【Watch Female Disciple Who Teaches the Taste of a Voluptuous Woman Online】

UPDATE: Nov. 30,Watch Female Disciple Who Teaches the Taste of a Voluptuous Woman Online 2017, 2:50 p.m. PST This story has been updated to include an apology Lauer issued Thursday morning.

Matt Lauer spent the past two decades on the Todaydeploying his goofiness and matter-of-fact interviewing style to win over television audiences.

On Wednesday morning, however, viewers awoke to the news that Lauer also engaged in workplace sexual misconduct so grave that NBC fired the million-dollar star. Lauer issued an apology Thursday.

"Some of what is being said about me is untrue or mischaracterized, but there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed," he said.

SEE ALSO: Matt Lauer terminated from NBC after alleged 'inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace'

This routine of watching successful men stripped of their power feels depressingly familiar in the month-and-a-half month since exposés revealed Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein as a serial predator who harassed and assaulted women. (Weinstein maintains his encounters with his victims were consensual.)

Since then, several influential men who once shaped news coverage and the conversations we have every day lost their perch atop media organizations as a result of allegations of abhorrent behavior. There is simply no way that behavior, which requires a sickening conscious or unconscious endorsement of misogyny, didn't poison how these men reported on and viewed the world at large.

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While the public regarded them as respected, objective authorities on the day's news, they concealed their own twisted views of gender and power, or perhaps couldn't even muster the necessary self-reflection to see their actions and biases clearly.

When you watched these men deliver the news, and trusted their impartiality or judgment, it was actually based on a deep-seated lie about their honorability.

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This list of male media executives accused of harassment in the last two months is long and includes author and former NBC political analyst Mark Halperin, top NPR editor Mike Oreskes, NPR chief news editor David Sweeney, and CBS' This Morningco-anchor Charlie Rose. That doesn't count Bill O'Reilly, who Fox News fired earlier this year, or pop culture icons like Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K., whose work is typically held up as a benchmark of creative excellence.

"It is impossible to keep that kind of facade up. You can’t keep those biases from infiltrating."

Even as I was writing this column, news broke that Minnesota Public Radio fired Garrison Keillor, former host of the long-running variety show "A Prairie Home Companion," after accusations of inappropriate behavior.

By mid-afternoon, Varietypublished a story detailing more allegations about Lauer, including that his door could be locked from a switch beneath his desk and that he exposed his penis to at least one colleague he summoned to his office. Several women had complained to NBC executives prior to Monday's complaint, according to Variety.

While Lauer and these other men may have tried to draw a stark line between their private misconduct and their public persona, William Ming Liu, a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, says they probably failed.

"It is impossible to keep that kind of facade up," says Liu, who is also editor of the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity. "You can’t keep those biases from infiltrating."

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For journalists, says Liu, the rapid-fire nature of interviews makes it extremely challenging to reign in those impulses at every turn. Beyond the second-by-second nature of live television, Liu says that deeply rooted misogyny -- along with other types of discriminatory views -- is bound to touch every aspect of a journalist's work, whether it's the care they take when describing an event or their sensitivity to the context of the day's news.

Twitter users were quick to point to illustrative examples following Lauer's ouster, including his combative exchanges with Hillary Clinton at an election forum that featured him engaging with Trump on friendlier terms. A 2012 clip resurfaced of Lauer starting an interview with the actress Anne Hathaway by asking about how paparazzi published photos of her accidentally flashing onlookers at a premiere. Lauer asked if she'd learned a "lesson" from the incident.

Variety reported that Lauer exerted considerable control over the Today'seditorial choices and that he frequently dismissed stories about cheating husbands.

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Similarly, some critics had long questioned Halperin's treatment of Clinton, which seemed steeped in distrust and resentment. Halperin was accused, among other things, of rubbing his erect penis against the shoulders of female colleagues during his tenure at ABC News. He denies the claims, but the allegations portray a man subtly or explicitly uncomfortable with treating women as equals.

Liu says that while men like Lauer and Halperin, or anyone else recently accused of harassment or assault, would likely insist they harbor no ill will toward women, their misconduct tells a different story.

"The outward articulation and description of themselves and their controlled behavior may be different, but in private spaces and less public spheres, these implicit biases make an appearance much more automatically," he says.

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For years, these men have been collectively paid at least tens of millions of dollars for their unimpeachable news authority -- a professional distinction that's rarely bestowed on their female peers who possess the same credentials and skill. They've operated in a system that handsomely rewards the perception of objectivity, which is perversely both something that men feel they are the arbiters of, and something that only men of certain backgrounds can claim.

"The idea of trying to be objective in anything we do clearly comes from multiple levels of privilege," says Liu, noting that people from marginalized backgrounds often cannot afford to take a both-sides-are-equal approach. "If there are no consequences to any of the identities you hold, then you can say and do anything you want."

As Timereporter Charlotte Alter pointed out on Twitter in the wake of Lauer's dismissal, men frequently suggested that women's analysis of Hillary Clinton's candidacy was "biased," or "subjective," or "opinion."

"When women wrote about Hillary, it was a 'feminist take,'" Alter explained. "When men wrote about Hillary, it was 'the truth.'"

In other words, men like Lauer, Rose, and Halperin, could set the agenda for the news-consuming public without broad skepticism of their motives or character.

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Aside from the examples of sexism that infiltrated their work, it's hard to measure the small and large ways their conscious and subconscious ideas about gender roles found their way into the coverage we read and watched during their long tenures. It's also a depressing reality to contemplate.

It's doubly disturbing to consider that the same dynamic plays out with regard to journalists' views of race, sexuality, gender identity, and class. Yet the industry's obsession with a certain strain of objectivity frequently helps elevate white men whose worldview is anything but unbiased; it just might take a sexual harassment or assault scandal for the public to realize the bait-and-switch.

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Matt Lauer's downfall is the latest in a series of painful revelations about who we are willing to anoint as a chronicler of our era. Just because a media personality claims the mantle of impartial authority, doesn't mean he's earned that privilege. Such a distinction, in fact, is frequently just a mirage reflecting the hope that what happens in some people's lives can be reduced to a simple, convincing narrative.

The men who've been selling that illusion often have their own secrets to keep.

Disclosure: I worked at NBC News Digital (formerly msnbc.com) from 2011 to 2012. In my role, I occasionally worked with Todaydigital and broadcast staff. I was also a freelance contributor to Today.com until mid-2014. During that time, I heard no rumors or allegations about Lauer's behavior.

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