In an August 9 alert (www.fair.org/activism/yahoo-opinions.html), FAIR noted that Yahoo!News Opinion/Editorial columnists are 67 percent male, 90 percent white, and only 24 percent liberal. Additionally, not one female artist is included among the 25 Yahoo!News Op/Ed contributing cartoonists. Scores of media activists, responding to FAIR’s alert, asked Yahoo! News to broaden their range of editorial debate.
Commendably, Yahoo!News took FAIR activists’ concerns seriously: In an August 16 letter to FAIR, Yahoo!News senior producer Kourosh Karimkhany thanked FAIR for suggesting increased balance in their contributors’ race, gender and political perspectives: “To state it succinctly, we agree with you 100 percent. We have been trying to achieve exactly what you suggested.”
Karimkhany said that Yahoo!News’ mission is “to represent almost every perspective” without editorial bias. “We are negotiating with several more organizations to run material from the authors you suggested,” he wrote, referring to a list of progressive columnists included in FAIR’s alert. “Our only limitation is the time and business development resources it takes to procure this content.”
Karimkhany closed his letter by welcoming continued monitoring: “We encourage Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting to watch our site over the next few months. We hope you will notice a broader journalistic range.”
You can keep tabs on Yahoo!News’ progress by checking in at:http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cm/cm/?u
GLOBE OMBUDSMAN’S MEA CULPA
In June, FAIR activists wrote to Boston Globe ombudsman Jack Thomas about the apparent hypocrisy of the Globe’s advertising policy (https://fair.org/activism/boston-globe-staples.html). While the Globe editorialized against college papers that had rejected a racially inflammatory ad, the paper itself refused to run an ad criticizing the office supply company Staples, an advertiser based in the Boston area.
After ignoring requests to deal with the issue for several weeks (https://fair.org/activism/boston-globe-iwf.html), Thomas finally responded to a second round of letters with a column that defended the paper. The column suggested that the letters Thomas had received were the result of a “PR campaign” by ForestEthics– the environmental group that had tried to place the ad– maligning that group and writing FAIR out of the story entirely. Thomas made no attempt to get any side of the story other than that of the Globe advertising department. He also attacked columnists Russell Mokhiber and Rob Weissman, who had called attention to the Globe’s double standard (See https://fair.org/activism/globe-staples-update.html ).
But in a column announcing that he was stepping down as ombudsman to become a feature writer at the Globe, Jack Thomas acknowledged that the way he handled the Staples ad issue was a mistake. In the August 13 column, he wrote:
“In recent months, as a lame duck, I became less antagonistic and less effective. For example, in writing about an environmental group, Forest Ethics, whose ad the Globe refused to publish, I was not assertive in questioning the advertising department. Readers condemned me, and justly so.”
Such self-criticism is not very common in journalism, though the column still falls short of the full apology that Thomas owed to Globe readers, and especially to Mokhiber and Weissman, two journalists who got the story right. Thomas also fails to answer the larger question: Did the Globe in fact act improperly in its handling of the Staples ad?
Still, the fact that Thomas’ assessment upon stepping down is so different from his public response at the time is an indication that activists’ criticisms may be getting through to major media outlets such as the Boston Globe.
You can see Jack Thomas’ farewell column at:http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/225/oped/Farewell_dear_readers_and_mea_culpa+.shtml
