We all know the lengths Washington Post ombudsman, Debbie Howell, has gone to carry water for the horrendous amount of crap on the Post's opinion pages and today is no different.
In her latest missive about the lack of diversity on the Washington Post's editorial staff, she actually does more harm than good to the premise that she puts forth.
She tries to write about the preponderance of white men on the opinion pages and starts out to say this is not a numbers game.
The Post needs more opinion writers and columnists who are of the female persuasion or are minorities. Overwhelmingly, Post columnists are white guys. Some are among the paper's best columnists, but more diversity would make The Post a richer paper.
Numerical equality is not what readers look for, but women and minorities want to see themselves well represented in the news and opinion pages of The Post. This is a remarkably diverse region, and that should be better reflected in columnist jobs.
The rest of the article is then an "audit" of the various opinion writers in all the sections of the paper, broken down by race and sex.
But as she said, this is not a numerical exercise.
Which defeats the whole purpouse of the piece.
Rather than counting the numbers, Debbie, why didn't you do a piece reflecting how this preponderance of white men leads to everybody having the same opinion and how that led the Post into slavish support of the Administration in the run-up to the war.
Maybe if you had a diversity of people writing opinion, you would have a diversity of opinion. Just saying.
But no Debbie, would much rather count heads (even if she denies that is what she is doing!)