Politico’s Wholly Sexist Narrative Of The ‘Woman In Power’ At The New York Times

[Purveyor]

By Emily Bell, The Guardian
Thursday, April 25, 2013 3:41 EDT

Happy newsrooms are all alike. Every unhappy newsroom is unhappy in its own way. The New York Times newsroom is unhappy because its editor is not very nice. Allegedly. This startling revelation comes from a piece posted on Politico yesterday that instantly lost the internet but gained fans at the NYT.

The litany of complaints against Jill Abramson, the Times’s executive editor, is indeed jaw-dropping.

She is apparently, on occasion, stubborn and condescending. She snaps at people in meetings (sometimes). Once, she asked why an editor was still in a meeting instead of leaving to fix a problem that had been identified. Worst of all, she had such a strong disagreement with her managing editor over the direction of the news pages that he slapped the wall and walked out. The fact that he was allowed to walk back in again might mean that the tirelessly unpleasant Abramson was having an off day.

Dean Baquet, the managing editor in question, does admit in the piece that walking out was not perhaps the best thing for a senior editor like him to do. The very popular Baquet also admits to a history of wall-punching. Abramson, though apparently non-violent, is judged “impossible”, according to the unsourced Politico hatchet job. Impossible, stubborn, condescending, snappy. Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that Jill Abramson is a newspaper editor. Not just any newspaper editor – a female newspaper editor.

The lame nature of the reporting suggests it might be better just to ignore the piece entirely, but it deserves attention, as it fuels an exasperating and wholly sexist narrative about women in power. The souls of the New York Times who found themselves describing Abramson’s shortcomings in terms of her manner and mood should be sentenced to read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In as punishment. As we know, this manifesto for women in the boardroom tells us that the correlation between women being judged ‘likeable’ and their position in a hierarchy are inversely proportionate.

MORE...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/25/politicos-wholly-sexist-narrative-of-the-woman-in-power-at-the-new-york-times/

Politico article: Jill Abramson loses the newsroom

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/04/jill-abramson-loses-the-newsroom-162480.html

[niyad]

1. and yet another salvo in the ongoing war on women