The Hite Report on Shere Hite (20 page)

It is so hard for me. I can only reconstruct what happened in the most crude and jumbled sort of way. This is the first time I have tried to record an objective picture of what was happening.

Here is chapter and verse of the media madness of 1987/8, for readers with strong stomachs (or a good sense of humour).

When I published the result of my seven-year research,
Women
and
Love,
Time
magazine made it their cover story. I was surprised and happy when I heard in advance, impressed. Of course they don't share with
you what it will be like before it comes out, but I had no reason to expect anything other than a responsible discussion of the issues. Some criticism, but a basic discussion of the ideas.

When I saw
Time
on Monday morning, my heart sank. The cover had a terrible cliché drawing of a male and female symbol – arguing. The cliché was this: a screaming, nagging woman attacking a surprised and gentle looking man. She was ‘nagging' at him, and he was looking surprised and perfectly ‘innocent'. My mind boggled: instead of erasing the stereotypes I had worked so hard to overturn, it reinforced them! But, anyway, I thought, don't let your ego get in your way, this is probably just the way the cover is. Inside will be better.

Inside was worse. Rather than discussing the new issues for women which I had devoted almost ten years of my life to researching, working painstakingly seven days a week for long hours, funding it all myself – rather than saying what I had concluded (even if only to knock it down),
Time
went out of its way to miss the point. Instead it said that I had no point, or if I did, nobody could believe it anyway, because my methodology was so laughable. It went on to trash me, devoting column after column to quoting people who said my work wasn't any good. And these were people who could not even have read this book. How do I know this? Because no one even had any review copies yet; the publisher did not have them ready.

What
Time
seems to have done was to create a brief, three-paragraph synopsis, and give it to their bureau
chiefs in certain key cities, then have that bureau call local therapists or whomever, read them a part of this page, who knows in what context, and ask their reaction, parts of which they then quoted as ‘informed opinion' about my work! In other words,
Time
used almost all of its space, not to discuss the book's general ideas, basic statistics, or new theories, but to cite over twenty assorted individuals saying they didn't agree with the distorted ideas they seemed to have of my work or how it was done. Exactly what they did or did not agree with was hard to tell. People who were called and said positive things were not cited, as many informed me by letter.

I was shocked and amazed. I never expected such shoddy journalism or bias from
Time.
It was dishonest not to let its readers know that none of the people they quoted had read this book, in fact to imply that they had, and weight the story towards the negative, not using any positive citations. There were plenty of positive reactions, including in the book's prefaces and appendices; professional associates and collegues I knew were called, and kept on the telephone for up to an hour, but not quoted.

(Does this remind any readers of the media madness surrounding the Clinton sex scandal of 1998/9?)

At the same time, the
Washington
Post
co-operated (financially) with
ABC
News, to conduct their own poll, based largely on my questions (to which they had selectively early access because I was to be interviewed first
on their weekly current affairs programme,
20/20
). They then promoted the results as ‘proving Hite wrong'.

Do you think they told me in advance that they were doing a comparative study? Quite flattering in a way. This could have been informative, and real collegiality developed. But no. They didn't tell me a thing, but went out of their way to trick me onto their show. In fact, most of
ABC
's results proved me right: Most women in their study also said that they wanted more emotional closeness from men, and felt men were too distant. But the bit that interested
ABC
was only this:
How
many women were having extramarital sex?
ABC
's number was fantastically lower than mine! (Of course, their lower figure couldn't have been because of their ‘poor methodology', i.e., they called people up on the telephone, so those interviewed were hardly anonymous or speaking in privacy! How many would admit current or past affairs to a stranger from the national media on the telephone?)

What happened was that I got a call from the
ABC
Nightly
News.
‘Ms Hite, we would like to come and interview you tomorrow for the evening news.' ‘You would?' I asked, puzzled, ‘Do you know that I have been on one of the other nightly news shows? Do you mind not being first? Is there a different angle you have in mind?'

A woman's voice reassured me from the other end of the line, ‘No, we just think your book,
Women
and
Love,
is so interesting and so important that we want to interview you. Can we come tomorrow?'

I agreed, and the following afternoon, three women arrived – one carried a camera, one was the producer, and one the interviewer. I was surprised and happy to see that the network understood women's issues, since they had sent an all-woman crew; in fact, two women were black.

The interview began, camera pointing at me. During the preliminary questions, all seemed to be normal, then my interviewer reached down into her briefcase and pulled out a large sheaf of papers. ‘Ms Hite,
ABC
News and the
Washington
Post
have together conducted a survey which proves your statistics wrong! What do you say to that!' And she thrust the papers into my lap, camera rolling.

I stared at her, fascinated. ‘You have? How interesting! You mean, you replicated my questions, exactly the ones I used! Asked people anonymously?' I began reading the reams of computer print-out data, scanning it to note the questions and percentages of answers. ‘But this looks like you found just about the same thing I did – women wish men would talk to them more about personal issues – and on this page …'

‘But get to the end, get to the end!' the interviewer exclaimed. ‘Our results there are totally different!
We
found that only seven per cent of American wives are unfaithful to their husbands!'

I looked up and was about to comment on this, but was amazed to see that the camera was still rolling. ‘You don't mean to say that you've been filming this whole thing, have you?' Silent nod from the camera woman. ‘Do you expect me to comment on your study before
reading it? Is this some kind of a set-up? You wanted to try to catch me off guard, shake me up? Why are you doing this? Don't you feel a little strange, three women coming here on dishonest premises?' But they went away happily with their film, edited it, and ran it on the news. Since I hadn't ‘broken down', they asked other people to comment negatively on me, and thus ‘proved their point'.

This was followed by a
Washington
Post
‘investigative article' – a huge two-page attack on me and my work. Though the
Washington
Post
and
ABC
had jointly sponsored the survey, readers of the paper (and viewers of
ABC
) were probably unaware of the joint sponsorship. Nowhere was this mentioned in the
Washington
Post
article ‘exposing' my flaws, nor in several subsequent articles attacking my research, and, increasingly, me personally.

One of their reporters, David Streitfeld, ‘investigated' my personality and (yes, again) my ‘science' (yawn). What a challenging and heroic assignment – not like investigating a big corporation, or a professional business executive with expensive lawyers for defence; more fun to ‘investigate' a lone, independent feminist writer, for sure. Well, it is not difficult to find flaws in my personality! Yet I don't think his research into me was anywhere near as balanced and scientific as my research into others. He describes the flaws in my comportment (as little as he knew them; he had met me twice, for a total of two hours each time; the second time Friedrich had literally thrown him out of the apartment, with a crew from Brazilian television
applauding him for this) and the flaws in my famous methodology (yet again).

Frighteningly, not only did this reporter personally harass me, and then attack
me
(not my ideas, he never mentioned them, but implied there were none) in the
Washington
Post,
he also made intimidating telephone calls to at least two of my publishers (Knopf
US
and Viking
UK
), asking them if they were not now, after the negative articles, planning to withdraw my book from the market? ‘Since they are calling it a fraud …' (It was he and related media who called it ‘a fraud.')

At this point, I called Ben Bradlee, editor-in-chief of the
Post,
who told me over the telephone (when I asked him to ask this reporter to stop calling me), ‘We tried to get you, but now we'll stop.' He laughed and sounded like he thought it was all in good fun! I was amazed, couldn't believe my ears, and asked him to repeat it. He repeated it verbatim, ‘Well, well, we tried to get you, but now we'll stop!' And he chuckled some more. I reminded him of this some two years later, at the annual meeting of American Women in Radio and Television held in Washington, DC, and recorded by C-Span television network. He answered, ‘Oh, uh, but didn't we somehow make this up to you, uh, give you a chance to …' ‘No,' I said. ‘Oh well' was the sum total of his response.

Set-ups became common, intimidating situations contrived in advance, attempts to rile me, designed to make me angry so I would do something ‘dramatic'. And when this rarely happened, then in the editing, the missing events or details would just be added in!

Not only did
ABC
Nightly
News
lie about the reason for their wanting an interview with me in order to ambush and surprise me into breaking down (which I didn't, of course – why should I?), but also another television network decided to join the free-for-all: Fox TV decided to trick me into an ‘interview' with them via satellite. In a situation like this by satellite, one doesn't see one's interviewer, but simply sits in front of a blank camera; you hear the voice and the questions, then respond into a black screen; only the interviewer can see you. I was asked by my publisher to do an hour of satellite interviews to various stations from a Washington studio. I was not told who any of them were in advance, this was just one hour slotted into a hectic book tour schedule, and I trusted my publisher …

As it turned out, Fox TV (from New York, where I had just been!) was on the other end of one of these slots and made it their business to create as much tension and confrontation as possible, before I knew what was happening. When I tried to leave the set, to get away from the brutal attack the unseeable ‘interviewer' was making on me, the studio personnel refused to let me out of my chair, refused to detach the various wires and microphones placed all over my body so I could walk away! Then Fox stationed a ‘reporter' outside my apartment building in New York, mixing in some of this footage, to ‘tell the public' the ‘awful truth' about me … (with my address plainly in sight behind the reporter). This ran as ‘major news' several times a day, then was given to
CBS
for its prestigious
Sunday
Morning
News
of
the
Week
with Charles Kuralt.

The media now became more and more aggressive, as they discovered there was little way I (or any ‘public figure') could fight back or stop them. Later, I understood a lot of what Princess Diana had felt about being hunted by the media. They were in for the kill, hot on the chase. The colouring, sensationalizing, dramatizing of events, inventing of conflict and magnifying personality characteristics – all this became frequent. Reporters called at odd hours and said provocative things, hoping to get a response (they were taping) and then use it out of context. It was exhausting and tedious. I tried to counter these attacks by doing other interviews and television shows, hoping to speak about the actual issues and ideas in the book. But it was a circus, one ridiculous out-of-context attack after another.

Yet I was not alone. After a few months, an article by Louise Armstrong describing the whole farce appeared in the
Women
'
s
Review
of
Books
: