Ombudsman Deborah Howell tells me that she agrees with a disapproving note I sounded about Charlotte Allen's Washington Post article and that her own item on the subject will appear on Sunday. It sounds like she will also ask John Pomfret et al. to take responsibility for the piece.
In re: Allen's article, Kieran Healy offers that playing against type is a market niche:
When associations with some classification are strongly polarized, there'll be more anger and fighting, but also more incentive to play against type. And of course these processes take place within nested contexts, which complicates the dynamic. But the bottom line is that cross-cutting social categories will be filled with people happy to bear the intersection as an identity, and probably also to spend most of their time talking about it: hence black conservatives, marxist economists, Log-Cabin Republicans, ex-gay fundamentalists, pacifist Marines, libertarian environmentalists, pro-life Democrats, or what have you.Playing-against-type articles are great for newspapers: they draw eyeballs. PATs allow editors to telegraph to one set of readers that they run a truly liberal paper, one that encompasses many viewpoints and isn't afraid to interrogate uncomfortable truths. At the same time PATs allow editors to telegraph to another set of readers that they are on their side.
This does no one any service. Liberal readers don't like to read extremely wrong, offensive articles, whereas people who hold extremely wrong, offensive beliefs (such as the notion that women are stupid—not, by the by, poorly equipped relatively to perform spatial reasoning tasks but just plain pluck-dumb stupid) do not represent a sizable segment of the reading population. In order to preserve their liberal readership, the paper's editors must walk back on the article in clever ways, which, I guess, the troglodyte readership isn't supposed to notice. Which the troglodyte readership is happy to do, since the troglodyte readership is totally imaginary in the first place.
Posted by Kriston at March 3, 2008 11:35 AM