This Gal’s Got to Rant

If there was any doubt, and there was among some people, that Bill Cosby was a rapist who drugged his victims, the news yesterday that he admitted so himself ought to have put that to rest. 

The Associated Press news organization finally convinced a judge to unseal Cosby’s testimony from a civil hearing a decade ago, into whether he sedated and raped a woman at a university where he held an honorary degree. Cosby, in his own words, admitted to it. The judge explained that he was disturbed by the stark contrast between Cosby the public moralist and Cosby the subject of more than two dozen allegations of rape, so he opened the documents. Cosby’s lawyers had tried to keep the testimony private because it would cause “great embarrassment” to their client. I’ll say.

So that part is done and so is Bill Cosby. But that’s not even the point of my upset. I believed these women all along. No, it’s the pervasive ignorance about what the job of a newscaster is and the willingness of some people to openly criticize without knowing what in the hell they are talking about.

Many local feminists – among whose ranks I place myself, by the way – took to Twitter to denounce “the media” for “softening” and going “all PC” on the wording of the story. “Drugging women and having sex with them is rape. Why isn’t the media saying so?”, was a typical complaint. I saw red.

How dare anyone accuse me and my colleagues of bias on the side of a known rapist. The story concerned Cosby’s own words. Cosby said under oath, “to have sex with”, and his refusal to identify his actions as rape is part of the damn story! It shows his lack of empathy about the brutality of what he had done.

I’m really fed up with being told I’m not doing my job right by people who don’t understand my job. Yes, I take it personally because I take my work – not myself – seriously. Granted, these complaints were directed at all London media, but I made sure my story was always filled out with the number of women who are accusing him of drugging and sexually assaulting them. (Not all of those incidents were rape and none of us has the luxury of time to list every woman and her specific accusation which was another criticism leveled our way.)

Lumping the media into one big steaming stew of morons is something I can’t stand idly by and take. It’s my duty to stay unbiased and stick to the facts in a newscast. And just because it doesn’t serve someone’s specific agenda doesn’t make me, or my colleagues, wrong, or worthy of public scorn.