When model behaviour is unbecoming

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/04/2011 (5457 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Oh, what a delicate balance one female journalist needs when calling another one out.

You know you will be branded, in no particular order: shrill, humourless, jealous, ugly, bitter, a rabid feminist, a left-leaning lunatic, old and a prude. I may have missed a few adjectives but faithful web commentators will quickly provide them.

I’m calling out Krista Erickson, once a CBC Winnipeg anchor and now an employee of the Sun News Network. Hers is a high-profile job in an edgy experiment, a test of whether Canadians are ready for all-Con all the time. My problem isn’t the job she’s taken. It’s what she did (or was forced to do) to promote it.

Last week, Erickson posed as a Toronto Sun SUNshine girl. She wore a variety of sports jerseys, ripped T-shirts and leggings. She’s a comely woman and these photos made the most of her attributes. To be fair, she wore more than the usual bikini tops and bustiers sported by Sun pinups. But they’re not usually advertising their high-powered careers.

The bio that ran next to her photo was the sort of breathless twee all SUNshine girls get:

“SUNshine girl Krista Erickson is rarin’ to go. As host of Sun News Network’s Canada Live, Krista is unapologetically patriotic and not afraid to call it like it is,” it read.

“A seasoned journalist, Erickson started her career in 1999 in her hometown of Winnipeg. When she’s not in the anchor chair, she spends her time cooking, working out and taking care of her dog — a six-year-old Jack Russell terrier named Winston (yes, after the great British PM).”

Presumably she doesn’t like long walks in the park or that would have been mentioned, too.

Erickson is not a girl. She’s a 35-year-old woman whose bio includes anchoring the supper-hour news in Winnipeg and working in the CBC’s parliamentary bureau in Ottawa.

In 2008, Erickson was transferred out of her parliamentary post after it was alleged she passed questions to a Liberal MP during a Commons ethics committee investigation of the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. She was later cleared of any wrongdoing. The CBC ombudsman said Erickson “lacked the experience and sensitivity to know where the line was” but adding there was “no evidence of any partisan interest on her part.”

She rebounded.

Erickson’s come-hither photos were part of the new station’s sexualization of its female employees. A National Post writer bemoaned the wardrobes of the majority of the female on-air talent.

“For its women presenters, there seems to be a ban on sleeves. Not a jacket in sight. Only cocktail dresses, as clingy and low-cut as possible,” she wrote.

Our own Charles Adler, now working for the network, appears to dress himself. He favours sleeves.

Public opinion turned ugly when Maclean’s writer Luiza Savage tweeted her opinion of the new network, calling it “skank TV.” She later apologized. She crossed the line.

And this is the problem when women dare to criticize other women, especially successful and attractive women. Savage’s tweet was grossly inappropriate. You don’t name-call. To the bloodthirsty, that smells like a cat fight and it’s what some people are waiting for.

But Erickson’s apparent willingness to sexualize her work, to put herself in the company of young women who squeeze their breasts together for the viewing pleasure of tabloid newspaper readers, doesn’t just demean her. It takes all of us along for the ride.

I work with women young enough to be my daughters. I don’t assume their age makes them kids or their relatively few years in the business are a sign they’re not pros. They feel this business in their bones. They worked damned hard to get where they are.

They’re smart enough to realize when a mid-career journalist has to show a little T & A to get noticed, we haven’t come a long way, baby.

Humourless I may be, but I really thought this fight was over.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca