Susan Estrich As Bubbles The Hippo
Cathy Seipp takes on the LA Times' lame coverage of the Estrich/Kinsley affair, relating it to "how the late, great old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner spun out the saga of Bubbles the Hippo, who escaped from the L.A. Zoo in the '80s and eluded captors for weeks":

Take the paper's March 11 feature about the whole dust-up, almost a month after the fact. This is my hometown paper at its worst: bland, misleading, weak and late. (And also badly punctuated, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Media reporter James Rainey did a yeomanlike job summarizing the whole affair for the dozen or so readers who hadn't yet heard of it -- presumably these are the same innocents who still need to have the Drudge Report explained; thus Rainey's helpful but not quite accurate description of the Internet juggernaut as "the online journalism tipsheet," as if Drudge were merely some sort of media insiders site.

At least Rainey didn't mention mimeograph machines. Yet he was peculiarly miserly about sharing information that actually might be useful. Those still awake halfway through Rainey's piece, for instance, might have liked to know they could read the Estrich/Kinsley email exchange for themselves at the Washington, D.C. Examiner. But Rainey made no mention of that, referring only to "a Washington-based newspaper reporter" copied on Estrich's email.

Nor did he ask any hard questions. Buried under Estrich's histrionics is a legitimate point: Kinsley, who took over the paper's opinion pages last year, really does seem like the epitiome of the L.A.-hating wonk from Harvard, with an obvious preference for sticking to his coterie of East Coast friends. I still think he's improved his section, because at least by hiring Joel Stein and Michael Lewis he's raised the caliber of writing on Spring Street, although I almost always find Margaret Carlson's columns too tedious to finish. But why not call him on it?

Then there's Estrich's transparently insincere claim that, really, all she wants is to see more L.A. women writers in the Times op-ed pages, right or left, she doesn't care that the Times doesn't run her column in particular, or more columns generally by women fellow travelers. OK, so then why not ask her to name a few L.A. rightwing female bylines she'd like to see in the paper? She's never come up with even one example. But of course, Rainey didn't bother Estrich or Kinsley with any of that.

You'd also have no idea, reading Rainey's piece, of the wonderfully nutty, "I will not be IGNORED!" behavior that's characterized practically every move by Estrich so far. To the average Times reader encountering this article, it must seem like just another dreary, inside-baseball matter of interest only to journalists. Not exactly what you want from a media reporter. Then there's this peculiar graph, about Times opinion editors trying to find more women writers:

They noted the hiring in the last year of Margaret Carlson, a familiar voice from Time magazine and television, as a regular columnist. Kinsley added that he tried but was unable to make Barbara Ehrenreich a regular commentator. Her last book on the struggles of the middle class received wide critical acclaim.

Never mind that leaden clunk you hear at this point, the sound of Rainey dropping the ball yet again when it comes to asking the obvious question: Why are Kinsley and his team only going after East Coast names for the West Coast's biggest paper? The alarm bell here is that incorrectly punctuated last sentence, which makes it factually wrong on two levels. Ehrenreich sounds like someone who has written (a) a series of books on the middle class, the last of which received wide critical acclaim, and (b) any book on the middle class at all. Uh, no. Her most recent book, "Nickeled and Dimed," is about the problems of the working class, but I guess to describe a class as anything but "middle" is too impolite for the reflexively genteel L.A. Times. Well, there's a long tradition out here of that, but enough's enough. Memo to L.A. Times editors: Wake up.

More on the topic on Cathy's blog -- and about the lame Deborah Tannen's piece in today's LA Times, and what Cathy calls Tannen's "hearts-and-flowers notion that women are kinder and gentler and that's why we need more of them on the op-ed pages." And Cathy brings up exactly the right point -- right out of evolutionary biology, that women fight wars of words, not wars with fists and weapons:

Actually, as anyone who's been around children knows, boys may be more aggressive physically but girls can be quite vicious verbally -- exactly the sort of trait you'd think would predispose them to opinion writing.

I'm certainly no shrinking violet -- which is why I get a pile of hate mail and angry letters every week. Just last night, this postcard in from Sheridan, WY, where I run in Mary Grossman's Planet Jackson Hole:

What's pretty ironic about this card is the fact that I just spent the better part of a week researching and writing about men's reproductive rights. I don't usually post columns until after papers have run them, but I'll be talking about this issue on Glenn Sacks' His Side radio show on Sunday, March 20, 5pm, so it's posted for his listeners. (Show airs in NYC, LA, and Boston on the radio, and on the Web, so listen and call in!)