Michelle Who? Anne Who?

Howard Kurtz asks us a perplexing question by way of introducing a feud between Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times and successful pundit/unsuccessful political consultant Susan Estrich.

First, the feud part. Estrich alleges that Kinsley doesn’t include many women columnists. Kinsley says that’s bunk. A couple female columnists chime in. The Washington Examiner has the whole exclusive scoop with all the hair-pulling and fingernail scratching that a spat of this magnitude seems to call for.

But Kurtz question (remember that?) to introduce it all seems not quite right.

First, let me say that our country needs more women pundits. I’ve never quite understood why–unlike, say, boxing–it’s a male-dominated field. Quick, how many female newspaper columnists can you name other than Maureen Dowd? They’re out there, but not in great enough numbers.

Okay, now is Kurtz talking about pundits or newspaper columnists here? Those are two-different jobs altogether and they don’t always merge. For example, Ceci Connelly of the Washington Post is most definitely a pundit while she’s on Fox News but she’s not a columnist. She’s a reporter. She writes news stories.

I think what Kurtz is getting at here is that there aren’t nearly as many female “opinion-givers” (which would include newspaper and magazine columnists, talk-show hosts, and tv show pundits) as there are male.

Well, yes. Of course. There also aren’t as many crazy women standing on a soapbox in Central park screaming to passers-by about the Trilateral Commission. There also aren’t nearly as many “pundit-bloggers” who are women either.

I don’t know why that is for sure, though I do have my own beliefs on the matter. And if my own beliefs are correct, then Ms. Estrich is going to always be disappointed because there will always be far too few female opinion-givers out there than men.

I suspect that women are less inclined than men to grab a megaphone and shout their opinions to the rest of the world. That may be because of nature, it may be necause of nurture, or it may be, as I suspect, a combination of both.

I just don’t expect that any time soon we’ll see an equal number of female opinion-givers as we’ll see male. That, it seems, is just the way things are.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s a dearth of female opinion-givers. Kurtz asks if any of us can name any columinsts besudes Maureen Dowd. Well, sure we can – at least I can. I suspect that anyone who watches any amount of cable television news or listens to talk radio can also.

Off the top of my head I can think of women like Michelle Malkin and Anne Coulter, whose columns are probably more likely read than Dowd’s (since I don’t believe Dowd is syndicated and Malkin and Coulter are). I can think of women like Betsy West and Catherine Seipp who not only have good eadership but who also appear pretty regularly on Dennis Miller’s “Varsity” panel. I can think of Laura Ingraham (who also has her own radio show) and Monical Crowley (who appears regularly on Foxd News and on MS-NBC) who are staples on a couple Fox News pundit shows. You can read Mona Charen, Anne Applebaum, and Linda Chavez regularly in the Washington Post. You can also read Madeline Albright on nearly a monthly basis in the Post as well, though she’s not particularly a columnist. Even Susan Estrich has a syndicated column, though it’s not widely syndicated (as I recall) and is practically a co-host on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes show. On townhall.com you can find 70 different columnists, 14, by my count, are women (including the aforementioned Malkin, Coulter, Chavez, and Charon), not including the frequent guest columnists.

It seems to me that, all things considered, there are a pretty good number of female opinion-givers out there, most of whom are quite good. That may not be enough for Howard Kurtz, but the number is far greater than he might want us to believe.

(Edited to fix an errant HTML tag that pretty much erased half of the entry. Now it makes sense!)

No related posts.

Category: A Voice From the Outer World