When our trusted storytellers are also the abusers

“Two men with this much disregard for women chose the stories seen by 8.5 million people — largely female — every morning for years,” Janice Min, a partial owner and former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, in a reference to Mr. Lauer and Mr. Rose. “Think about the damage.”…

There is no way to say what Mr. Lauer’s motivations were during his interview with Mrs. Clinton. He may have interrupted and questioned her extensively because she was the more experienced candidate and presumed front-runner.

But that interview reads differently to many now, as do Mr. Lauer’s other on-camera interactions with powerful women that seemed garden-variety sexist or purely boneheaded at the time. In 2014, Mr. Lauer, a father of three, asked Mary Barra, the first female chief executive of General Motors and at the time a mother of two teenagers, if she could do both jobs well. In 2012, he remarked to the actress Anne Hathaway that viewers had “seen a lot of you lately” after a photographer had crouched down to take a picture up her skirt.