Fox News Said CEOs Revealing Pay is "Slut-Shaming"

The conservative "news" channel that we all love to hate never disappoints — especially on a slow news day — and on Tuesday, a Fox News host likened CEOs disclosing salaries to "slut-shaming" companies, in reference to the Dodd-Frank law that could require companies to disclose "pay ratios," effectively exposing the exorbitant salary gap between, say, a company's mid-level employee and a CEO.

The Fox News host in question, Kennedy Montgomery, drew the interesting connection on the station's segment, "Outnumbered," in a discussion about the Dodd-Frank law that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to vote on mid-January. Labor unions and liberal advocacy groups that back the provision say that it will "shame companies into lowering CEO salaries" — which, as AFL-CIO found, can be 331 times more than that of the average worker's salary in 2014.

Citing the "millions of dollars" it could cost a company to compile "complex data" determining the median salary of all its employees, Montgomery said:

It's already cost them millions of dollars. A lot of companies are trying to comply with this in advance. They are essentially trying to slut-shame companies into paying their highest workers less money.

The segment's co-host, Andrea Tantaros, then chimed in:

And slut shaming companies is not the job of the U.S. government at all... Also, Kennedy, the only people who should care about this are the shareholders; how much people make in the company. Otherwise frankly it's none of the government's business.

If you're a little dumbfounded, not to worry, because drawing comparisons where there are none in the hopes of needlessly befuddling the situation is what Fox News anchors do best. Unlike what the channel's former presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney said, corporations are not people, too, and for one to reveal the stark difference between what its CEO gets paid and what an average employee's salary is, is not "slut-shaming," it is merely being open and transparent about the culture of said company. Also, a sense of transparency is definitely a PR boost, so you could even say it's a win-win for everyone.

If a woman — or man — chooses to have sex with one, or one hundred people is nobody's business but theirs. And regardless of whether you believe it fair that CEOs make over 300 times more than their average employee, it has nothing to do with slut shaming — an unconstructive, close-minded reaction to a woman's sexuality, absolutely worlds apart from salary shaming.

Image: Media Matters/Screenshot (3)