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rachelmarsden.com
Fox News contributor Rachel Marsden — uber-right wing pundit in the grand style of Ann Coulter — is the subject of a thorough and minutely-researched takedown by Salon's Rebecca Traister. Marsden, who started out as the "Canadian Correspondent" for the O'Reilly Factor (a title that, we must admit, elicits chuckles even from us, a fellow Canadian), is a nightly contributor at Fox 's late, late "bawdy gabfest" Red Eye where she has quickly become known for her in-your-face, right-wing invective (she's been known to refer to the House Speaker as "President Pelosivic" and does not exactly evince a loving attitude toward liberals).* Marsden's hotheaded cable stylings aren't exactly what one might expect from a Canadian, though they are what one might find on the Fox Network, and Traister speculates that Marsden is being groomed by the network for "brand-name pundit stardom" (RedEye's producer, Shelley Stevenson, confirmed the being-groomed hypothesis to Traister).
But is Fox in over its head? According to Traister's piece, Marsden has arrived at her new position with a whole lot of baggage - none of which has been disclosed by the network, who may or may not have been fully aware of it upon hiring her. During a discussion on last week's show regarding the Duke rape case, Marsden demurred regarding whether charges should be pressed against the accuser ( "Charges are laid, charges are dropped...It happens all the time. Unless she can get charged with mischief and they can prove she lied, then no, [she shouldn't be punished]. That's the process and the process works"). Turns out Marsden knows from which she speaks: Traister reveals that she is an "oft-accused and once-admitted stalker who made questionable rape charges of her own 10 years ago." All the tawdry details — of which there are many — are in the piece, but the short version is that Marsden's accusations of sexual harassment from a professor at Canada's Simon Fraser University resulted in him being fired, and then re-hired when her credibility was called into question. Marsden was in the center of a scandal that tapped into ideological wars at the time, and the mobilization of various feminist and social-justice groups in her favor added to the swirling attention around the case as it was built up - and deflated. Subsequent to all of this, Traister documents a number of other episodes in which Marsden was accused/accused someone of stalking/inappropriate behaviour; in one case she pleaded guilty to criminal harassment charges. It is a colorful backstory, to say the least.
So: Is this lack of disclosure a reflection on Marsden (who makes no reference to her past entanglements with the law on her website bio), or on the network which hired her? Or perhaps on the state of the news establishment in general? Traister points out that Marsden's quick ascension through the Fox ranks is testament to the fact that someone at Fox "really wanted" her, and that it may even be that, along with the addition of Marsden to the right-wing's ever-increasing "army of attractive fire-starters" the network may actually be banking on her controversial past to generate "scandalous coverage" and "secure her a nightly perch" (not an altogether shocking conclusion, all things considered). Traister reveals that Stevenson was unaware of the extent of Marsden's past behaviour but came out in favor of second chances and benefits of the doubt, and notes that she has been nothing but professional thus far.
Marsden would not speak to Traister for this piece, and Traister notes that her past is not exactly a secret ("Nexis her name, there are hundreds of articles") and her behavior pretty much invites this level of examination ("When you make it clear that you are dying to be noticed and now make a living attacking the kinds of ideological groups and institutions that were once your defenders: Well, that's downright impossible to ignore").
As for what it all means, we'll leave the last word to Traister:
[W]hatever prompted Fox's willingness, or eagerness, to take a chance on her -- for her brains, or her legs, or perhaps even for the scandalous coverage they knew perfectly well she would eventually generate -- speaks to the kind of shifts in political coverage that these post-Coulter years have brought.
Fox's Ann Coulter 2.0 [Salon]
*Disclosure: Rachel Sklar, another fellow Canadian, has also appearedon RedEye. No Canadian conspiracy, we promise.
