Did Kos just call someone out for sexism?
He's slamming Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, long a favorite bloggers' punching bag, for her recent column in which she runs down the numbers of male vs. female columnists, as well as whites vs. people of color, and finds that the Post comes up wanting in the diversity department.
So how could The Post increase diversity as the staff and space for stories got smaller? It wouldn't be easy, but here are some thoughts. On the op-ed pages, don't run all the columnists all the time. Create some space for new voices. In Close to Home, make a point of seeking out more women and minorities. Outlook can also bring in more such voices.The Metro section needs a female columnist, and it also needs a columnist attuned to the region's burgeoning Latino communities. A Latino columnist could appear in the Extras since they are oriented toward counties and neighborhoods. Not all new voices have to be on the staff; they could be regular contributors. Metro's new Page Three could be used to bring in more female and minority voices.
The point is not to toss excellent white male columnists; the point is to add more and lively voices to The Post.
Kos quite rightly points out that adding women writers and writers of color, but banishing them to the "fluff" section(s) of the paper, is bullshit. I am confident that Howell means to say the Extras are "oriented toward counties and neighborhoods," and not that Latinos are. Still, it's a pretty insulting remark: it amounts to saying that gee, maybe we should add a Latino columnist to talk about stuff that goes on around here because a lot of Latinos live around here now. The unspoken assumption is that Latinos (and whites) won't be interested in reading a Latino person's take on national issues.
What's really interesting here is that Howell does seem to understand that the numbers point to a need for change - but she's extraordinarily unambitious, even defensive, in her prescription for change. Some of her caveats remind me of begging my mom to let me stay up past bedtime: "C'mon, mom, just ten more minutes? Five minutes? Pleeeease?" When Howell points out that NO MEN'S POSITIONS WILL BE THREATENED, and really we don't even have to officially hire these women and non-whites as actual staff members - they can just be guest writers or something! (Maybe they'll even be so grateful for the opportunity that we won't have to pay them!) ...it bears asking, who is she talking to here? Who is the audience? Is she really that worried that Joe PostReader will give two hoots and a holler whether the new female columnist is on staff or not? No. Remember the role of an ombudsman, abominable as Howell has been at the job. She's talking to the paper's management - and begging them to throw her, and us, a bone.
So it's the management who really has the problem - not that we didn't know that already. I have a proposition for these guys. The Style section is the only section of the paper where female columnists outnumber male columnists (seven women to three men). These include a TV column, a fashion column, several advice columns... you know, women's shit. So they should change the name from "Style" to "Women's Shit" - put it right up there in the masthead. That will dramatically reduce the likelihood that any man will accidentally pick up, read, or otherwise come into contact with the "Women's Shit" section and suffer the penis shrinkage that surely results. Then they won't have to expense any more male enlargement pills to reverse the damage - and with the money saved, they can hire another woman to write on national issues for the op-ed pages. That will make it 17 men to 4 women, instead of 17 to 3, and those darn women will stop complaining - and the real readers (the male ones) will never notice.
Oh, and as for kos - for all his protestations that diversity is not a consideration when he chooses his front-page writers, he seems to be doing a pretty decent job of achieving it anyway. Last year, two of four new co-bloggers were women. This year, it's two or three of four (I'm not sure if Devilstower is a man or a woman,) and two of his three blogging "fellows" are women as well. Kos can be an ass, but maybe he did learn something from the infamous Pie Wars after all.