Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor were fired before we knew why. Good.

The "trial by media" has been essential in getting corporations to take sexual harassment as seriously as they claim to

Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor.
(Image credit: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images, ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo)

Wednesday's news that Today's Matt Lauer, NPR chief news editor David Sweeney, and A Prairie Home Companion creator Garrison Keillor were all let go by their respective employers due to allegations of sexual misconduct might have felt like the familiar muck. This ugly drumbeat of revelations has a recognizable rhythm by now: Women come forward, journalists investigate, newspapers publish the accounts they deem credible, Twitter reels, the public figure reacts, and his employer (or professional network) belatedly responds.

And yet, what happened on Wednesday — even if it seemed of a piece with all that came before — was genuinely different. Dramatically so. Instead of going through the much-derided "trial by media," Lauer and Keillor's alleged targets reported these men to their companies. The companies responded by investigating and firing them. Only after these things were done did we, the public, find out about any of it.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.