Years ago, when I worked at a magazine owned (at the time) by Rupert Murdoch, I worked for a raving lunatic who regularly abused, threatened and harassed everyone in his department. Everyone at the company knew it, including Rupe, but no one did anything about it.
Until they discovered that he was stealing from the company.
When I was 19 I worked as the receptionist at a law firm. One of the partners regularly screamed at his secretary and at least once loudly called her a cunt. He smoked about 3 packs a day and always had a stinking, brimming ashtray on his desk. One day he bellowed at me "GIRL!" (after a year he still didn't know my name, and this is in an office with only about 15 employees)"Yes sir?" I smiled sweetly. "ASHTRAY". Shoved it at me. "AND COFFEE". Shoved the cup at me. I took both out to the coffee station, loaded a couple of spoonfuls of cigarette ash in the coffee cup, and filled it up.
And from then on, I often offered to empty his ashtray and get his coffee.
I have never worked anywhere where I was not required to submit to verbal abuse by a supervisor or even coworker. I have seen chairs, keys, markers and such thrown at employees. Once my boss called me an "f*n bitch" in front of the president of our company because I didn't have a diskette he needed and didn't know where his secretary put it. At the time this boss had cost our company over a million dollars for playing fast and loose with the FDA. This diskette was not even my responsibility.
And not once, NOT ONCE, were any of these people reprimanded or demoted as a result of their abusive actions.
In fact, one the most abusive bosses I ever worked for was promoted repeatedly despite complaints from staff she supervised and other staff who were at her same level.
I am a former Fox News intern, I used to work in the newsroom and I am now a current active duty member of the military, I resent you calling the culture Roger Ailes fosters as "militaristic"
"Next time I'll rip your fucking head off...!?" That kind of shit would never slide in the military under similar circumstances - and I have worked with soldiers, marines, and sailors in stressful situations. If a supervisor yelled at a subordinate like that, there would be major career-changing repercussions for the supervisor in question. Further more, it was in the middle of the crowded newsroom, and Broderick only got a slap on the wrist? What kind of message does that send to the staff of Fox News? In the military, as a unit commander, you would never want to foster such a culture of disunity.
Of course, it would be a different story if the worker in question was say, working on a flight deck of a carrier with her head up her ass putting people's lives in danger, yep, an ass chewing would be called for...
@John Cook: I totally appreciate this perspective, but I think the toolkits at Fox News actually do believe they're on the deck of a carrier bringing in an F-18 during a typhoon. It's that important to propagate outrageous lies...it's that crucial and that stressful.
Dunno about all this. Doubtless he's a Republican, in which case he's the only Republican who actually DOES his anger, instead of slandering Obama in print and fucking teenage boys in bathroom stalls.
I don't know. Maybe it's stressful taking a great big mind-shit into a word processing program all day so that blow-dried blowhards can mis-read your partisan brain-dung for the deluded paranoids out there in cable land. Maybe he's just a great big teabagging douchebag like everyone who works at Fox News. Most mysteries really aren't.
By the way, in my company, and SINGLE ONE of the incidents above (let alone all of them together) would probably result in pretty swift termination.
We have a "zero tolerance" policy toward violence in the workplace. That means you behave violently once, and you're fired. It's that way at a lot of companies.
I'm rather stunned this guy could behave that way and keep his job at a major co. like Fox.
John. Please don't help this guy lose his job. You know he will end up drinking out of a paper bag on some bench and then will attack someone thinking they were trying to steal his foil.
He works for Fox News. That makes him a patriot and a true American. Which makes you, John Cook, a muslin socialist. And besides cyclists are all French homosexuals. Think of the children. Do you really want French homosexuals riding their dainty little cycles around our children?
06/18/09
06/18/09
Until they discovered that he was stealing from the company.
06/18/09
And from then on, I often offered to empty his ashtray and get his coffee.
06/18/09
And not once, NOT ONCE, were any of these people reprimanded or demoted as a result of their abusive actions.
In fact, one the most abusive bosses I ever worked for was promoted repeatedly despite complaints from staff she supervised and other staff who were at her same level.
And I've never worked at Fox News.
06/17/09
I am a former Fox News intern, I used to work in the newsroom and I am now a current active duty member of the military, I resent you calling the culture Roger Ailes fosters as "militaristic"
"Next time I'll rip your fucking head off...!?" That kind of shit would never slide in the military under similar circumstances - and I have worked with soldiers, marines, and sailors in stressful situations. If a supervisor yelled at a subordinate like that, there would be major career-changing repercussions for the supervisor in question. Further more, it was in the middle of the crowded newsroom, and Broderick only got a slap on the wrist? What kind of message does that send to the staff of Fox News? In the military, as a unit commander, you would never want to foster such a culture of disunity.
Of course, it would be a different story if the worker in question was say, working on a flight deck of a carrier with her head up her ass putting people's lives in danger, yep, an ass chewing would be called for...
06/17/09
06/17/09
06/17/09
06/17/09
We have a "zero tolerance" policy toward violence in the workplace. That means you behave violently once, and you're fired. It's that way at a lot of companies.
I'm rather stunned this guy could behave that way and keep his job at a major co. like Fox.
06/17/09
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