Following on the heels of the
NY Times' report today that pulls back the curtain on Fox News' hatred of reporters that refuse to reflexively toe the company line,
Gawker has a great story about Fox News' PR flak, Laura Briganti, "the most vindictive flak in the media world."
<Ailes refigured, in an homage to last week's anti-semitic
treatment of
Jacques Steinberg on "Fox and Friends">
... Briganti's real reputation was not earned by zingers about famous cable talking heads; it was earned with a conscious, longstanding policy of publicly bullying average beat reporters who wrote straight news that was not to Fox's liking. She once insinuated that a WSJ reporter wrote a story about Fox that the network didn't like because her hormones were acting up (the reporter was pregnant at the time). She and her colleagues routinely complain to reporters' bosses and try to get them in trouble with their editors for the crime of not praising Fox well enough.
She's famous for blacklisting reporters who do not cover Fox the way it wants to be covered. Whereas most media operations strive to present a professional face even if they hate a certain reporter, Fox does the opposite. One reporter told me that Irena blacklisted him and even turned him down for a requested tour of the Fox studios because she felt his coverage was negative. Also blacklisted in the past were an AP reporter and a Baltimore Sun reporter. The notable thing is that these are not commentators that Fox disagrees with; these are regular, run-of-the-mill TV reporters, reporting fact-based news, who were blacklisted because said facts disagreed with Fox. ...
When I worked at PRWeek a couple of years ago, I tried to write a profile of Briganti. This, after several people who had dealt with her assured me that she was the single meanest flack in the entire media world (which is true). I sent emails out to a list of people in the media that Briganti had publicly insulted. And what happened? Some turned me down, citing fear of her. Some didn't respond, out of fear. And one, in what I still consider to be the biggest bitch move I ever saw as a reporter, ran straight to Irena, telling her that a PRWeek reporter was out to smear her. This—from a reporter who had already been publicly smeared by Briganti—is akin to the kid whose response to being bullied is to grovel and try to please the bully further. ...
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