When your job puts you face-to-face with the public every day, it’s all but guaranteed that you’re going to encounter someone who acts disrespectfully enough to put a black mark on your whole day.
And it seems that this is especially true if you’re a journalist known for doing live reports as we’ve seen more than enough examples of people’s disruptive tendencies coming out the second they see someone trying to talk to a camera.
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Unfortunately, this is a particular problem for female reporters, who can often see the usual attention-seeking behavior from random passers-by graduate to sexual harassment .
And that’s exactly the issue that one reporter was seeking to address when she posted a clip of an uncomfortable encounter filmed seconds before she went live.
Be advised that the video featured in this article contains explicit language.
On July 23, Spectrum News reporter Brianna Hamblin shared a video that featured the man in the background interrupting her before a live broadcast.
As she stated in a follow-up tweet , she wasn’t bothered when the first man we’ll see in the video told her she looked nice, but that this other person took things to “another disgusting level.”
As we’ll soon see, that entailed “crude” statements about her attractiveness, badgering her about why she was on-camera despite an answer, and him saying that he “can’t be left alone with a black woman” while disparaging white women.
And while we can see that Hamblin handled the situation politely in the video, it was also clear that this encounter with the second man left her uncomfortable.
As she wrote in a different follow-up tweet , “The audacity of the things men say to me never ceases to amaze me. What makes you think women want to be talked to that way? In no way is this endearing. It’s uncomfortable. It’s gross.”
She also addressed his more racial comments, saying that it’s never OK to tear down one group of women to “praise” another and that aspect left her feeling more fetishized than complimented.
But while Hamblin made it clear that this kind of harrassment has happened often throughout her career, many other women replied saying that their own experiences weren’t much different.
And as we can see in this response from one woman, that became all the more apparent and frustrating when she realized this encounter was comparatively better than some of her experiences.
So sadly, it seemed like there were no shortage of people who could relate to how uncomfortable this was for her.
However, others soon turned their attention to Hamblin’s camera operator, who many felt hadn’t done enough when the man started harassing her.
This apparently wasn’t helped by that person’s now-deleted response , which read, “I can say is it hurts to see this. I’m sorry I stood there while you have to hear that. This isn’t the first time you have heard this. I would say more like the 50th. I know it’s easy for me to say but it’s only words.”
As you can see, this only had some commenters asking further questions.
Despite this criticism, however, Hamblin said she felt lucky that the camera operator was there at all.
From the looks of it, she would rather have someone with her to keep even a silent watch over the situation than have to deal with the same behavior entirely on her own.
And unfortunately, she has some experience with that scenario, too.
