 |
|
PressThink's Jay Rosen:
... “To provoke, but not to offend.”
“Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image” was, I think, the variety of mischief afoot at the Outlook Section of Washington Post Sunday when it published We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?, a dubious essay by a dim woman about how dumb most women really are. This was a deeply foolish act of publishing. The editor responsible, John Pomfret, told Laura Rozen that he “ran Charlotte Allen’s piece to provoke, but not to offend.” But if that were the case, he would not have chosen as provocateur a political opponent of the people who needed to be poked.
Let’s provoke people by suggesting that women really are dumb is supposed to scan iconoclastic. I mean, what other logic could it have? If the Post is willing to smash idols like that—women’s equality—it must be a pretty broad-minded place, right? This is not only a crude and formulaic way of demonstrating independence of mind; it misreads the cultural politics of the thing.
Thus, Glenn Reynolds demurred, Ed Morrisey fled in disbelief, Jessica Valenti and Jezebel seethed on behalf of millions who might, Jay Newton-Small of Time found the editors judgment “unbelievable,” Jane Hamsher gave a shout out to Posties: “clue me in to what happened here,” and the Post ombudsman started scribbling notes with an angry look on her face. (Rachel Sklar has more.)
John Pomfret, you misread. But what did you misread? Good provocations do not begin with an intention to provoke, but with an author who has something real to say, and an editor willing to provoke in order to see that it gets said. ...
So the Post and Pomfret are going to use the exercise to run letters as if they had provoked a legitimate -- if touchy -- debate. And yet, when, as Jay Rosen notes, bloggers from right to left were horrified by the piece, and the Post got 600 1,000 comments on it, about 580 900 of which were asking the question "Why did the Post publish this?" -- the paper, in touch with the cultural zeitgeist as usual! -- starts with the one mildly positive one! Editorial discretion! Incredible, really, and so buried as to seem perhaps cowardly.
Where is the letter from the editor explaining what happened and why the paper chose to run the "light-hearted" but utterly unironic "women are stupid" piece and what he thinks in its aftermath? No doubt he's busy with the task force on why women don't read the paper and lots of other people don't read the paper and lots of advertisers are leaving the papers and which next hundred people are going to be asked to take buy-outs. Is there any moral voice over there who is going to speak up on this? No sign.
All the Post online features in the world don't disguise the fact that the Post elders are pulling up the moat drawbridge on this one, and retreating from tremendous reader demand for an explanation from them about their editorial decision to run a piece saying women are stupid. (Among the "evidence" of "female inferiority" the Post astonishingly gave Allen a platform to deploy in a Sunday section front page cover, pulling out the calibers to measure brain sizes.) And can we enjoy such attacks on the intellectual inferiority of Jews and blacks in the future deploying similar such "evidence" in the pages of the Post, if the editor says it's tongue in cheek? Or just women? What is the editorial standard? How did this go past them? People honestly want to know. It's not clear the editors of the Post think it was a mistake to publish the piece at all.
It's not hard to recover from a mistake -- "a deeply foolish act of publishing," as Rosen puts it. You just write, where people can see it, using the same platform where the mistake was made, preferably closer to when you realize it: "Many readers were offended by our Sunday Outlook cover story ... and for that, we apologize. ..." It takes just a small dose of humility and sense of accountability and frankly good business sense. You don't pretend that letters to the editor ( "Agree? Disagree?") are a sufficient response, and replace the crying need for a public and high profile apology and explanation. But so far, it seems they are hoping to leave it to running letters to the editor and the ombudsman to deal with: he says this, she says that -- where you can be assured the missing young mothers the Post is seeking to attract won't see it.
Update: Addie Stan has a piece at the Post in response.
But again, Pomfret and the Post are conning themselves if they think they offered a piece that provoked a debate about an issue. The only debate the Post provoked was about one thing: its judgment at publishing what everybody from the American Prospect's Stan to the National Review's Shiffren has said is a shockingly stupid and insulting piece. So the debate is about the Post's editorial decisionmaking. That's it.