For the irony impaired Posted by: McQ
on Monday, June 09, 2008
Pundit Ari Melber of "The Nation" laments the lack of diversity within the ranks of pundits:
It's still all about the white men. Hillary Clinton's loss has renewed critiques that American political media is slanted, sexist and dominated by men. While Clinton and Obama broke barriers in the Democratic primary, swiftly dispatching white male Senators with more government experience, the race was still refereed, scored and narrated by white male commentators, an influential constituency in presidential politics. Pundits talked a lot about gender and racial progress during the campaign, of course, but the elite opinion media continues to employ, groom and promote a commentators corps that is disproportionately white and male.
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. (The Times also recently created a bimonthly graphics column, a post filled by a black commentator.) And in an industry review last year, about one out of four columnists were women at the largest syndicates around the country, according to Editor and Publisher. As Times columnist Nick Kristoff lamented last month, even as reporting staffs diversify, white men dominate American punditry "from newspaper columnists to television talking heads."
Commenter Mask holds up the mirror for Melber:
Mr Melber, aren't YOU a white male?
Isn't Ari Berman a white male?
I know John Nichols is a white male.
I know Peter Rothberg is a white male.
I know Richard Kim is a Korean male.
I think Tom Engelhardt is a white male.
I think Christopher Hayes is a white male.
I know Tom Hayden is a white male.
I think Robert Dreyfuss is a white male.
I think William Grieder is a white male.
I think Bob Moser is an African-American male.
Not really sure of the ethnicity but certain of the gender of ...Max Blumenthal....Marc Cooper....Matthew Blake....Max Fraser...Gary Younge....Jon Wiener....Adam Howard....
Then you've got Ms vanden Heuvel, Katha Pollitt, Laura Flanders, Te-ping Chen, and Zephyr Teachout (temporarily) and very rarely Karen Houppert and Liza Featherstone.
So of 18 males almost all white. And of all contributors 18 are male to 7 seven female. (or count Ms vanden Heuvel twice if you like, since she's a writer and the publisher.)
Seems pretty white, mostly male, with a female "boss" who probably posts fewer articles than the white males.
Reminds me an answer Jerry Falwell once gave when he was speaking at Duke. During the question and answer time, he was called a bigot and asked how many African American students Falwell had at Liberty University. Falwell stated that this was a big problem at Liberty that he was working hard to rectify, but at the moment "only" twelve percent of Liberty students were black. By the way, he said, do you know what percentage of Duke students are African-American? Six.
Whoa Jeff. Don’t you know that you cannot use percentages, only absolute terms? For instance, you may say that Exxon made $40B in windfall profits; you may not reveal this was less than a 10% net profit margin.
Accordingly, Duke had many, many more African American students in absolute terms than Liberty. Percentages aside, Liberty is therefore a racist university.
