perhaps the worst moment of my life, I’ve had to explain to the administrators at my daughter’s school that my then-five-year-old had a rape and death threat made against her.
