Top Fox News Editor, In Leaked Email, Urges Newsroom to Avoid Using ‘Karen’: ‘Derogatory Term Based on Race and Gender’
In an email to staffers Tuesday morning, Fox News Executive Vice President and Managing Editor of News Tom Lowell urged staffers to avoid using the term “Karen,” a would-be insult for white women deemed problematic.
Lowell’s suggestion was in response to an internal email in which a Fox producer advised that the criminal charges against Amy Cooper — a white woman who became known as the “Central Park Karen” in May 2020 after calling police and falsely claiming that Christian Cooper, a Black man, was threatening her life — would be dropped. Mr. Cooper had asked Ms. Cooper to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, and the confrontation, which Mr. Cooper recorded on his phone, escalated from there.
In response to the producer’s email, which initially included a parenthetical reference to Ms. Cooper as the “Central Park Karen” for clarification, Lowell responded with a note on the use of “Karen.”
“A reminder: ‘Karen’ is a derogatory term based on race and gender, and as such we should probably refrain from using it,” Lowell said in the email obtained by Mediaite.
Following the suggestion Lowell made in his email, the subject line of the message changed from “Charges against AMY COOPER (Central Park Karen) dismissed” to “Charges against AMY COOPER (Central Park birdwatching incident) dismissed,” according to a Fox insider.
The insider took issue with the suggestion, considering that Fox News sometimes uses “illegal” to refer to undocumented immigrants, a practice some have said is derogatory.
“It’s completely jaw dropping, considering the network uses the term ‘illegals’ freely with no regard to AP style, which is our default unless otherwise noted,” the insider told Mediaite.
The AP Stylebook, long considered to be the industry standard guidance for reporting, advises against using “illegal” to describe a person: “Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”
Ms. Cooper lost her job and, temporarily, her dog, after the incident, and faced one charge of filing a false police report. The case was dismissed Tuesday at the prosecution’s request, after Ms. Cooper completed a “therapeutic educational program” that included a focus on racial bias, the New York Times reported. If convicted, Ms. Cooper faced up to a year in jail.
Marisa Sarnoff was a researcher at Fox News from 2015-2020.
