Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Quick Hit: Op-Eds are Stupid.

Yeah, from NewsCat comes more support for my argument that op-eds should either be held to the same journalistic standards as any other article or be scrapped altogether:
This seems to be the pattern. Run some terrible outrageous column that discusses some aspect of femaleness or women’s sexuality, and then, as the outraged letters appear, run a response column. Presto! Now you have balance. Something shitty said about women and something said to refute it. Great. I guess as long as you run a response column everything is okay.

It wasn’t until I started counting the day’s columns for the number of women authors (which many days there weren’t any, and many days the only woman printed wrote something derogatory about women’s behavior) that I started to get really angry at the LA Times and what they think their Op-Ed pages are for. What kind of debates and ideas do they want discussed on them and frankly, who qualifies to talk about what subjects.
Perhaps, though, the op-eds are following the same journalistic standards as the rest of the LA Times et. al. It seems like this sort of woman-basing is the new status quo.

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