Tuesday, March 4, 2008

WaPo Tries Some Spin

The Washington Post is publishing some letters which criticize, in very mild terms, Sunday's misogynistic piece "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" Yet, they are trying to spin the piece as having been about "Barack Obama and the Female Vote." Now to the list of reasons WaPo editors should be fired, we can add that they can't identify the topic of a two-page article - even one which mentions Obama only in the first two paragraphs, but abuses women as being "stupid" in every sentence and ends with the very clear:
So I don't understand why more women don't relax... and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.... Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.
Merely expressing displeasure is not going to get us far. Please let the WaPo know, when you write, that you expect some action on their part - oh, and that you'll never click on another of their ads or that you'd like to cancel your subscription.

UPDATE: No, the WaPo still hasn't fired the editors in charge of publishing this garbage, but it has published two articles bashing Allen's - to be found here and here. Don't think I'm appeased, WaPo. My complaint about linking to studies will likely fall on deaf ears, though, since it seem like the Washington Post's ombudsman just discovered the internet last month.

2 comments:

Casmall said...

Allen is a long time partisan and wing-nut hack. She has a long history of attacking women and standing up for sexist men, like Harvard's Lawrence Summers (i think that was his name). The WaPos editor's claim that this was in good humor, and misconstrued due to " poor framing", rings false due to her long and flagrant disregard for fact and logic. Might I add that there is NO biological evidence that the differences between the sexes effects intelligence, period. Outrageous.

habladora said...

Yeah, that's why this type of writing has no place in the Washington Post. If she wants publish baseless claims and misrepresent scientific findings, there are plenty of publications on the internet that will allow her to do so. Yet, a news organizations that wants our trust on any issue should not publish work by writers who misrepresent the data they discuss, or that offer no evidence to support their claims. The fact that this piece was so over-the-top with its insults to women serves to draw attention to some fundamental problems with our media which, in seeking to drive up profits, are letting standards fall to the wayside. This type of thing makes me wonder if serious news organizations should publish op-ed articles at all. They should at least reconsider their standards for such pieces.