My home town paper has joined a growing national search for female op-ed columnists.
"....I have spent all afternoon searching the wires, think-tanks, magazines ... and all over looking for edgy opinion pieces by liberals, particularly women"
<snip>
"the liberals aren't even showing up to fight."
writes Rod Dreher, Assistant Editorial Page Editor at the Dallas Morning News, on the DMN Editorial Blog
Read on for details, and challenges...
My local paper, the Dallas Morning News, has just started a new Sunday Op-Ed section called:
Points
The editor cites this Slate article by Dahlia Lithwick Girl Fight and then expresses this plea:
I can tell you as a newly-minted editor, I have spent all afternoon searching the wires, think-tanks, magazines we have syndication deals with (including Slate), and all over looking for edgy opinion pieces by liberals, particularly women and minorities. It's very, very difficult. I have a philosophical objection to publishing a column just because it was written by a woman or a person of color. I am finding some pretty sharp stuff from liberals ... but they're all white men. I am finding some pretty sharp stuff from women and minorities ... but they're all conservatives.
The liberal think tanks are just pathetic; the conservative think tanks have all kinds of stuff written for non-wonky smart people to read, but the liberals aren't even showing up to fight.
On the syndication wire, I've found exactly four columns written by minorities in the past two days. Two are very dull, one repeats an argument about immigration seen many times on TDMN, and the other is about flowers in Death Valley. If any of you have any suggestions at all for a source of high-quality liberal columns from women or minorities, please write me. I really do want to make Points diverse on all fronts, and I could use readers' help.
Can we help the man? Molly Ivins, Ellen Goodman, Helen Thomas....continue the list, please.
Extra credit question: Are women opinion columnists as scarce as hen's teeth, or are recipes for quality "sauce" rated differently by geese than by ganders?