The XX Factor: What women really think.

"No Need For a Maid in the House!"

Hot damn, Emily, that ABC News segment you linked is worse than you described! The creepiest part of the piece is the way in which the patriarch's 17 "wives" are given voice: They're interviewed as an afterthought, at the end of the segment, and then only sitting squeezed between men (are they really going to speak freely?), whereas the men are interviewed individually. (One of Daad's sons enthused that the presence of 17 wives meant there was "no need for a maid in the house!") Gross. And, as you pointed out, Cuomo doesn't give a single nod toward any of the wider questions his story raises.

I blame Jeanne Moos, creator of the "Moost Unusual" news-of-the-weird segments on CNN. I know this could be controversial, but Moos is among my nominations for Worst Woman in the Media. But her little segments are funny, you say! Well, maybe I'm just crabby—and hey, I've written light stories in my life—but I think the high profile of Moos's wide-ranging and meaningless segments makes it respectable for other networks to turn every beat (and not just crime) into a news-of-the-weird beat, in which stories are hyped for their wackiness and not for their implications.