UNIFORMITY AND CONFORMITY. Yesterday, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell detailed the lack of diversity among Post columnists and then concluded, "The point is not to toss excellent white male columnists; the point is to add more and lively voices to The Post." Today, however, Ezra bemoans the lack of excellence and accountability among those throngs of white male columnists, and how op-ed pages are the one part of newspapers where no one ever loses their job for getting major matters of national importance completely wrong.
It's hard to imagine these two issues -- lack of diversity and lack of accountability -- are entirely unrelated. Indeed, it seems like this might be a good time for editors to really think about what defines excellence, and what their obligations are to their readers, and whether the similarity of the opinion writers' backgrounds is so great that it might contribute to a dangerous uniformity in the opinions they express, and so increase the risk that the paper will present readers with a single, uncontested, and ultimately mistaken view on critical issues. It's important not to confuse personal characteristics that inform perspectives with topic areas worth reporting on (for example, hiring more Latino columnists and adding more coverage of the region's immigrant communities are two totally separate tasks), or even with particular viewpoints, but, that said, it's also likely that a greater diversity in backgrounds and lived experiences among those granted columns might lead to a fuller and more rigorous examination of the issues before the country and so better serve readers' interests.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
