Land 'O Dudes

Ari Melber on diversity in the opinion section:

The most traditional location to reach the political establishment, the Washington Post opinion section, is brazenly male-dominated. Seventeen of the 19 columnists are men; only three of the columnists are racial minorities. Guest op-eds could present more voices, but they rarely do. This year, only 12 percent of the Post's guest pieces came from women, according to a May count by ombudsman Deborah Howell. At the New York Times, eight of the ten weekly columnists are men; one is black.

I'd say this is especially egregious with regard to the op-ed pieces. The major papers seem to pride themselves on the glacial pace of turnover and total lack of quality control with regard to their regular columnists, which limits one's ability to diversify with speed. But all it would take to dramatically increase the number of women having op-eds published in The Washington Post would be to email some women who write about politics and say "want to write something for The Washington Post?" I'm sure someone would say yes.

Comments

I agree, it's "egregious", Matt. Women should be doing a much better job, not whining.

Posted by robert powell | June 9, 2008 9:38 AM

But all it would take to dramatically increase the number of women having op-eds published in The Washington Post would be to email some women who write about politics and say "want to write something for The Washington Post?" I'm sure someone would say yes.

And who would they dump? George Will? Charles Kraphammer? Not only is it white men but they are all old(I guess Hiatt isn't that old). They need new blood all the way around. Younger and more diverse.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | June 9, 2008 9:38 AM

Jonah Goldberg-nationally syndicated columnist. Yep, definite meritocracy here!

Posted by Rob | June 9, 2008 9:56 AM

But all it would take to dramatically increase the number of women having op-eds published in The Washington Post would be to email some women who write about politics and say "want to write something for The Washington Post?" I'm sure someone would say yes.

Well, yes, but some of those women would probably devote several hours to writing a thoughtful, and intelligent editorial, and then people might notice that Richard Cohen hasn't spent more than 10 minutes on any of his columns in over a decade.

Posted by peep | June 9, 2008 10:09 AM

And 0 come from women, or men, with a working class background who might question some of the class assumptions and prejudices shared by both men and women on the editorial page.

Of course these voices are missing from the most well-supported blogosphere, too.

There is no part of our public discourse in which anything other than elite and "meritocratic" opinion is given a platform. There is a stylized left and right debate among elites, but no questioning of elites, and the prejudices, questionable assumptions and self-serving attitudes they share, on left and right, is allowed. Which means that, in even the most establishment parts of the media, there is a lot of ugly prejudice expressed toward large groups of American not only without centure, but also without awareness. Sexism of course, as this campaign season has made unavoidably apparent, is both rampant and acceptable. But so is classism. Journalist who would never write in insulting and stereotypical ways about racial minorities have no problem speaking and laughing in print and on tv about "trailer trash." People who fully recognize Steppin Fetchit as an ugly, media created racial stereotype use Archie Bunker to characterize and stereotype millions of working people without a second thought.

Very early in this campaign season when I suggested to a writer/regular contributor to TPM that class and gender bias was rearing its head in this campaign in ways that could have bad consequences for the party (I had been deeply offended and appalled at the ugly gender and and class stereotypes routinely expressed by Obama bloggers and commentors, and by a video produced by an Obama supporter that portrayed Clinton supporters and naked, toothless hillbillies), and in the course of doing so indentified myself as a working class woman, he, as an amusing way to telegraph his deep disdain for both my gender and class, responded to me in pig latin.

Unfortunately, I believe his attitude of patronizing superiorty, his conviction that the "lower" classes can't have anything (that needs to be taken into consideration) to contribute to the public debate and have no part in the democratic dialogue, is a tenet of the meritocratic faith shared by the chattering class across all the media, old and new.

Posted by esmense | June 9, 2008 10:11 AM

What esmesne said. It's depressing but hardly surprising that so many people can be attuned to structural sexism but totally un-attuned to its consequences. In this case, the problem with 90% male pundits isn't that some smallish number of potential female pundits are denied the pleasures of income without work, but rather than millions of people are exposed to a narrower perspective than they might otherwise have. If you think this is a problem, but specifically deny that it was an issue in the past Democratic nomination fight, then in what sense is it really a problem?

Posted by Rich | June 9, 2008 10:16 AM

So what? Shouldn't the concern be he diversity of viewpoints, not the color or ownership of genialia of those giving the viewpoints?

Posted by Miande | June 9, 2008 10:21 AM

Postscript; Before anyone suggests that the Limbaugh and O'Reilly's of the world represent working class viewpoints, let me remind you -- these are men from middle class to elite backgrounds, and their audiences tend to be relatively affluent males. Talking like a truck driver, in broadcast and occasionally in print, while defending the elite status quo is a popular affectation of members of the media on both sides of the extremely narrow, allowable debate.

Posted by esmense | June 9, 2008 10:21 AM

Yeah. What esmesne said.

Good article, but I was disappointed that it (and Matt's commentary) let the blogosphere off the hook.

Posted by jon | June 9, 2008 10:23 AM

Sure, someone over at OW posted that he thought the reason that he wasn't seeing a lot of Clinton supporters on the blogs was that working class people tend not to know how to use computers, and he caught no crap for it.

I like David Sirota on labor and class issues.

It occured to me that someone who's better on labor than, say, pretty much any of the fauxgressive bloggers might have picked up on the history of Jews and labor and how it affected Jewish support for Clinton vs. Jewish support for Obama.

Posted by Melinda | June 9, 2008 10:32 AM

Miandne, well, since right now there's an impressive uniformity of both race and gender on the WaPo opinion page along with it's ideological uniformity, I can't object to addressing only one of these. After all, the WaPo editors will go to great lengths to claim that their op-ed page is truly ideologically diverse, but they can't credibly deny the fact that they are retaining their same 70s-era talent of white men.

That said, I think anyone would have a hard time getting genuinely working class voices on an op-ed page. Becoming a professional writer is a vocation for the people who are comfortable enough and well-connected enough to do it. Working class people are concerned with getting jobs that make money. Asking why there aren't more working class voices in the media is like wondering why art museums and auction houses don't have more top-level people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps: it's a rich man's game.

Posted by Tyro | June 9, 2008 10:33 AM

Two words: Katha Pollitt. Why the NY Times and others publish the lamebrains they do, and not her, is without any reasonable explanation.

Posted by David in NY | June 9, 2008 10:37 AM

Number of women bloggers on The Atlantic website: 1 out of 8. (Hm, same lousy percentage as the Post!) I realize that's not necessarily your doing, Matt, but, stones, glass houses, etc.

Posted by Glenn | June 9, 2008 10:44 AM

Note that one of the two NYT regular female weekly columnists is the moron Maureen Dowd. Even Richard Cohen is smarter then her, which isn't saying much.

Posted by SLC | June 9, 2008 10:44 AM

I might also add that even for the few prominent journalistic voices who've come up from a working class background, by the time they're old enough, successful enough, and well-connected enough to land a choice media position as a commentator, they've been detached from the working class for quite a few decades. Tim Russert tries to leverage his supposed authentic Buffalo roots for all it's worth, but what comes out of his mouth is just the stereotypical "elite discourse" cliches we would expect from anyone else.

Yes, there is a bevy of better potential columnists out there to replace some of the dead weight on the WaPo op-ed page, but let's not pretend that it's possible to get working class voices there.

Posted by Tyro | June 9, 2008 10:51 AM

But all it would take to dramatically increase the number of women having op-eds published in The Washington Post would be to email some women who write about politics and say "want to write something for The Washington Post?"

Yeah, at least they should try to include more women guest-columnists. For this they could even just go for people like university professors, and skip all the types who are trying to make livings as journalists and columnists. After all, Krugman attributes part of his being a hit to his being an outside-the-beltway-type and a wonk, which he seems to think predisposed him to speak truth to power. Maybe we need more of that.

Alternatively, the papers could just start firing every opinion writer they hire after 3-5 years. After all, it's such a dream-job and a resume-builder- all the writers they hire are getting plenty of help in their lives just by getting to do it for a little while. There is no need for a paper to feel like it has married its writers.

Posted by Swan | June 9, 2008 11:19 AM

I might also add that even for the few prominent journalistic voices who've come up from a working class background, by the time they're old enough, successful enough, and well-connected enough to land a choice media position as a commentator, they've been detached from the working class for quite a few decades.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Writers who have a lot of success being published are so overwhelmingly rich, that I tend to think that once-lower-class is better than never-working-class, and that's all there is to it. Things don't change so much that someone who went to college and stopped hanging out with everyone they knew from the neighborhood loses touch with the perspective of those roots very quickly, I think.

The only thing I think that would be a problem is if the writer is trying to not be lower class anymore in a way that involves throwing out that point of view. Just trying to be an educated writer and to hang out with educated people and to think about things that require some higher education to think about doesn't necessarily do that on its own, I think.

Posted by Swan | June 9, 2008 11:26 AM

I might also add that even for the few prominent journalistic voices who've come up from a working class background, by the time they're old enough, successful enough, and well-connected enough to land a choice media position as a commentator, they've been detached from the working class for quite a few decades.

This sounds more like a conservative fantasy to denigrate the liberal writers who got into journalism back a few decades ago, maybe in the '60s, when there was probably more permeability, and who now occupy a few choice spots in the new media (like Andy Rooney). I'm not sure it's so much a concern. I'm not talking about the WaPo opinion writers, though, just your comment as it applies to opinion writers in general.

Posted by Swan | June 9, 2008 11:32 AM

Speaking of the Atlantic, couldn't the magazine find someone more qualified (or at least more literate) than McArdle? The blogosphere has many talented women writers, a few of them in your own blogroll, who aren't gibbering idiots. Does the Atlantic take pride in affiliating itself with someone whose output consists of economic quackery, vegan drivel and self-referential twaddle?

Granted, some of the Atlantic's male bloggers (Douthat, Goldberg and Sullivan) are hacks too, but they can write well. If you're only going to have one woman, hire a competent one. Somebody with some insight into politics and world affairs.

Posted by A Reader | June 9, 2008 11:48 AM

Number of women bloggers on The Atlantic website: 1 out of 8. (Hm, same lousy percentage as the Post!) I realize that's not necessarily your doing, Matt, but, stones, glass houses, etc.
Posted by Glenn

Not only that, but MY and other Jews prevent diversity from being achieved not just by creating the politically correct number of female and minority slots, but block white diversity as well.

To be fair, Yglesias and the other Jewish writers need to sit down and agree to which Jew gets to stay while the rest are forced out to make room for a Pole, a Meztizo, a crippled lesbian German-American..

Posted by chris ford | June 9, 2008 12:11 PM

Anybody else sick of Modern Women? I know I am. Enough already. Go do something feminine. Stop trying to compete with Men. It's very unattractive.

Posted by ronald | June 9, 2008 12:11 PM

"There is no part of our public discourse in which anything other than elite and "meritocratic" opinion is given a platform. There is a stylized left and right debate among elites, but no questioning of elites, and the prejudices, questionable assumptions and self-serving attitudes they share, on left and right, is allowed."

Spot on!

The GOPocratic power duopoly long ago outlived its usefulness. That's what really needs to be changed. Until it is, messing with the racial/gender ratios will just produce the same dreary predictable content.

Posted by kafka | June 9, 2008 2:45 PM

What's the proportion of women on the Atlantic blog site?

More to the more general point, in the wide-open world of entrepreneurial rather than salaried political blogging, what's the sex ration? The last time I checked a couple of years ago, it was heavily skewed toward men, too.

Guys just have a stronger urge on the whole to grab the world by the lapels and tell them what they think about events in Akbahzia.

Similarly, the Atlantic magazine has hired a couple of fine female writers over the last decade -- Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing Loh -- but it turns out that they are primarily interested in writing about the failures of feminism.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 9, 2008 3:28 PM

This was all hashed out in 2005 when Susan Estrich, peeved at having Michael Kinsley turn down one of her op-eds for publication in the LA Times, demanded gender quotas and accused Kinsley of having a brain rotting from his Parkinson's disease.

Then, the liberal Washington Monthly's blogger Kevin Drum asked:

"Not to get too obsessed by the whole Estrich-Kinsley thing, but so far no one has attempted any kind of real answer to Estrich's question: why are op-ed pages so completely dominated by men?"

He immediately performed the ritual self-abasement required of white male liberals:

"I suppose the obvious response is that it's for the same reason that practically every other elite profession is dominated by men: we still live in a male-dominated society and probably will for at least another century."

But Drum went on to mischievously point out:

"The political blogosphere provides another clue. … there are still no formal barriers to entry here, no old boys club in the usual meaning of the word. Yet if you take a look at the Blogosphere Ecosystem, which for all its faults is probably the closest thing we have to a consensus measure of popularity for political blogs, you will find exactly three women in the top 30: Michelle Malkin, La Shawn Barber, and Michele Catalano."

"And that nearly led to his eyes being clawed out," reported Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post, as obscure women bloggers denounced Drum in the most vicious terms imaginable, causing Drum to cravenly shill for these talentless harridans.

To be a liberal white male, it helps to be a masochist.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050313_gap.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 9, 2008 3:34 PM

Steve Sailer writes:

"More to the more general point, in the wide-open world of entrepreneurial rather than salaried political blogging, what's the sex ration?"

Meager, I would imagine.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 9, 2008 3:37 PM

Here's the 2005 email exchange between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley:

Run my letter or else
From: Susan Estrich
To: Kinsley, Michael
Subject: RE: my letter to the editor

I am sending over my letter this morning. It is very, very temperate. It is signed by approximately 50 women, among them some of the most powerful women in town, from Nancy Daly Riordan to Lynne Wasserman to Katherine Spillar to Carol Biondi to Dolores Robinson etc. etc. etc. ... [Personally, I've never ever heard of a single one of the 49 women on her list -- Steve.] Everyone is assuming it will be published on Sunday. I honestly think it will be a bigger deal if you don't publish it, and Drudge and Newsmax and the rest do, than if you simply publish it, and start adding more women from Southern California to your mix (today's tally, 3 men, 1 Washington woman late of Time, no women from Southern California...)

I really do hate to be doing this. I counted e-mail after e-mail that I sent and was totally ignored. I can't tell you how much I wanted to help quietly. If this is what it takes, so be it. My friend Barbara Howar told me she got a call yesterday from Bob Sipchen about writing for the Sunday section and I was delighted. How easy can it be ... That's all. You want thoughtful conservatives ... I have a great conservative former Harvard student who tells me she's been desperate to get a piece published and she gets consistently turned away. She lives in Pasadena ... I've got so many names for you of good women who live right here, care about this community; Carla Sanger, who created LA's BEST, tells me she can't get a piece in; I have women writing to me who have submitted four piece and not gotten the courtesy of a call - and they teach gender studies at UCLA ...

Anyway, the piece runs 500 words, and the signatures another 100. Since I have my own mimeograph machine, I can do a column today... but as I have every day, I would like nothing better than to work with you to declare victory. Otherwise we'll have a new website, www.latimesbias.org up by tomorrow [As of Sunday, it's still "under construction]...

Sincerely, Susan

Don't try to push me around girlie
From: Kinsley, Michael
To: Susan Estrich

Susan - We don't run letters from 50 people, and we don't succumb to blackmail. So we won't be publishing your letter. I would actually like to run an essay by you in our Outside the Tent column (the one Mickey kicked off a few weeks ago), but even that would look like blackmail if we did it now. So that's out too, for the moment.

I don't want a fight any more than you say you do - and we are both pissed off today. So I suggest we wait a few weeks (say, three) and then let's talk about an Outside the Tent. (It would be subject to the usual editing, of course - but not to dull your point, since the whole purpose of this column is criticism of the Times.) Or if you'd rather write a letter to the editor in two or three weeks, please write it and sign it yourself. You can say in the text that it is endorsed by whatever number of others.

How dare you accuse me of blackmail
From: Susan Estrich
To: Kinsley, Michael

You owe me an apology. NO one tried harder to educate you about Los Angeles, introduce you to key players in the city, bring to your attention, quietly, the issues of gender inequality than I did - and you have the arrogance and audacity to say that you couldn't be bothered reading my emails, spending time in the city where all of us are raising our families ... and then we should stop our efforts because you're "pissed off."

I am not engaged in blackmail, and I find that Suggestion to be highly offensive and insulting, and I am certain the many prominent women who have signed the letter would also agree. Far from being "pissed off," I believe I have conducted myself with admirable restraint because of our past relationship and my honest concerns for your health. I am not aware of any policy against jointly signed letters, nor has one been pointed out to me. You were quite aware of what I was doing, and to spring the policy this morning is bad faith, short and simple.

I was told that in order to have a letter published Sunday, it had to be submitted by today. My suggestion that your publishing it would be better (for you too) than my having to go outside somehow constitutes me blackmailing you is so outlandish that it underscores the question I've been asked repeatedly in recent days, and that does worry me, and should worry you: people are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgment, and your ability to do this job. The fact that you were not in Los Angeles all week hardly helps matters, nor does the fact that you don't return phone calls. You are making things worse for yourself.

My point wasn't blackmail, Michael, it was that if you prefer me to conduct this discussion outside your pages, and make it into an even bigger fight, that makes you look even more afraid and more foolish, and angers every woman who signed a temperate letter that you are now refusing to publish. So be it. I now have powerful businesswomen and community leaders, professors and developers and talent agents and managers and journalists, students at the high school, college and law school level, and teachers involved in this effort. For the young women, I hope it's a lesson in how you can make change happen if you're willing to stand up to people who call you names, and reach out to other women, and not get scared and back down. If you recall, I wrote a book about that, called Sex and Power. It's what I have spent my whole life doing. The older I get, the clearer I am about all of our obligations to make a contribution during the brief time we have on this earth. Add that to the commitment those of us who have signed this letter share towards the community that is our home, where we are raising our children, living our lives, trying to deal with the real problems this city faces (not shrunken female minds), and the idea that I would somehow say STOP now because Michael is pissed off and has offered me some onetime column down the road when he's not mad anymore is just absurd; it would make a mockery of everything I stand for.

Do the right thing for your sake ...

That's it I am taking my ball and going home
From: Kinsley, Michael
To: Susan Estrich

Susan - Your mischaracterizations of what I wrote to you are farcical, as anyone can plainly see from reading the whole string. But your references to "concern for [my] health" are disgusting. Consider my invitation to write for the Times when things calm down rescinded. John Carroll [the LAT's editor] agrees.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/02/kinsely-estrich-brouhaha.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 9, 2008 4:40 PM

Why don't women write many good op-eds?

... asks Dahlia Lithwick, an editor at Slate:

"I can also swear to the fact that as an editor, the number of pitches I receive from men outnumbers the pitches I see from women by several orders of magnitude. I can add, again purely anecdotally, that women largely send in pitches for reported pieces, and are far less inclined to frame a piece as an "argument"—which may prove Tannen's point that argument is not necessarily a comfortable or natural mode of communication for women (a phenomenon I observed in law school as well). This is, in short, an insanely interesting thought problem to which we are applying very little interesting thought."

http://www.slate.com/id/2114926/

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 9, 2008 6:12 PM

Matt: "The major papers seem to pride themselves on the glacial pace of turnover and total lack of quality control with regard to their regular columnists..."

Nice to see The Atlantic following suit with their bloggers.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 9, 2008 7:00 PM

The really interesting thing is how intellectually unrebellious, timid, and gullible the younger generation is.

Whatever happened to "Don't trust anybody over 30"?

For example, here's Matt, a 26-year-old who has had to put up his entire life with indoctrination by over 30's in the feminist theology. He's smart enough to know this worn-out ideology is a joke and a racket, and, theoretically, he's in the prime of his young manhood, but do we ever hear a hearty laugh of scorn over feminist follies from him?

Hardly. We just get these sad little emissions of intellectual submission like this one.

And that's typical of the current generation.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 9, 2008 8:10 PM

the egregious Sailer writes:

"Similarly, the Atlantic magazine has hired a couple of fine female writers over the last decade -- Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing Loh -- but it turns out that they are primarily interested in writing about the failures of feminism."

"it turns out"--because the Atlantic could never have had any idea in advance that these particular women might have interest in this particular theme. what women who get published write about is influenced only by their bodies, and women don't want to write op-eds because that just makes their little ovaries hurt.

what an egregious fuckwit!

Posted by nick | June 9, 2008 9:49 PM