Sunday, March 04, 2007

The Nation Stats

We have two issues of The Nation to cover this week, March 5, 2007 and March 12, 2007. We're also going to try to include links at the end of this running feature from now on as a result of long term reader Troy's points made in an e-mail about "what a nightmare" we're going to have when we cover the last issue for 2007 and try to suddenly create links for all the past installments. (Thank you, Troy.)

Starting off with the March 5, 2007 issue.

EDITORIAL & COMMENT
"War Drums On Iran" -- unsigned, sick 'em AlterPunk, if you're not too busy going after cat bloggers!
Michael T. Klaire's "Targeting Tehren"
Max Blumenthal's "McCain Mutiny"
Andrea Batista Schlesinger's "Pro-Immigrant Policy"

Score: 2 males, 1 woman

COLUMNS
Calvin Trillin's "Feith Cooked the Books . . ."
Alexander Cockburn's "Sold to Mr. Gordon, Another Bridge!"
Gary Younge's "White History 101"

Score: 3 males, 0 women

ARTICLES
Patricia J. Williams' "Obama and the American dilemma"
James K. Galbraith's "What Kind of Economy?"
Alisa Solomon's "Out of Africa"

Score: 2 women, 1 man

Critics
Annia Ciezadlo's "Blandford: Killing Mr. Lebanon . . ."
Carol Muske-Dukes' "River Road"
Vivian Gornick's "Isaac B. Singer"

Score: 3 females, 0 males

Total score for this issue: 6 women, 6 males

Wow. They finally found a way to offer equal gender representation. Too late to score impressively -- in fact, to do that, they'd need to offer a few issues with only female bylines. And to think, they needed to bring in only one The New Republic(an) writer to do so. (Yes, they do. Must be a shortage of women on the left -- at least on their rolodexes.)

Year to date score: 92 males; 25 women.

Oh, look (below), it's a typical day at The Nation where editor & publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel meets with the bulk of the magazine's writers!

nationstats

Turning to the March 12, 2007 issue.

EDITORIALS & COMMENT
"Home Truths" (unsigned)
Neve Gordon's "Uneasy Calm in Palestine"
Ari Melber's "Bloggers on the Trail"
Eric Foner's "Lincoln's Antiwar Record"

Score:

3 men, 0 women

COLUMNS
Calvin Trillin's "A Republican Talks Straight"
AlterPunk's "Liberalism's Lost Libretto"
Naomi Klein's "A Trial for Thousands Denied Trial"

Score: 2 males, 1 female

ARTICLES
Ruth Rosen's "The Care Crisis"
Robert Nathan & Jo-Ann Mort's "Remembering Norma Rae" -- did Norma die? Hope it wasn't from brittle bones. There's a Boniva commercial running non-stop that claims to treat that.
Mark Green's "How to Fix Our Democracy"

Score: 2 males, 2 females

Critics
Christian Parenti's "Fall: Bernard Fall . . ."
Jonathan Ree's "Sisman: The Friendship . . ."
Stuart Klawans' "Films"

Score: 3 males, 0 females

Total Score this issue: 10 males, 3 females

Year to date score: 102 males, 28 women

And with that score, The Nation "achieves" the "honor" of having featured exactly 4 men for every 1 woman writer in their magazine since they began their 2007 issues. How proud they, or at least Warren Farrell, must be!

One more time, Katrina vanden Heuvel meeting with the bulk of the writing staff for the magazine (and such a pretty, little hat).

nationstats

In the ten issues (including one "double" issue) so far this year, the magazine has telegraphed that a woman is worth hearing from . . . at least after four men have first weighed in. Which makes is even more laughable that a brief posing an 'article' (ran on The Notion, now pushing itself as a "StudentNation" 'article') wanted to cite Katha Pollitt's 2005 column about how women are underrepresented in opinion journalism . . . at other publications! (The Nation is an opinion-journal.)

The lack of women being featured in the magazine was brought to C.I.'s attention by a group of women late in 2006. For a column at Polly's Brew, C.I. went back and compiled the stats for that year. What we had discussed was following 2007's issues each time they arrived in the mailbox. Ava and C.I. were in charge of the December 24, 2006 edition and that was the first week that a 2007 issue had arrived (January 1, 2007 issue). They immediately started up "The Nation Stats." "The Nation Stats" ran again in our December 31st edition (covering the magazine's January 8, 2007 issue -- a "double issue"). January 21st, we covered the January 22nd issue in "The Nation Stats." Last week, "The Nation Stats" covered two issues since two arrived the same day for three of us participating in this feature. February 4th, we covered the Feb 12th issue in "The Nation Stats." February 11th we covered the February 19th issue in "The Nation Stats." February 25th, we coved the February 26th issue in "The Nation Stats."


To date, there were four prior features covering five issues (one of which was a "double issue").
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