THE POST COMES FULL CIRCLE: Back in 2001, when Katharine Graham passed away (in an essay hilariously titled “Kay, Why?”) Mark Steyn wrote:
Obituary-wise, Kay was the hostess with the mostes’, but nevertheless an inevitable hierarchy quickly set in, with points for how recently you’d last seen her (“At lunch last month …”) and a bonus for whether she’d come to you (Barbara Walters scored big here, entertaining Kay at her pad in the Hamptons). Many anecdotes were told and re-told and re-re-told: 30 years ago, dining at the home of columnist Joe Alsop, Mrs. Graham discreetly rebelled by refusing to join the ladies while the men discussed world affairs over brandy and cigars. As she modestly explained to Larry King on CNN, this brave stand singlehandedly brought about an end to the custom throughout the town. Perhaps Washington was singularly backward in this respect. By this stage, in London, New York, Winnipeg, all the great cities of the world, the ladies were no longer obliged to retire after dinner, a social revolution accomplished amazingly enough without the intervention of Mrs. Graham.
Which may help to explain this item yesterday at the Tatler:
Having achieved parity in news columns and as columnists, The Washington Post’s relatively new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of the late Katharine Graham, has brought the institution full circle with a new blog with the air-sickness-inducing name of She The People, — “The World As Women See It.” And the birth of She The People –get this — has inspired the newspaper’s ombudsman, one Patrick B. Pexton to inquire, of all the questions in all the world, Is The Post Innovating Too Fast?
Earth to Mr. Pexton: What The Post is doing is not innovating too fast; it is, rather, bicycling backwards too slowly, uphill. This ludicrous new blog is the opposite of progress.
Now the gals are back in the corral where they were lassoed from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Thanks a lot.
At least here at PJM we’re all considered bloggers, contributors and columnists, irrespective of our gender. Isn’t that what the so-called women’s movement was all about?
In theory it was, but separate-but-equal has been an obsession for much of the increasingly paradoxically-named “progressivism” for much of the past decade.
RELATED: At Big Journalism, John Doyle writes, “WaPo Publisher’s New Year’s Email Reveals Haughty Old Media Isn’t Learning Its Lesson.”
But the brandy and cigar parties are fabulous. Pay no attention to the icebergs ahead.