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By Emily Peck

When a harasser controls the narrative

Matt Lauer is the latest powerful media figure felled by allegations of sexual harassment. On Wednesday morning NBC announced that the longtime Today host had been fired after receiving a complaint from an employee about Lauer's behavior.

It's hard to undersell how important Lauer has been over the years in shaping the public's understanding of gender and power dynamics. Just recently, Lauer was widely criticized for the way he treated Hillary Clinton at a forum in which she and Donald Trump were both interviewed. Lauer spent most of his time with Clinton hammering her about her emails, devoting almost no minutes to the subject matter at hand: foreign policy. He then went on to lob softballs at Trump.

We don't know what was in Lauer's mind, but we can say this: The way men treat women privately bleeds into how they treat them publicly. That's something to consider as more and more powerful men in media, like Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose, are outed as sexual harassers. How did their views on women seep into the public's brain?