A Letter to Congratulate Matea Gold on Her Promotion to Washington Post Managing Editor
But Will She "Do the Right Thing"?
Dear Ms. Gold,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter in its entirety and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
As a proud lifelong reader of The Washington Post, I’d like to extend my heartiest congratulations on your recent promotion to managing editor.
I respect your considerable experience and appreciate your accomplishments as the Post’s National Editor, including the investigative series on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the two recent Pulitzer Prizes awarded to your team.
I also applaud the comments attributed to you in the Post’s article announcing your promotion, including your nods to lofty concepts like “elevating the Post’s journalism” and “approaching every story with curiosity, with rigor, with judgment”. All worthy goals.
However, I must take some exception to some of the other things you said:
You want to “pull back the curtain on our work” and show “the integrity and care that goes into the stories we tell, to reinforce readers’ trust”
“We’re in a moment in the media where we really need to reckon with the distrust that’s out there.”
I politely ask that you take the time to understand that in one area the Post often fails to exercise “integrity and care” and that that this failure feeds much of the “distrust that’s out there”.
If you take a hard, honest look at the record, you’ll discover that the Post has a provable, decades long history of feminist-inspired anti-male gender bias:
In 2018, the Post published an undeniably gender-biased article, Why can't we hate men?, a #MeToo inspired rant written by the director of women’s studies at Northeastern University, who had the gall to openly and shamelessly express a Nazi-like hatred for men in a major American newspaper.
How in the world could The Washington Post be so completely oblivious to the anti-male sexism of this article, printing something that by its very title can only be considered hate speech?Six months later the paper published Amber Heard’s shameful op-ed that ultimately cost Heard millions and proved beyond doubt that men can be victims of violent women.
It also embarrassed the Post, ending with articles like this appearing online:
“A publication with any semblance of ethics might have asked Depp for comment about the sexual violence claims before running with the allegations — then subsequently spiked the op-ed or sicced its reporters on the case for more fact-finding. But not The Washington Post.
“That paper, which loves to blather in its self-important tone about how “democracy dies in darkness,” didn’t bother to turn the lights in the direction of Heard’s claims. Instead, it gave her a free pass to air her dirty laundry against her ex-husband and consequently enabled her to paint herself both as a victim and a crusader of the Me Too era.”The prior two articles were the capstone to the Post’s long, provable history of anti-male gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence. This imbalance was documented in a February 2023 report by The Coalition to End Domestic Violence.
Also in 2018 the Post appointed Monica Hesse as the Post’s “gender columnist”. But if there was a need for a gender columnist, why didn’t the paper also hire a “race columnist”? As I asked in an article Why Doesn’t the Washington Post Have a Race Columnist?,
“If women have, like African Americans, indeed been victims of real discrimination, then why hasn’t the Post designated a race columnist as well? Hasn’t racial discrimination always been a more significant problem than what has been called “sex discrimination”?
“Let me be blunt: In American history, how many women have been lynched or otherwise been the victims, because of their gender, of what can only be described as a century-long campaign of terror?”1
In response to the Post’s long provable history of gender bias against men, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this bias, this prejudice.
These letters document gender bias against men in the Post’s coverage of: domestic violence, the “gender pay gap”, sexual assault and #MeToo, race vs. gender, and general misandrist reporting. They also try to open minds to something called the “gender empathy gap, … the striking and disturbing indifference of our culture to the suffering of men and boys in stark contrast to our evident concern for the suffering of girls and women.”2
As the late men’s rights activist Marc Angelucci once wrote,
“We simply don’t care much about men. In fact, the devaluation of male lives is so entrenched in our psyches and endemic to our system that we refuse to see it — even when it’s smack in our face.”3
Ms. Gold, with all due respect, please use your position at the Washington Post to rectify the paper’s gender bias against men.
Please allow me to close this letter as I ended one sent to a Post columnist in December 2021,
“Do it in memory of the men of the Titanic, who willingly gave up their lives so women and children could live; do it for the more than one million American men who have died in wars protecting us at home; do it for the 4,140 male 9/11 first responders (85% of total) who died that day; do it for the thousands of nameless men who are injured or killed on the job every year to support their families — 94% of workplace fatalities. Finally, do it for the tens of millions of men who, despite being assailed by feminist hate for decades, continue to support, care for, and love women.”
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
As I noted in the article, “To those who might reply that women have suffered from a centuries-long campaign of domestic violence terror perpetrated by male oppressors, the truth is that women perpetuate at least 50% of domestic violence.”
From a video clip of anti-feminist Janice Fiamengo talking about the empathy gap, starting at about 6:25
Gender Bias Toward Males Frequently Gets Overlooked Daily Bruin Online, 2/20/01