Part of my responsibilities as senior vice president of the National Coalition of Free Men is to work with the news media. Other newspapers also are quire sexist: I think particularly of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. So, too, is that alleged paragon of respectable journalism, the New York Times.
But I have found individuals on both the Post and the Globe to be fair-minded and open to new perspectives. Once you sweep away the humus of 30 years of one-sided reporting that nourishes both journalistic male-bashing and public misperceptions of gender realities, Post and Globe staffers are journalists before they are gender ideologues. (The focus is on newspapers here because, candidly, I've never acknowledged that radio and television newspeople are serious journalists.)
The Times is different. It is relentlessly ideological, driven to its sexist spin on the news by a blind commitment to gender feminism. But the Times also has a reputation to uphold, a reputation (undeserved, I might add) as the benchmark by which all other news media judge themselves. So the Times will often attempt to give the appearance of practicing responsible journalism, while actually engaging in the rawest, rankest form of sexist tokenism.
Not so my local Austin American-Statesmen.
The American-Statesmen is overly sexist -- unreservedly, unabashedly, unrelentingly, unswervingly, and uncaringly sexist in story selection, content, and display. Wit the American-Statesmen, the "woman is always victim, man is always oppressor" apocrypha is a matter not of challengeable ideology, but of unassailable dogma, every bit as intractable as that of Jim Jones and his similarly self-destructive minions.
For several years now, I have been tweaking the American-Statesmen's powdered aquiline nose. Austin activists stuffed American-Statesmen vendor boxes with a spoof, the Austin American-Hatesmen. We've taken out ads in another local publication chiding the daily's sexism. I've personally given an Energizer Bunny award to an editor whose sexism just keeps going and going and going. At last count, I had written about 150 letters to various American-Statesmen editors, pointing out how their sexism violates the most fundamental journalistic ethics.
Recently, I fired what I expect to be my last salvo at the American- Statesmen. Well, maybe the next to last.
A new editor, Richard Oppel, has taken the helm of the newspaper. Early on, he asked for comments from readers regarding areas in which the American- Statesmen could improve. I responded with a 4.5 page letter citing the many areas in which the American-Statesmen coverage of gender issues was sorely lacking competency, ethics, fairness, balance and objectivity. To which he responded in his column by comparing men's activists with the Flat Earth Society, tarring us as members of a fringe element, and sarcastically questioning whether there are such things as a masculist, or another side to gender questions other than that presented by the American-Statesmen.
The editor failed to explain how he concluded that a group of activists who advocate such revolutionary approaches as imposing adult responsibility on women for their crimes, requiring women to financially support children, and insisting that women be drafted and die in combat just like men, are reactionaries. And especially how a political liberal of Jeffersonian religious persuasion, whose heroes are the woman he loves, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Sam Houston, can be characterized as a Flat Earther. Such subtleties do tend to get lost in the ideological miasma that cloaks journalism and gender today.
For reasons that will become apparent later in this column, I wanted to determine exactly how calcified the editor was in his sexist dismissal of the idea that men, too, have issues. So, at my request, many doctoral level scholars -- and the president of the Fort Worth chapter of the National Organization for Women -- wrote Oppel. They represented 11 different institution of higher learning, nine academic disciplines, eight states that span the country from the Canadian to the Mexican borders, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans; four nationalities, three countries, two races, and both sexes. They were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and agnostic.
All told Oppel precisely what I had told him: Men's issues get short shrift from a biased press.
Naturally, it made no difference. Even after hearing from so many thoughtful, informed academicians, the editor defended his bigotry, and the continuing sexism of his newspaper, on the grounds that anything I had to say represented only my views, and legions of PhD's to the contrary be damned. He also ignored a conference that half a dozen local activists, representing five men's organizations, had with American-Statesmen editors a year before he came. At that conference, the same concerns had been expressed - and I was not even the spokesman for the group.
Picking away at a zit on the face of American journalism has had its rewarding moments, but there is a saying among journalists: "Never start a fight with someone who busy newsprint by the ton and ink by the barrel." You'll just never win a fight with a newspaper if you choose to duke it out on the paper's turf, i.e., the newspaper's own columns. When the fights over, the newspaper will still be a muscle-bound bully, and you'll still be a 98-pound target -- except that you'll now have sand in your face.
Nevertheless, if either side ever comes out on top in a pissing contest in which public policy issues that affect life spans and the quality of lives are at stake, I think this may be the one.
Journalism is an engine that is fueled by novelty. Yesterday's plane crash will always be superseded by tomorrow's talking frog, and the frog will yield to next week's radical new surgical procedure.
There is a whole universe of "man-bites-dog" stories in the realities of gender. With increasing frequency, the news media are discovering that the advocacy research they have unwittingly bought into for 30 years is unreliable, and verifiably incompletely reported and/or incorrect. Once the media, and especially the news services such as the Associated Press, recognize the invalidity of the data they have been using, the credibility that has automatically been extended to gender feminists because of that data, and denied men's activists, will vanish.
Then you will begin to see some semblance of balance in the coverage of gender issues, because the media have an insatiable appetite for new angles on old stories. And most journalists do have a desire to be fair. We need to remember that journalists' perceptions of gender issues have been formed by the same biased reporting that has formed those of the public.
Five years from now, 10 years from now, Richard Oppel inevitably will be reading in his very own American-Statesmen the things all those scholars tried to tell him, and that in his ignorance and ideological intransigence he dismissed out of hand. We can all take gratification in knowing that each time he reads a truly balanced gender issue story, he will have to confront his own sexism.
I have my own, distinct, albeit prospective, measure of pleasure.
Four years ago, when I began in earnest to challenge the American- Statesmen on its news column sexism, I did so with a specific goal in mind. The goal was a book on the media and sexism, a subject that first caught my interest while doing graduate work at the University of Texas. This month, I am resigning my position as senior vice president of NCFM to dedicate more time to completing the book, which I'm writing with one of the professors who corresponded with Editor Oppel.
The second chapter is devoted entirely to the American-Statesmen. The newspaper serves as the requisite horrible example, its journalistic failings fully documented, laid bare for all to judge -- and delivered, gift-wrapped, by the publicly proclaimed bigotry of its own editor.
Semper fratres, Hugh Nations
Reprinted with permission from Transitions
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