Disgraced journalist and former CBS television host Charlie Rose may have a new show in the works. Worst of all, it’s about himself.
According to news reports, the show being discussed will involve Rose interviewing other high-profile men who have been ousted for their behavior as part of the #MeToo movement. Editor Tina Brown confirmed to the New York Post’s Page Six column that she’d been approached to produce one such “atonement series,” starring the former anchor. She wisely passed on the opportunity.
My colleague Kristen Bellstrom nailed this trend in her column on April 23, and made sure we were ready to clap back.
I don’t know about you, but I’m nowhere near ready to see Matt Lauer, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Mario Batali, or any of the host of other powerful men brought down by the #MeToo movement return to public life. Yet in the past week or so, there’s been an ominous drip-drip-drip of stories reporting on how these men are faring in “exile” and speculating about how they might stage their comebacks.
I don’t know about you, but I’m nowhere near ready to see Matt Lauer, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Mario Batali, or any of the host of other powerful men brought down by the #MeToo movement return to public life. Yet in the past week or so, there’s been an ominous drip-drip-drip of stories reporting on how these men are faring in “exile” and speculating about how they might stage their comebacks.
She links to several other stories, which help explain why this is all so problematic – how it will intimidate other victims from speaking out and how it fails to wrest a full accounting from the cultures that let harassing men get away with the kinds of stuff in the first place. (Which, in Rose’s case, involves problematic behaviors around race, that have yet to be explored.)
Bottom line, a temporary stay in the penalty box is not redemption.
This is part of what makes the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens today in Montgomery, Ala. so vitally important. It centers the victims, not the perpetrators, and invites us first to bear witness, then, to do better.
The memorial is the work of Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who worked with a small team to comb through thousands of archival records looking to document the stories of people who had been the victim of racial terror lynchings across the South. They’ve found 4,400, many of whom had never been named before.
The memorial draws our attention to these stories of the victims and their families, and the impact of sanctioned violence on generations of African Americans whose transition from enslavement to free citizens with inalienable rights was never fully realized.
It’s a new model for thinking about atonement and justice, with implications far beyond race.
“I’m not interested in talking about America’s history because I want to punish America,” Stevenson told The New York Times. “I want to liberate America. And I think it’s important for us to do this as an organization that has created an identity that is as disassociated from punishment as possible.”
Smart producers, leaders, investors and, ahem, future film studio owners should also look to marginalized voices for liberation — by centering them in the businesses they build, the policies they support, and the stories they tell. And they should plan to re-make the world, not themselves.
Let those who have transgressed, for now, tell their stories only to each other, perhaps over drinks at a posh place in a lesser Hampton. It’s time to hand the microphone to those who have been hurt, dismissed or erased, laboring for too long in shadows they never deserved.