Why won’t the media use the word misogyny?
Misogyny is at the core of these smear campaigns targeting women, yet news coverage consistently avoids naming it.
Throughout the press tour for the movie It Ends With Us, star actress Blake Lively was villainized. Once seen as a wholesome and popular celebrity, the public turned on Lively. In a seemingly endless stream of articles, tweets, TikToks, and other online posts, Lively was painted as controversial. She was deemed rude, ungrateful, a high maintenance nightmare, and a generally terrible person. Years old unflattering clips of Lively were surfaced, anonymous gossip accounts villainized her, and she was savaged in headlines.
Now, it turns out that the public cancellation Lively endured was seemingly the result of a well funded PR effort to smear and discredit her so that the concerns she raised about It Ends With Us film producers Justin Baldoni and Jamey Heath's alleged misconduct wouldn't be taken seriously.
Lively is suing Baldoni and the team behind the movie for orchestrating the online smear campaign after she spoke out about sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior on set. According to the suit, Baldoni subjected Lively to unwanted kissing, discussed his sex life, including encounters where he said he might not have received consent. Heath allegedly showed Lively a video of his wife naked, watched Lively in her trailer when she was topless and repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed along with Baldoni. You can read the full list of allegations here, they are disturbing.
In response to her speaking out, Lively alleges that Baldoni orchestrated a "multi-tiered plan" using "social manipulation" to ultimately "destroy" her reputation.
But since details of the smear campaign broke, initially in a big feature in The New York Times, then subsequently in dozens of articles on major news sites, not one outlet has used the word misogyny.
Misogyny is almost always at the core of smear campaigns targeting women, yet media coverage of these coordinated attacks consistently avoids naming it.
This erasure is part of a pattern. When high profile women challenge power structures, call out abuse, or loudly express progressive values, they are met with calculated, well funded campaigns to discredit and destroy their reputations. The legacy media, when it does cover these sorts of attacks— which is exceedingly rare because the burden of proof is 100% on the women and most targets do not have the resources someone like Lively does— almost never centers the misogyny.
By refusing to explicitly name misogyny when covering these campaigns, the mainstream media minimizes the systemic hatred behind these smear efforts and enables the very type of harassment they purport to critique.
Lively's case, much like the vicious smear campaign against Amber Heard during her legal battle with Johnny Depp, reveals a well-worn playbook. Baldoni and Heath even worked with the same communications consultants who Depp hired to discredit Heard.
Even these consultants acknowledged the misogynistic nature of the hate Lively endured. “Socials are really really ramping up in [Baldoni's] favour, she must be furious," one comms consultant wrote to another member of the team about Lively. "It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.”
Lively’s detractors leveraged social and news media to smear her professionalism, personal character, and even her unrelated business ventures, like her hair-care line. Terakeet, a marketing consultancy who produced a report on public sentiment for Lively following Baldoni's campaign, concluded that she was subject to a “targeted, multichannel online attack” similar to the one against Heard, and that it was destroying her reputation.
After analyzing “the entirety of Google’s search index” for Lively’s name, Terakeet found that 35 percent of the results mentioned Baldoni, which was extremely unusual given the length of her career. The firm ultimately suggested that "the media environment was being manipulated," according to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Baldoni, amidst mounting allegations, co-hosted a podcast along with Heath called “Man Enough,” about toxic masculinity. He was framed as a champion for women in news articles. Earlier this month, Baldoni received an award by the nonprofit Vital Voices, for his supposed allyship to women.
At the heart of every misogynistic smear campaign lies a readiness by both society and the media to vilify women. On Monday, one of the publicists involved in the campaign spoke out saying that they didn’t even have to enact a “social combat plan” because “the internet was doing the work for us."
Powerful men can outmaneuver accusations with strategic retaliation, while women risk everything by speaking out. Men can lean into being perceived as "controversial," "difficult," "annoying," or "unstable," while the same labels are career-ending for women.
As I wrote in my book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, so many of these campaigns against high profile women utilize the Gamergate playbook. Gamergate was a coordinated, deeply misogynistic harassment campaign that relied on manufactured outrage cycles to terrorize women, frame them as controversial and difficult, and drive them out of the video game and media industry.
Gamergate was a watershed moment in online culture because it provided a blueprint for the weaponization of social media platforms to spread hate, exploiting the legacy media’s ignorance of online culture and its tendency to take things on the internet at face value.
The Gamergate playbook relies on leveraging networked harassment to launder bad faith attacks and smear campaigns through the mainstream media, in order to drive women and marginalized people out of positions of power by framing them as controversial, untrustworthy, or difficult. Lively's lawsuit details how this playbook was run on her.
And yet, despite the fact that misogyny is the central element of Gamergate-style attacks, news media refuses to call it what it is. This has led to a deep ignorance among the public on what fuels hate, and has made the majority of people unable to recognize these smear campaigns while they're happening.
"Has there been any notable male smear campaigns? Like i can't even think of any where a man was getting whacked unrightfully," one X user posted in a tweet that amassed over 1.5 million views.
As many attempted to explain in response, there are no equivalent campaigns against men because men do not suffer misogyny. Misogyny is a gendered weapon, while men in the spotlight may face criticism, it does not devolve into the kind of vitriolic, deeply personal, and sustained attacks designed to humiliate, discredit, and silence women.
Men are not scrutinized in the same ways that women are. They are not subject to the same avalanche of gendered threats and abuse. By failing to name misogyny as the central force furthering these campaigns, the news media perpetuates the idea that this is just how fame works, rather than how misogyny works.
Articles that frame networked smear campaigns against women as "backlash" or "controversy" intentionally mislead the public and further stigmatize the women targeted.
The news media must evolve and start reporting on these campaigns and the gendered hatred behind them accurately, because these attacks don't just happen to celebrities like Lively.
The same bad actors, law firms, comms consultants, and radicalized online networks that smear high profile women in entertainment are smearing women in journalism, using the exact same tactics to try to discredit them and drive them out of the field. To make matters worse, male media reporters at major outlets often participate in and launder these smear campaigns against female colleagues.
We need more robust, nuanced reporting on these online campaigns, and we need to be transparent about the hateful ideology that fuels them. Avoiding the term misogyny only validates the very forces that journalists should be exposing and dismantling.
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I hope Blake Lively gets a huge award for damages. It should serve as a warning that these types of campaigns come with a terrible cost to the perpetrators. And yes one of the core tenets of the vicious campaign was misogyny.
Didn't this exact thing happen to Katherine Heigl in the aughts?