Gretchen Carlson on press under Trump: ‘It’s my hope journalists will start speaking up’

Donald Trump has achieved something rarely seen in Washington: uniting rival television networks against him. When he banned CNN and MS Now – along with Politico – from the White House, their competitors suspended shared coverage of the US president’s events.Gretchen Carlson, a journalist, author and former Fox News host, hopes this will not be the only example of solidarity from a White House press corps facing what she describes as an “outright onslaught” from the administration.In a phone interview with the Guardian before the media ban news, Carlson, 60, called on reporters to push back against Trump’s brazen misogyny, which has included calling female reporters “stupid”, “piggy”, “incompetent” and “a horrible person”.“That’s highly offensive to any human being, much less journalists whose job it is to cover the president with respect and dignity,” said the cofounder of Lift Our Voices, a non-profit that aims to end the silencing of voices in the workplace. “To be called those kinds of names and still have to maintain your composure and do your job is something that no journalist should have to endure.”She called for solidarity across the White House press corps in response to the president’s sexist insults.Donald Trump gestures as he speaks to reporters on board Airforce One as he travels back to Washington DC on 5 April 2018. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images“It’s my hope that other journalists will start speaking up when that happens and repeat the question that was asked because it likely wasn’t a stupid question,” she says. “It was likely an appropriate question that many Americans want the answer to like, when will the Iran war end? My hope is that the questions will be asked until they are answered and that it’s not just from the one who’s attacked.”Carlson also urges the media to take a more robust approach with Trump despite the risks of being barred in the future. “It’s also my hope that journalists will say, you can’t speak to people that way. Now, I’m not naive, I understand there’s a conundrum here for journalists, because this is all about access to the President of the United States and access to this administration. If you speak up and cross this president, he’ll come after you.“But we have to find a happy medium here because the end result is allowing this to continue is the promulgation of misogyny in our society. ”One potential barrier to collective action is an influx of “Maga” media outlets, ever ready to ask the president favourable questions and unlikely to speak up on behalf of “mainstream media” colleagues. The president can call them at any moment to blunt the momentum of the questions coming his way.Carlson acknowledges the point but responds: “There’s still plenty of other journalists who might. There is the White House Correspondents’ Association. They were able to plan a second dinner after the assassination attempt so they could certainly come together and decide that they’re going to have a certain reaction to those kinds of attacks.“When you get attacked like that and another reporter just goes on to the next question, it makes it look like there’s nothing wrong and so if you’re watching this press conference, you normalise that then, and you’re like, oh, I guess that’s how we should treat everyone.“It’s damaging to young men about how they can treat women and young women about how they feel they should be treated. We’ve been trying to raise up our young women for generations and we’re doing a great job of it and now, all of a sudden, you can just treat women like this and nobody says anything?”As if channeling the 1960s-set TV drama Mad Men, Trump has repeatedly singled out Kaitlan Collins, the chief White House correspondent of CNN, complaining: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.” Carlson notes it is not the kind of comment he would ever make to a man.“Ask any woman on the street how many times have you been told in your life you need to smile more. Barf. I mean, really? We’ve all heard that before: put a smile on your face and just go out there and deal with it. No. That’s like, you go in to negotiate for higher pay, the man just asks for it, the woman has to put a smile on her face in order to get it. It is such an old school way of looking at the different gender types and the way in which we respond to a request if it’s by a man or a woman.”Carlson rejects the implication that women in media should maintain a happy demeanour when asking tough questions about conflict, economic strife or foreign policy. “She’s not supposed to be smiling when she’s asking tough questions of the president of the United States.“You’re not supposed to be smiling when you’re out as a journalist covering a triple murder or raging wildfire. There’s plenty going on in America right now where we don’t need to smile about it – high gas prices, high grocery prices, the Iran war, tariffs.It is almost 10 years since Trump was first elected. It is also 10 years since Carlson sued Roger Ailes, then the chief executive and chairman of Fox News, for sexual harassment. In the following weeks more than 20 other women came forward with allegations that Ailes had abused them. The #MeToo movement, raising awareness of sexual misconduct by men, was in the ascendancy.Despite the regression personified by Trump, Carlson sees evidence of progress in unexpected places – notably in the Capitol Hill campaign surrounding the disclosure of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein, who exploited and trafficked underage girls. The effort produced an unusual alignment between Democrats and Republicans, demonstrating that survivor advocacy can break through.“It was an amazing bipartisan movement,” Carlson notes, citing Democrat Ro Khanna and Republicans Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace.For Carlson, the driver of this breakthrough is a fundamental shift in public opinion. A decade ago, she contends, victims of high-profile abuse were routinely dismissed or discredited. Today the baseline has changed.“The most credit goes to the survivors because they keep pushing forward,” she says. “A lot of times people say to me that the #MeToo movement is in a downward spiral because we’re still not getting all the files released and people aren’t being held accountable. But I look at this as a leader in this movement and say we have to look at the progress.“People actually believe the Epstein survivors now. Ten years ago, they would not have believed them. Every time they come to the Hill and hold a press conference, they take the power right back.”Despite the rise of the “manosphere”, “trad wives” and a tsunami of online misogyny, Carlson rejects the narrative that the movement against workplace abuse has stalled or been defeated by reactionary cultural backlash.“It’s very easy to say the #MeToo movement is dead when you look at all the negative stuff,” she admits. “I’m not naive enough to say that everything is perfect right now–it’s not. But movements ebb and flow. If you look at any major cultural movement, whether it was the civil rights movement or women getting the right to vote, these things did not happen overnight. There were many ups and downs.”Carlson points to legislative milestones that have altered employment law across the US. Through Lift Our Voices, she spearheaded the passage of two pieces of federal legislation in 2022 that curtailed forced arbitration clauses, preventing corporations from hiding systemic abuse behind secret, binding proceedings.“People ask me every single day: how did you do that?” Carlson reflects. “These are the kinds of things we have to focus on. Yes, there are blips along the way and hurdles to overcome, but we have to keep pushing forward. There have been laws passed, and state laws passed banning non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) completely for these types of things.”Her focus remains the total elimination of contractual silencing mechanisms – such as non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement clauses – that allow toxic workplace cultures to persist in secret.Carlson insists that workplace safety and anti-silencing reform must remain strictly non-partisan. When high-profile misconduct allegations surfaced surrounding Democratic candidate Graham Platner in Maine, Carlson condemned attempts by some Democrats to shield their own candidates from accountability.“There is no room for hypocrisy with regard to this kind of behaviour, and the American public is onto this,” she asserts. “The idea that you want to not call out this behaviour because it’s a Democratic candidate and you’re a Democrat is wrong – and the same thing on the flip side.”At Lift Our Voices, the rule is evaluate the conduct, ignore the party label, she says. “We believe women and we take politics out of it. By the way, it’s been proven all across the board that politics has nothing to do with sexual harassment or sexual assault.“Before somebody decides to do either of those to you, they don’t ask you what party you’re in. They don’t care. This is about power.”