Who tells the truth? Disgruntled ex-employees like Gretchen Carlson of Fox News

Lawyers will tell you to ignore the blatherings of "disgruntled ex-employees". But who else will tell the truth? People trying to keep their jobs and their social standing in the workplace almost never expose dirty linen voluntarily, and often won't do it even when they are under oath.
 
Even retired people, who no longer need to fear the loss of their jobs, usually don't want to tell the truth if it reflects badly on their former employer.

I remember in the Danielle Coziahr v. CVESD case, the judge had to forcefully demand that a retired teacher show up as a witness. The testimony the teacher was afraid to give was hugely supportive of Cozaihr, who won a $1 million judgment. The witness was retired, but still reluctant to step out of line.

Gretchen Carlson of Fox News Files Suit Against Roger Ailes, Alleging Harassment

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and JOHN KOBLIN

NYT

JULY 6, 2016

 

Gretchen Carlson, the longtime Fox anchor, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday saying that Roger Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News, fired her from the network last month after she refused his sexual advances and complained to him about discriminatory treatment in the newsroom.

The startling accusations immediately transfixed the world of television news, where Mr. Ailes is a hugely influential figure known for demanding absolute loyalty from his employees.

The lawsuit — filed in Superior Court in New Jersey, where Mr. Ailes maintains a residence — portrays the Fox chairman as a loutish and serial sexual harasser, accusing him of ogling Ms. Carlson in his office, calling her “sexy” and making sexually charged comments about her physical appearance.

Ms. Carlson, who joined Fox in 2005, contends that during a meeting last fall to discuss her concerns that she was not being treated fairly, Mr. Ailes told her: “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.”

When she rebuffed him, the lawsuit claims, Mr. Ailes retaliated by reducing Ms. Carlson’s salary, curtailing her on-air appearances and, to her surprise, declining to renew her contract last month.

In a statement issued Wednesday evening through Fox News, Mr. Ailes rebuffed Ms. Carlson’s accusations. “Gretchen Carlson’s allegations are false,’’ he said, calling it “a retaliatory suit for the network’s decision not to renew her contract.’’

“Ironically, FOX News provided her with more on-air opportunities over her 11 year tenure than any other employer in the industry, for which she thanked me in her recent book,’’ he wrote. “This defamatory lawsuit is not only offensive, it is wholly without merit and will be defended vigorously.”...

'Entitled' high school senior sparks a firestorm

Suzy Lee Weiss doesn't understand that she can not always have what she wants. She also doesn't understand that her sour grapes attacks on students that did get into the colleges she applied to reveals her contempt for people who are different from her. I doubt that she'd be much of an asset to an Ivy League College; this fact may have come through in her applications. But she may have a terrific career ahead of her at Fox News.

'Entitled' high school senior sparks a firestorm of anger after she writes a scathing open letter to the Ivy League schools that rejected her
By Daily Mail Reporter
5 April 2013

A high school senior who wrote an open letter to the Ivy League universities that rejected her has sparked a firestorm of anger, with readers accusing her of being 'entitled', 'whiny' and even racist.

But others have praised Suzy Lee Weiss, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the honesty and 'accuracy' of her article, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

She said she wrote the piece after she was rejected from a string of schools in one day.

Despite the teenager's 4.5 GPA, an SAT score of 2120 and work experience as a U.S. Senate page, she was shunned by Princeton, Yale, Vanderbilt and the University of Pennsylvania.

In her article she blamed not getting into the schools on the fact that she was not 'diverse' enough, and she even accused her parents of giving up on her because she is the last of four children.

She started out with an attack on diversity, suggesting that her white skin, business-owner parents and good education worked against her in the application process.

'What could I have done differently over the past years?' she wrote. 'For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it.'

She added she regrets not going to summer camps in Africa where she could 'scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life.

Suzy Lee Weiss defends her scathing open letter to Ivy League...

Of her parents she added: 'As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me.

'My parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin.'

The article outraged many, who accused her of being entitled, self-indulgent and even racist.

'Entitled little brat,' one Twitter user said, as another said: 'Choking on the petulant privilege of Suzy Lee Weiss & hoping she matures out of her ignorance...

Fox News article on evolution of fish into land animals

'Walking' Fish Prompts Evolution Rethink
By Charles Choi
LiveScience
Fox News
December 13, 2011

Air-breathing fish that can hop and walk across the floor on their fins hint that walking may have evolved underwater before such animals began migrating on to land, scientists find.

The distant ancestors of humans and all mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and other four-limbed animals, or tetrapods, are fish that eventually developed the ability to breathe on land. One of the few living fish related to these ancient land-dwellers are air-breathers known as lungfish, which are found today in Africa, South America and Australia.

Now scientists find that an African lungfish (Protopterus annectens) can lift its body clear off the floor and propel itself forward using scrawny "limbs," abilities previously thought to have originated in early tetrapods.

"This shows us — pardon the pun — the steps that are involved in the origin of walking," said researcher Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago. "What we're seeing in lungfish is a very nice example of how bottom-walking in fish living in water can easily come about in a very tetrapod-like pattern."

The lungfish in question has an eel-like body and a pair of flimsy hind fins. "If you showed me the skeleton of this creature and asked me to make a bet on whether it walks or not, I would have bet it couldn't," Shubin said. "Their fins seem like the furthest thing from walking appendages possible."

The lungfish's history makes them popular pets among paleontologists, and anecdotes and rumors circulated among scientists for years about walking behavior allegedly seen in these strange fish. To uncover the truth behind these stories, the researchers designed a special fish tank in which they could record a lungfish's motions on camera from the side and below for in-depth analysis.

Their videos revealed the lungfish commonly used its hind or pelvic limbs to "bound," moving both limbs at once like one would hop, and to "walk," alternating limb motions. [Video of lungfish walking]

"I find it exciting and surprising that even with such small fins, this lungfish is able to not only propel itself, but lift its body clear offthe bottom as well," researcher Heather King, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told LiveScience. "If you were to look at just the skeleton of the lungfish, you might never guess that it was capable of this behavior, especially since they don't have feet!" she wrote in an email.

The forelimbs look similar to the hind limbs, but were not involved in such bounding and walking movements. The researchers are not certain why that is, but "it is possible that if the hind limbs alone are sufficient for propelling the fish, the forelimbs would not be used," King said.

The lungfish's ability to support its body on its slim limbs might be aided by their buoyant air-filled lungs, researchers suggest.

"It shows what's possible in an aquatic medium where you don't have to support yourself with gravity," Shubin said.

This discovery might redraw the evolutionary route scientists think life took from water to land. Many of the steps needed to adapt to surface-dwelling could have occurred millions of years before early tetrapods developed limbs with digits and took their first steps on shore, King said.

These findings might also make us rethink whether recently discovered approximately 380-million-year-old tracks were in fact made by early tetrapods. They could have been created by other kinds of fish instead.

King, Shubin and their colleagues detailed their findings online Dec. 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fox News isn't even pretending anymore

Fox News isn't even pretending anymore
By Gene Lyons
Salon.com
Oct. 15, 2009

...The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”

Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.”...