Sayonara, Judy Miller. Maureen Dowd is the latest “it girl.” Arianna Huffington made the rounds, touting the joys of bloggery, but Dowd pushed her aside with a potent mix of hair flipping and flip assertions. Perhaps a recent study demonstrating that the female voice is more complex than the male voice explains why only one token smart woman can dominate… return to article
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Reader Comments (4)Page 1 of 1 pagesWhy can’t a woman write more like a man? When I was a young journalism student, before the days when every story had a byline, journalism was about good research and good writing. With the advent of ubiquitous bylines (and how did that happen anyway?), journalism became personality-based with predictable results. May the ghost of Ida Tarbell rest in peace.
Posted by islandmolly on Dec 2, 2005 at 1:20 PM Hey, my local news headline today was :
“A Day of Drinking Led Woman to Kill Boyfriend”
Pretty insightful, and eye grabbing, eh?
Pretty concise, I don’t even have to wonder about the precedents....
Budweiser is clearly to blame in this scenario, lol
Posted by minerva on Dec 2, 2005 at 6:34 PM “...this spring’s “Opiniongate,” which pitted Los Angeles Times contributing editor, Susan Estrich against the editorial page editor Michael Kinsley. Estrich raised a stink after documenting that on average only 20 percent of the editorials were written by women.”
I would be curious to know a few more numbers. What percentage of qualified editorial writers who submit to LATimes (or any media organ you want to choose) are women? What percentage of total articles submitted to the Op-Ed page are written by women? If, say, exactly 50% of the pieces submitted for publication were authored by women, with only 20% of the total articles printed being written by them, this could suggest a deliberate choice to focus on male-authored articles and to keep out female-authored ones. However, if well under 50% of pieces submitted were written by women, the 20% proportion takes on a different significance. The phrase “written by women” is a little obscure. With the information I refer to above as context, the meaning of the 20% figure will be more clear.
For that matter, when assessing male v. female publication rates across any aspect of journalism, the context of that rate needs to be known in order for any sense to be made of a stated figure. If only 25% of submitted articles were penned by females but 50% of the time women’s works got published, this might mean that the male writers would be disproportionately dis’d. How can the meaning of numbers (or anything) be understood in the absence of context?
Posted by Kuya on Dec 5, 2005 at 1:42 AM The consolidation of news corporations into a few male-dominated supermedia no doubt has contributed greatly to the bias in staffing. That should be corrected, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the profit-hungry execs to make it a priority.
That said, it would be foolish to expect that a fair gender balance would automatically result in a more sensitive, liberal and woman-oriented news environment. Women nowadays tend to be just as politically divided as men, and for every new Molly Ivins you would get a new Ann Coulter.
The best approach is to level the playing field and insist on good reporting from all involved.
Posted by A.A. Murphy on Dec 5, 2005 at 6:23 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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