Alert: Fiddling While Rome Burns
There’s a time and a place for pieces like these, and this isn’t it. Deborah Howell of the Washington Post writes that:
Women and men read The Post in roughly equal proportions, but female readers don’t read it as frequently, and the paper is failing to draw women with younger children. Readers who follow women’s sports or their daughters’ athletic teams complain that women’s sports don’t get the ink they deserve.
The Post, like most of the news media, is dominated by coverage of men from the A section to Business and Sports. . . .
“Male dominance of news inevitably reflects men’s greater likelihood of holding positions of authority, yet women seem absent from political news in disproportionate share to their positions of power,” according to an overview of the subject done for a November 2007 seminar on Women and the News at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
The New York Times Company seems to be following Ms. Howell’s advice, and it has a credit rating on par with the government of Kazakhstan. In this case, it’s hard not to take this sort of fatuousness personally, as my sister does hard news reporting for the Times, and I don’t think she’d appreciate the suggestion that newspapers should be more like the Ladies’ Home Journal.
One big reason the Chicago Tribune’s lite supplement, the Red Eye, makes money and the Washington Post Express does not, is that the Red Eye regularly runs women on the cover. Of course, the women it runs also happen to be Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and it also happens to front them even on days where there’s been breaking international news. There are reasons that model works in Chicago but not in Washington — namely that Washington is a company town, with a transient and self-selecting population of abnormally politically involved people.
But to anyone watching the ongoing train wreck in print journalism, it’s clear that the grim reaper doesn’t care about gender ratios.
Gender equality is nice, and so are the additional eyeballs you get by writing things about orgasms, but does it make you an indispensable or financially viable news source? Does it pay your salary?
P.S. Does Howell really think female writers and editors, female chiefs of staff in Hill offices, or female Secretaries of State care at all about her conception of womanhood? On some level, shouldn’t Howell be happy that they’re reading — and making — the hard news?