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Friday, May 26, 2006

All Right, I'll Bite

I have only been dimly aware of the Elizabeth Vargas/ABC news situation (largely because I don't watch the evening news on any network), but something about Dahlia Lithwick's commentary on Slate made me notice.

Vargas is 44 years old, and is due to deliver to her second child in August. On advice from hr doctors, she will start her maternity leave early to avoid gestational complications and when she returns to work she will no longer have her co-anchor position on World News Tonight. She will instead go to 20/20.

Needless to say, there's been a world of back and forth about this. Was Vargas pushed out by ABC, terrified that their news program won't be able to compete with Katie Couric on CBS Evening News? Or was she telling the truth when she said (as reported in the New York Times): "I don't think it's fair to a new baby to have a new mom who's off in Iraq or Iran all the time. . . I certainly intend to be doing that in a few years. But right now it's not realistic for me."?

Do we have to worry about ABC abusing a pregnant employee? Is Vargas hurting other pregnant women who don't want to quit their intense jobs after they have their children? What are the implications? What does it mean?

I do wonder what this means, not so much because it seems reasonable or unreasonable that Vargas may have changed her mind about the kind of work she wants to do with a newborn on her body and mind. I wonder if some of the intense reaction has to do with the way we respond to people on television.

Quite a long time ago, I read an interview with the actor/director George Clooney, who said that, at the height of his ER popularity, he was once on a plane with Mel Gibson and was amused by the way the other passengers treated Gibson like a visiting deity while treating Clooney with extraordinary familiarity. His reasoning was that his being a television personality- someone who visits his fans at home, in their living rooms, kitchens and beds- made him approachable, known to people. Fans seemed to feel entitled to be close to him.

So there is Elizabeth Vargas, sitting in millions of living rooms, and her pregnancy is troubling. Why is it a problem?

Is it bad that she needs time off? Perhaps it weirds people out in a way that Lithwick described: "Maybe the reason we can't quite stomach a hugely pregnant news anchor is that we can't even manage to talk coherently about all the ways in which they somehow freak us out."

Maybe Vargas is universally disappointing to network executives and feminists and home-viewers alike because her pregnancy means no one owns her. She will never belong to her audience or her employers or the people who would hold hr up as a political example because ultimately she belongs to her body and her family.

posted by Elise at 8:07 AM

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2 Comments:

Laura K. said...

There are two other aspects to Vargas' pregnancy and the surrounding controversy, I think:

1) the debate over abortion rights has made pregnancy in general a hot button; I am not sure that 5 years ago anyone would have said a word about her career choices. Now, everyone feels they have a right to comment. A baby--any baby--is public property; the baby of a public figure is exponentially moreso.

2) concurrent with the debate that has brought pregnancy into the limelight is a paradoxical return to puritanism. The fact that Vargas is pregnant means that she...(gasp)...had sex. This physical evidence of sexual activity is something with which men do not have to contend. It is possible that pregnancy's denial of a news anchor's asexuality not only "freaks people out", but also seems to make people feel entitled to comment on her life choices.

There may be some of this behind ABC's decision, I don't know. Frankly, I don't care. If Vargas doesn't think there's a problem with her move, far be it from me to try to change her mind or speculate on her reasoning.

I haven't been following this story, either, for many of the same reasons you haven't, but I do think that, in every area of life, basic privacy is being squeezed out and it's very disturbing.

5/28/2006 10:53 AM

Elise said...

Salon just had a mini-piece (here: http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/05/30/vargas/index.html) about this whole fracas today and it raises a lot of these questions. In a way, I feel that it is so easy for everyone on all sides to turn this into an issue. Was Vargas demoted for being pregnant? Was she just asserting her perrogative?

I wonder about everyone's need to claim some part of this question. Is there a mystery about ABC's behavior or are people just seeing what they want in all of this?

5/30/2006 12:04 PM

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