“I’VE BEEN ASKED to become the president of PBS,” I told my significant other, Scott, as we prepared dinner together in the small kitchen of my Atlanta home.
“Well, that’s wonderful!” he said. Then he looked up and stopped cutting the onions. “So why aren’t we celebrating?”
“PBS headquarters are in Washington,” I said, expecting his big smile to fade. He was a lifetime resident of Atlanta and loved it.
“That’s terrific! I always wanted to live in the nation’s capital,” Scott responded with the biggest smile yet.
“Then you’ll come with me?”
Instead of answering the question, Scott dropped to one knee right there in the kitchen, took my hand, and asked, “Will you marry me?”
My first response was to laugh. Not appropriate, of course, but we’d been happily together, unmarried, for nearly seven years. “Why now?” I heard myself saying.
Still on his knees, Scott said, “You’re not going without me.”
“But you’ve got a business to run!”
“I’ll figure that out. Say yes, and start this job as a married woman.”
Now we were both laughing and deciding the order in which to share the news with the children—the new job, the move to Washington, or the upcoming wedding?
Within a few weeks, we were off to DC. I would be the first woman president of PBS and the first producer to take the reins of this country’s only public media broadcasting service.
IT WAS FEBRUARY of 2000. I’d already decided I was leaving Turner Broadcasting after Ted got fired and the disastrous AOL/Time Warner merger. I’d been asked to become the dean of a journalism school, an offer that I was considering seriously, when I received the call to interview with the PBS search committee. I’d never worked for public television; I was just another “viewer like you.” But after I met with the search committee and spent some time with its esteemed chair, Colin Campbell, I became more interested in this unexpected opportunity.
Joan Ganz Cooney, the cocreator of Sesame Street, who was on that committee, called me after my interview. “Pat, why would you want to do this job?”
“What do you mean?” Who wouldn’t want to work for the network that gives viewers choices like Sesame Street, Masterpiece Theatre, Frontline, and American Masters?
“It’s a really tough job!” she said. “PBS is not really a network. Not in the way you’re thinking it is. You’ll be spending more time herding cats, trying to get 349 public television stations to agree on anything!”
I didn’t fully understand the warning, and even if I had, I would probably have said yes anyway, believing, as I did and still do, that public broadcasting is a national treasure, an essential media enterprise in a landscape that even in 2000 was changing at cyberspeed with the internet emerging as a force and commercial media merging, acquiring, and being driven to deliver bigger returns to investors.
In fact, it was those same forces that motivated a small but committed group of concerned citizens to begin to petition Congress to put aside some of the public spectrum, the airwaves that belong to the public, for noncommercial television and radio. Their efforts eventually led to the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, which provided for some federal funding for the television and radio stations already operating locally with educational or public-broadcast licenses and created the national organization PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service.
Service is the operative word in the name. PBS is not a network or even a system, but a service organization created to serve its members, the local public broadcasting stations. At the national level, television stations joined PBS, and public radio stations joined together as members of NPR, National Public Radio. Some local stations have both radio and television licenses, but at the national level, the services are separate. I admit to being disappointed when I learned that NPR was not part of my responsibilities, as I came into this new position with a huge admiration for public radio, which has only continued to strengthen since my PBS tenure.
Importantly, in the legislation that formalized our public media service, Congress also set up the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to distribute government funds to the local public television and radio stations. This system ensured that federal taxpayer dollars would be handled by a bipartisan group, with a presidentially appointed board. This led to some unintended consequences from time to time.
A paranoid Richard Nixon, who believed public meant progressive, tried to use the nine-member board of CPB to influence programming decisions and, failing that, to cut federal funding. Since the membership tilts with whichever governing party is in power, I inherited the more conservative Bush-appointed board when I started in March of 2000. George Bush, like many detractors, had characterized PBS as a luxury at best and at worst a megaphone for public opinions that might not concur with current administration policies.
As Joan Ganz Cooney had predicted, I had underestimated the challenges as president of PBS of keeping 349 stations happy, and I had overestimated the extent of the power of the position. I did have the “power of the pulpit,” as we used to refer to it in the South, and I was the public face and the national advocate and voice for funding and support, but the power of public media is local and each station has its own president and its own board of trustees.
To be effective, I had to try to accommodate vastly different needs for vastly different communities. I made it my business to travel to almost every one of those 349 stations, from Biloxi to Bozeman. What I discovered was, as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously declared, “All politics is local.” In those individual communities, there wasn’t a strict division between Republican and Democrat; what they cared about was “our public TV.” My brief was to protect those individual stations’ interests and to help them raise funds from “viewers like you,” who are the primary source of nearly every public station’s support.
During my tenure, PBS’s congressional funding was often in peril. But time and time again, the funding would survive the efforts to keep public media weak and dependent entirely on pledge drives, primarily due to a reluctance of any member of Congress to vote against Mr. Rogers or Big Bird. But it was a pretty constant fight with Congress, and every day I felt as if I was putting on my boxing gloves. In fact, I literally got to put on a boxing robe and gloves for a special appearance on the Sesame Street set after I secured appropriations for them in my first year.
I also had to navigate a very fragile line between wanting to be a different kind of leader as a woman, but not being so different that I was defined solely as a woman. In making the first seven hires for senior executives, I reported to the board on my choices: five extremely qualified women and two men. A board member challenged me, “What are you doing, running an affirmative action program for women?”
“No, I’m just running an effective search process to find the most qualified candidates.” I’d told the search firm that I wouldn’t even consider a list of candidates that didn’t have people of color and women represented after they’d brought me list after list of the same names—all men, all white, usually similar backgrounds, too. We were public television and we needed to look more like the public we served.
What I realized then—and in every leadership position since—is that becoming more representative of the communities we serve, with greater diversity of backgrounds, experiences, ages, and gender, doesn’t happen because it’s the right thing to do, or even because it leads to better performance and more public or consumer support. It happens when the leader takes whatever steps are necessary to make it happen. It’s not hard. It just means being committed to making it so. At PBS and every other organization I’ve engaged with, being more inclusive and representative has always meant better outcomes—from every perspective and by every measurement!
I made some changes that I felt were important for better management of limited resources: reducing the size of the board and enlarging the number of public trustees; making the PBS greenlighting process more inclusive and collaborative; setting up regular consultations with the stations, and transitioning from analog to digital delivery of broadcast signals, which was developing faster than any of us predicted or could have anticipated—and required us to raise an additional $2 billion. But we couldn’t move as fast and as far as others did, which meant we began losing support from the generation growing up with the internet.
That was the first year’s big challenge, and then 9/11 shifted everyone’s perspective and priorities.
I was at a breakfast meeting near PBS when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York. Rushing to my office, I arrived as another plane crashed into the Pentagon, a mere quarter mile away. The panic was palpable as the call came from some government office that media companies were the next target, and PBS was immediately put on lockdown. We waited for explanations and focused on what PBS needed to do for a country reeling from this first major terrorist attack at home.
I called the producing stations to confer. With their support, I made the decision to bring back the retired, award-winning journalist Bill Moyers, whose interviews and documentaries defined the best of PBS for many years. Now with Bill Moyers went live on PBS at 11 p.m. just days after 9/11, and as Bill said in his opening statement, it was “intended to be a nightly conversation to help the nation heal.”
Very soon after the launch and an outpouring of gratitude from viewers for Moyers’s insights, I began to hear complaints about Bill’s editorial slant, which some leading Republicans characterized as antigovernment and anti-Bush. Bill had previously enraged some conservative leaders with his investigations into campaign financing; long before Citizens United, he had highlighted money in politics as the real threat to democracy. On Now, every week, he openly shared his concerns in the aftermath of 9/11 including the Iraq invasion and the bombing of Afghanistan.
It was no surprise that Bill became a target for a lot of political firepower, and as the executive who put his program on PBS, I also wore a bull’s-eye. At first, the pushback was subtle, with thinly veiled threats about PBS being unpatriotic at a time when patriotism was defined as unquestioning support for the Bush administration’s policies, including declaring war. Then the pressure became overt: “Take him off the air or your appropriations are going to be struck from the national budget.” I’m proud to say that the majority of stations supported Bill, and us. We all knew that the responsibility of PBS was to be a platform for the full spectrum of public opinion.
More upsetting was the friendly fire and those unintended consequences of having a presidentially appointed board governing the CPB. I was summoned to a CPB board meeting where Ken Tomlinson, its chairman, pushed me to cancel Bill’s weekly broadcast. I declined to do so, and after the meeting, Tomlinson asked me to stay behind, and then turned to me in fury, jabbing a pudgy finger in my face. “You better do what I say or I’ll take you down—and Bill Moyers with you.”
I was speechless. The CPB chairman was threatening me with personal repercussions for doing my job? Was this some cheesy gangster movie?
I took a breath. “Ken, I’m going to do what I think is right for the PBS board and 349 public television stations. You do whatever you feel you have to do. I’m going to put aside that threat, but I’m not going to forget it.”
I walked out of the room deeply shaken. I didn’t tell Bill Moyers what was going on because he’d already offered to resign several times, knowing he’d become a flashpoint for attacking PBS.
Next, I was summoned to testify before a committee headed by Republican senator Ted Stevens, never a supporter of public media.
“You put your Democrats on the air,” he thundered, and “especially that well-known liberal commentator Bill Moyers!”
In fact, a newly commissioned study had concluded that the public didn’t believe there was liberal bias in PBS programming. “Senator, actually, that’s not true, I have the numbers right here—”
“Don’t you speak unless you’re called on!” Stevens roared, cutting me off. And so went that hearing and the ones that followed—one-sided attacks by the Republican leaders of the committees.
I recognized the need for restraint, staying focused on the ultimate outcome of keeping our funding, so I resisted the urge to further defend or correct. I couldn’t call on Mr. Rogers, whom we had sadly lost—and what a loss that was, as Fred Rogers was one of the most admirable people I have ever had the privilege to know. I did bring Big Bird once again to Capitol Hill along with a few other PBS icons, and visited nearly every Senate office, asking for help and listening patiently to many attacks. But I also found support with people like Senator John McCain and Congressman (now Senator) Ed Markey. In spite of heavy lobbying against us, we got the funding renewed and Now with Bill Moyers stayed on the air.
When you’re successful at keeping your appropriations before a bipartisan committee, the press describes you as solicitous or compromised; if you lose appropriations, too confrontational or liberal. I just had to take the press hits and stay quiet. Soon after, of his own accord, Moyers decided to end his show. The program had served its purpose, and Bill had proven once again that speaking the truth, standing up for American values and democracy, is one of the strongest arguments for a media enterprise beholden only to the public it serves.
AT PBS, I often felt more like a firefighter than a CEO—trying to douse the flames of some controversy or crisis. And the next fire was started by a bunny named Buster who sent video postcards from his travels around the United States—the premise of Postcards from Buster, a popular children’s program series designed to teach four- to eight-year-olds about cultural diversity. In one episode, this adorable oversized talking bunny, Buster, visits a family in Vermont and learns how maple syrup is made. Buster is greeted by two moms and their daughter, who lovingly show off family photos. Buster exclaims, “Gee, you sure have a lotta moms!”
Yes, that was the offending line. The Department of Education secretary Margaret Spellings dispatched a letter asking me not to broadcast the program.
“Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode,” Secretary Spellings wrote. I didn’t agree and gave the episode the go-ahead. Most stations supported the decision. Unfortunately, Spellings rallied support for her position on Capitol Hill, and the episode became another flashpoint in the war for editorial freedom and independence.
Peggy Charren, the founder of Action for Children’s Television, one of the first advocacy groups for positive role models and storylines in children’s programming, weighed in publicly. “Are you sure this is what all the fuss is about? The amount of information about lesbian families in the program is zero. I learned more about cows—that all cows are female—than I did about lesbians.” After a flood of threats and complaints in an organized campaign reached the local stations, about half announced they wouldn’t broadcast it. I didn’t have the power to make any station play any program, but PBS always took the heat for all such decisions, and I took a hit in the press again. Even today, when you google me, the articles about me and a bunny named Buster still pop up.
How irrelevant and downright silly it seems now to have had all that sound and fury about an episode with two moms who today can legally marry in every state. At the very time of Buster’s busted episode, my goddaughter Maddie and her two moms were staying at our home. Now that would have caused a stutter or two—and probably a call for my resignation.
DO I BELIEVE that there could be a better organizing principle for public media than PBS as it’s currently configured? I do. Just look at BBC Worldwide and other public-service media around the world, an analysis I took on when it looked like there might be an opportunity to redesign the whole structure, at least of public television, which would be strengthened, in my opinion, by a different governance and funding model. In a media ecosystem where PBS is being outspent and outpaced in innovation by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon with billions of dollars to spend on content, being nimble and able to make quick and unified decisions about everything from programming to rights management is necessary.
The good news is that we can find some of PBS’s best programming on demand, and that outstanding series like Downton Abbey can still break through the clutter of choices. Hats off to my successor, Paula Kerger, for keeping the standards high on programming and keeping PBS as current as limited funding for innovation allows. I remain an advocate and a loyal viewer, especially of NewsHour, anchored by one of the best journalists in media, Judy Woodruff. And I’m devoted to the news and podcasts from NPR.
In 2017, when President Trump tried to cut the funding once again for public broadcasting, Ken Burns, PBS’s leading documentarian, testified before Congress: “While we count on the marketplace to do lots of things in our lives… the marketplace doesn’t come to your house at 3 a.m. when it’s on fire. The marketplace does not have boots on the ground in Afghanistan at this moment. And while I wouldn’t ever suggest that public broadcasting has anything to do with the defense of the country, I think with every fiber of my being that it makes our country worth defending by what it has added to our national conversation.”
Keeping the threats to public-service media at bay is not only the responsibility of PBS and all the local public media leaders; it’s on each and every one of us, too, to let our voices be heard that we value the voice, content, and local community connection as well as the national programming that PBS and NPR provide. I considered it a privilege to fight for a vibrant and sustainable public-media enterprise because it is critical, in my opinion, to serving and sustaining a thriving democracy.
AFTER SEVEN YEARS, I’d made as many changes as I was going to be able to make as PBS’s leader. I stayed about another year to help identify my successor. I’d grown enormously as an executive and as a leader. I’d certainly improved my consensus-building and negotiating skills and was better able to cope with criticism—because I got a lot of it. Being a transformative change leader during a time of great change will test your appetite for risk and commitment to the way forward.
In 2007, I wanted to take what I had learned at the PBS helm and lead a global discussion about the undeniable power of media and the impact of the enormous changes happening at cyberspeed across the global media landscape. I accepted a position as president and CEO of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and LA, an institution created by CBS founder Bill Paley to be the largest archive of television and radio programming in the world, open for public viewing and a convener of programs focused on the impact of media in our lives and culture.
Once again, I was going to be the first woman and only the second president in its history. Why did I keep finding myself the first, the only, or one of the few, and it seemed, stepping in at a time of major transition? It’s worth noting here that many women leaders find themselves in similar situations—taking over a business or a global NGO or even a country just when the profits are declining and competition is growing or there’s a transition from war to reconstruction or the other way around.
I think of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who became president of Liberia at the end of a ten-year civil war and faced the challenge of rebuilding a country. Or the dozen or so women who were promoted to CEO just as their companies were on a downward trajectory. There are many examples of times when women are brought in (or promoted or elected) just as everything hangs on a precipice. And often, these leaders end up like the sacrificial virgins of long-ago cultures—tossed off the precipice. This has led to a new expression about women’s advancement—forget the glass ceiling, look out for the glass cliff!
I’m not sure I considered whether my next CEO position was a ceiling breaker or stepping off a glass cliff, but I knew within weeks of moving into my office next door to the historic 21 restaurant in midtown Manhattan that I was once again on a steep learning curve, and I would have to take some early risks to make some big changes.
Within the first eighteen months, I proposed a radical move: changing the name of the institution. Being the Museum of Television and Radio just didn’t sound relevant, and the institution was losing ground with visitors and supporters. The board agreed to a process to find a better name, and after months of consultations and board discussions, we landed on the Paley Center for Media, a name that honored the founder. Losing the museum moniker was important if we were going to have relevance to media consumers who had no doubt felt a disconnect between museum and media, and whose media worlds went way beyond television and radio.
Given the history and the culture and the fact that many of the staff had been in their jobs for two decades, these moves could have put me on a precipice for a short tenure and dramatic fall. That didn’t happen, though, because I had important support. Frank Bennack, board chair for more than twenty years and still, at this time, CEO of the Hearst Corporation, wasn’t an easy man to convince of anything. He was too wise and too experienced to go along with change without being fully convinced that it was the right move. I could not have been successful with this change or any other without Frank’s wise counsel and support.
There were some outsized ego battles in the boardroom; with Frank’s experienced guidance, I learned to choose my battles very carefully. To change the culture of the board and increase the relevancy quotient of our programming, we decided to invite technology CEOs to join the prestigious board, which had always included the CEOs of major media companies.
“We’re not a media company” was why Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned down my original invitation to join the board when I met them at the World Economic Forum in Davos. They had just launched this start-up called Google. Eventually, Google joined the board when Eric Schmidt became CEO, and so did Yahoo and AOL and Verizon and most of the rest of the big players—bigger today in terms of consumers, users, reach, and impact than any television or radio network.
Shaping programs that had value for all these leaders of media and curating programs that brought the public back into our museum-like buildings in Manhattan and Beverly Hills was a challenge—but also an opportunity to use my almost-retired talents of moderating, hosting, and interviewing. I was once again on television, too, broadcasting a series of interviews on PBS with well-known women, called She’s Making Media, filmed on the Paley theatre stage.
I had, once again, landed in a job that optimized all previous work experiences and connections and opened up new worlds to explore, discover, and disrupt. Arguably, there has never been a bigger disruption in the media landscape than the launch of what we quaintly called new media in the beginning and now refer to as social media. The Paley Center for Media was a platform for me to observe the enormous transformations taking place within the media industry worldwide, as we convened annual global gatherings of media executives and top leaders for the purpose of exploring media and technology’s ever-growing power in our lives, cultures, and even government.
At one of our first international meetings in Istanbul, where we partnered with Doğan Media, Turkey’s leading media company at that time, the newly elected president, Recep Erdoğan, lectured a hundred media CEOs about the “damaging and dangerous” power of media. (He later jabbed “Know your place!” to the New York Times when it offered an editorial critical of his regime.) He also made it clear that he planned to take down independent media in his country—and he did, allowing a progovernment conglomerate to buy out Doğan Media.
He also refused to have me—a woman—in a photograph with him and my board. Diminishing and disappearing women comes with diminishing, silencing, and attempting to shut down all independent media, which Erdoğan has done during his tenure. We have witnessed similar events across Europe, in China, and certainly in Russia, as power-driven leaders dismantle the power of media in order to rule without dissent, which can arise when viewers and readers and listeners like us know the truth.
IN THIS NEW media space, I believe women are in a very strong position to influence media’s power. Women are the number one users of social media; but men, mostly very young men, built and still own the platforms and run the companies that use them. In 2019, the numbers tell the story of the potential power women can and should leverage when it comes to social media: 89 percent of women online use Facebook and 73 percent of women use social networks, and among younger women, the numbers are even more dominant.
I confess to resisting the urge to start my day on my Facebook page and with visits to the Facebook pages of friends and family. It’s a time suck that I can rarely afford, but it’s also supporting a company that allowed, unwittingly or not—and that’s still debatable—a foreign government’s use of the platform to influence the US elections.
When I think of the dark power of Facebook and other social media companies to manipulate and misuse data, and when I am reminded of the bullying, the misogynistic content on many pages, the outsized influence of Twitter as a national policy forum, I’m tempted to forgo the instant connections and communications of social media altogether.
In 2019, the thirtieth anniversary of the internet, the debate rages about the right use of the technological innovations that have transformed our ability to communicate, to share knowledge, to be connected. Even the web’s founder, Dr. Timothy Berners-Lee, has been speaking out with clarity and concern about the corporate control of the World Wide Web, which he and others envisioned in 1989 as a free and open space for global connectivity. What has evolved instead are a few dominant players collecting and monetizing our personal data.
It feels like we are at a tipping point in the future of the internet, and certainly I can’t predict which direction we will take as media consumers and as citizens. When I watch the faces of my youngest grandchildren, transfixed by a screen, I know why some of the very people who created the addictive platforms are restricting their own children’s use of them—this, according to a recent report on Thrive Global.
My husband and I sometimes have caught each other texting or emailing under the covers after lights out. And I further confess that, some days, when I’m tweeting rather than listening in a forum, when I’m sending Instagram photos of boots that I know my granddaughter would love instead of looking at a glorious sunset, or when I’m working on a blog post instead of this book, I remember my father’s explanation of why he wouldn’t allow us to have a TV set in our home when he sold them to other people in his appliance store—“too distracting.” I also remember my Garth Associates colleague, Jeff Greenfield, who said my decision to take a job in television “will ruin your life!” The question for all of us is whether the World Wide Web is ultimately a force for good or evil, and the answer is most likely “it’s up to us and how we use it.”
BEING A FRONTLINE participant in at least three media revolutions: the early 1970s for women, the 1990s for cable, and the 2000s at the helm of the country’s only public-media enterprise during the digital revolution, I’ve had a privileged front-row seat to transformative change and media’s power, and I believe that there is no single bigger power than media, collectively, to both distract and detract, to amuse and offend, to inform and misinform, to entertain and inspire; and now, with all that power and more consolidated at one end in the hands of less than a dozen corporations and at the other end in our hands through social media—we must use that power for good.
In my more radical state of mind, I think a lot about whether I should jump back into the media parade and launch an idea that I had in 1999, which was all set to become a new cable network. Ted Turner and I had named it WIN, Women’s Information Network, and the concept was to deliver global news and information that women want and need, using a similar format to CNN—news through a woman’s lens. We believed that WIN, like its older sibling, CNN, would connect the world’s women by sharing stories of what women were doing everywhere to meet challenges and shape solutions. Since women then and now are responsible for 85 percent of purchases in the home and are the number one consumers of online merchandise, women are the best customers for purpose-driven products. We were sure we would have the financial support through sponsorships to sustain a new global cable network that would also be launched online.
In 1999, this was in our plan, and I had hired a team, produced sample programs, arranged to have a studio allocated in Atlanta’s Turner headquarters, and was ready to launch when Ted decided to sell his cable empire to Time Warner.
I was flying to meet the family for a vacation when I heard my name called over the intercom at the airport. I found a phone, and the voice of Ted Turner boomed into my ear: “Pat, WIN is dead. Jerry Levin [the CEO of Time Warner at the time] killed it. He says there’s already one women’s channel and there’s going to be another one—something called Oxygen. So you better come back and tell the team.”
I was devastated. The same feelings I had when I got a similar call about Woman to Woman came rushing back—mostly rage and helplessness. I knew how different WIN would be from Lifetime and the not-yet-launched Oxygen, and when I got the chance to meet Levin, I tried to argue the case for reinstating the idea.
“There are 114 sports channels on every cable system,” I reminded him, “and WIN is nothing like Lifetime”—which was doing very well, by the way! Lifetime was the number one cable network in ratings and revenues, being led by my friend and extraordinary media executive, Carole Black. But Levin was not persuaded that there could be room for a second women’s network, and WIN was dead.
Every year since, I have thought about bringing back the concept to take full advantage of the technology that would make it so much easier and cost-effective to build an online communications network focused on news for and about women. There are many good online news services that offer information and stories about women. I value them all and still believe there is a place, in fact, a need, for a women’s news and information network.
Women could be the big shift needed in today’s media environment to ensure that we’re ready and well armed with the one weapon against tyranny and against loss of personal freedoms and for a more equitable and sustainable world: a trusted source of information.
With or without a WIN, I’m urging us to be active media consumers and support important initiatives like the Representation Project, founded by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and the work of the Sundance Institute, the research from USC’s Annenberg School, and the Women’s Media Center; to use the on/off switch when media misrepresents us and to raise our voices when it underrepresents us and our stories; to vote with every Instagram or Facebook posting or tweet, every video or podcast, every film or meme viewed; to keep public media public with our support and independent local media vital and reliable with our engagement; and to keep in mind the need for a better balance between “always on” and fully present, so that we can optimize the power in our hands and on all our screens for good.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Laura Flanders
Laura Flanders has her own network: she created it, and with a small team and a modest budget but a big vision, she has produced and hosted her own weekly online news program, The Laura Flanders Show, and managed a business she calls Grit TV for a decade. She describes the purpose of her media enterprise, a nonprofit that is supported by individuals and foundations, as “to raise radical spirits by interviewing forward-thinking people who have real experience of shifting power, from the few to the many, in the world of arts, entrepreneurship, and politics.”
Deeply involved with the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), she’s also contributed to The Nation, Ms., The Progressive, and Yes! Magazine. Her latest book is Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America. Laura and I are working together on an initiative we launched with Jane Fonda and Kat Taylor, an initiative that began at that meeting, organized by Eve Ensler, where I first declared myself to be a dangerous woman. Would Laura say the same of herself? I asked her.
Do you consider yourself a dangerous woman?
Laura: I do consider myself a dangerous woman, although I am nowhere near as dangerous as I’d like to be, which is to say, as dangerous as reality itself. I’m still working on it. Choosing the unofficial briefing over the official one, going where the cameras aren’t, not worrying too much about my future and myself: all of that helps. There is no more pernicious lie than the one that tells us to fear the stranger. Settling for the devil we know is the route to a deadly life.
Is age a factor in how dangerous you feel?
Laura: Young or old, inoculating oneself against the toxin of tolerance requires daily practice. Let up for a moment and the crimes and cruelties that outraged us yesterday become conventional today. Early on, when the bloodstream’s fresher, one rejects guff and poison naturally. It’s in the middle that you can find yourself succumbing to the noxious notion that (as that dangerous woman, Margaret Thatcher, put it) “there is no alternative.”
Years later, if you’ve stuck at it, experience builds resistance. It’s in the middle that can get you: the temptation to accept that there is no alternative. As journalists, it is our responsibility to hold a line against that normalizing of inhumanity. Our job, it seems to me, is to do what we can to un-bland life at every age.
Who inspires you to be more dangerous?
Laura: I live with an action hero, choreographer Elizabeth Streb, who inspires me to be more dangerous. She walks down tall buildings and dives through glass. In contrast to her, my risk taking is purely pedestrian. I risk security, which, as Buckminster Fuller reminded us, is nothing but a fiction. We are all just matter, hurtling through space.
What are the challenges for many women in becoming risk-takers and more dangerous?
Laura: To paraphrase Susan Sontag, society’s kiss is overrated. Who wouldn’t give up a side seat in the status quo for a perch on the prow of possibility?
For women, especially those with the least proximity to power, the times have always been dangerous. Chattel, scullion, trophy, threat: women didn’t set things up this way, but we have become experts at gathering information and pulling off improbable shifts. As Arundhati Roy says, “A new world is not only possible, she’s coming, and women are leading: leap!”