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Guest Post: “Why Did They Let This Go On?”: How Media Coverage of Harassment Shifts Blame from Men to Institutions

Over the last few months, EMCC has been hosting placements for Applied Gender Studies MSc students from the University of Strathclyde. As part of her placement, Anna McFatridge has been researching the media coverage of two high-profile allegations of sexual harassment. Read the first part of her blog series here. In this blog, she writes about how the media frames harassment as an institutional problem. 

When stories break about public figures being accused of sexual harassment, the media often fixates on the individuals involved, their careers, reputations, and responses. But in the cases of celebrity chefs Gregg Wallace and Gino D’Acampo, another significant pattern emerged throughout my analysis of articles: their employers, The BBC and ITV respectively, appeared to shoulder a large proportion of the blame for the men’s alleged actions. On the surface, this might seem like progress. Holding institutions accountable for enabling or ignoring harmful behaviour is crucial in addressing gender-based violence. But when media narratives focus too heavily on institutional failure, they risk subtly excusing the individual and side lining the experiences of the victim-survivors. 

Headlines and quotes like “Why did the BBC let this go on for so long?” (Daily Mail) and “ITV had 10 years to sort out Gino” (The Sun) illustrate how media coverage framed the institutions as complicit enablers. The story became not just about Wallace or D’Acampo, but about powerful networks that allegedly turned a blind eye. Articles described how complaints had been made previously, how colleagues felt uncomfortable, and how executives were warned but failed to act. 

This kind of framing reflects ideas around workplace complicity, when employers fail to address known patterns of harassment, they become part of the problem. In this sense, the focus on BBC and ITV can seem like a step toward holding systems accountable, not just individuals. 

But there’s a flip side. 

By shining such a bright light on institutional failure, media coverage can also let the accused men fade into the background. The conversation shifts from “What did he do?” to “Why didn’t someone stop him?”. It reframes the men as products of a broken system, employees whose behaviour wasn’t corrected, rather than people with personal responsibility for their actions. 

When individuals accused of misconduct are depicted as unaware that their actions were harmful because nobody ever told them otherwise, the underlying message becomes, “If the bosses didn’t say anything, how could they have known?”. Quotes like “And yet, the shows that profited from him for years turned a blind eye” (The Sun) reinforce this logic. Rather than reinforcing personal accountability, this kind of framing dilutes it. 

There’s another dimension to this too. When one news outlet criticises another’s broadcaster, it’s not always about solidarity with victim-survivors. It can reflect broader tensions and competition between elite media institutions. Media discourse is shaped by power struggles, and sometimes, those struggles are between powerful institutions trying to preserve their own reputation while undermining their rivals. While it may appear that newspapers are challenging the institutional status quo, it’s often less about justice and more about editorial rivalry. 

Who’s Missing from the Story? 

What gets lost in all this? The victim-survivors. When the story becomes about institutions and headlines focus on who should have acted sooner, the lived experiences of the women affected are often reduced to the background. The media often prioritises the fall of high-profile men, and in this case, the institutions that “let them fall”, over the harm caused to those who experienced their behaviour first hand. 

This narrative shift not only marginalises victim-survivor voices but also reinforces the idea that the real impact is reputational fallout for the alleged perpetrators, not harassment itself. Blaming institutions instead of individuals doesn’t just shape how we see these particular cases; it can shape how we understand sexual harassment more broadly. It encourages a view of misconduct as something that happens in isolated elite environments, due to weak management or permissive corporate culture, rather than as part of a wider pattern of systemic gender inequality. Whilst workplace cultures that allow for harassing behaviour to take place absolutely need scrutiny, we can’t forget that behind every institutional failure is an individual decision: someone choosing to act inappropriately, someone choosing to stay silent, someone choosing to look away. 

Institutions should be held accountable when they enable harmful behaviour. But so should the individuals responsible for that behaviour. When the media overcorrects by focusing only on institutional failure, it risks creating space for the accused to frame themselves as passive participants in someone else’s negligence.