The Outstater
Women Journalists Stressed
AN INDIANAPOLIS EDITOR is crusading for more gentlemanly treatment of female journalists. She says they are being merciless trolled by online critics, suspiciously male. After a generation of “I am woman; hear me roar,” we aren’t going to put that on our worry list.
An editor for the Capital Chronicle cites a United Nations study finding that 81 percent of black women journalists experienced online harassment as did 64 percent of white women journalists. That percentage climbs to 85 percent of lesbian and 86 percent of bisexual journalists.
Not that you would doubt United Nations data (New Jersey should drop into the Atlantic any day now), there might be an explanation other than sexual bias. Perhaps the frustration with women journalists has something to do with the strain of journalism they produce.
I’m not going to insult you by including a “some of my best friends are women journalists” disclaimer. My argument rests on averages and patterns in a specific profession, not on individuals. I just reject the absurd notion that in 2026 female journalists require special consideration.
You don’t have time for me to list the number of women heading up newsrooms in Indiana. Leave it to say that the Indianapolis Star, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, the Capital Chronicle and the Indianapolis Business Journal are led by influential females at the highest levels — and they have been for three decades now. and they have uniformly adopted the curated liberal orthodoxy.
Interestingly, those are the very decades when public trust in the media fell from 72 percent to below 30 percent.
A coincidence? Helen Andrews, author of “Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” notes that journalism is one of a growing number of prestige professions that has now tipped majority female. So yes, that coincides with the decline in the believability of print, electronic and Internet media.
Cause, of course, is not correlation. And Andrews is careful to say that women are not less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. Moreover, there are many professions and industries in which women clearly excel. Andrews only says that women think differently — better in some contexts, not better in others.
To use an Andrews example, if a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy (Budweiser, Cracker Barrel), it will shed investors. It is a simple observation, Andrews concludes, “that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”
Mass media is one of them.
Granted, age has skewed my perspective on this. As a young reporter on the night side of a metropolitan daily, I recall a colleague being fired on his two-way radio for hesitating to interview on scene the mother of a beheaded murder victim. And the city editor regularly climbed on top of his desk (with cowboy boots on) to shout obscenities across a sea of desks to some ink-stained wretch falling behind on deadline. There were pints of whiskey in bottom drawers, and yes actual spittoons. But Pulitzer Prizes meant something.
For the primary value of journalism is prescience. News reporting, when it was successful in that regard, concentrated on absolutes and facts, not on feelings and relationships. The legendary Bob Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, related the journalist to a primordial man at the fireside who could remember and therefore predict the most productive game trails for the next day’s hunt.
Andrews is more direct; “If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they?” Readers want to know where crime is occurring no matter who might be offended, what the weather is going to be, who voted to raise taxes, whose team is going to win — absolutes and facts, again, not feelings or relationships. Red Smith, the consummate sports columnist, would not write about anything that had not happened on the playing field or race track, no locker room gossip or front office politics, no interviews on how a wide receiver feels about the flag.
Disagree with this analysis as you will, but it is specious for women journalists to call on chivalry to shield them from criticism now that feminism has marched through their institution and put them in charge. In any case, the industry has more serious problems than the hypersensitivity of those who choose to make a living under a byline and a studio headshot. Addressing them can start by understanding how chasing Internet clicks has transformed journalists into packs of negativist, egomaniacal and now whining social marauders. — tcl
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