Last Saturday I posted a diary about a media controversy over an article which had appeared in the New York Times.
Media Brouhaha Over "Angry Black Woman"
The article was about TV writer and producer Shonda Rhimes and showed significant lapses in racial sensitivity that set off a media storm. The NYT has now made a lame and left handed attempt to respond to the criticism.
An Article on Shonda Rhimes Rightly Causes a Furor
The public editor recaps the situation and then makes comments about it.
This is a preliminary post, and I’ll be adding to it later today, or posting again. But I’ll say this much: The readers and commentators are correct to protest this story. Intended to be in praise of Ms. Rhimes, it delivered that message in a condescending way that was – at best – astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.
However, when she goes on to pass along the reactions of the editors who were responsible for authorizing the publication of the article the attitude becomes more defensive.
“There was never any intent to offend anyone and I deeply regret that it did,” Ms. Mattoon said. “Alessandra used a rhetorical device to begin her essay, and because the piece was so largely positive, we as editors weren’t sensitive enough to the language being used.”
Ms. Mattoon called the article “a serious piece of criticism,” adding, “I do think there were interesting and important ideas raised that are being swamped” by the protests. She told me that multiple editors — at least three — read the article in advance but that none of them raised any objections or questioned the elements of the article that have been criticized.
“This is a signal to me that we have to constantly remind ourselves as editors of our blind spots, what we don’t know, and of how readers may react.”
When she moves on to talking to Alessandra Stanley, the author of the article the tone becomes more one of defiance than apology.
I didn’t think Times readers would take the opening sentence literally because I so often write arch, provocative ledes that are then undercut or mitigated by the paragraphs that follow. (links below)
This seems to fall under the heading of critics have a right to be bitchy and get by with it.
None of this sounds like anybody at the NYT has any serious plans to make the newspaper any more sensitive to the issues of human diversity. To do that would require them introduce more diversity in the staff that generates and edits the content. That is not likely to happen.