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The Media and Women


    -Anti-feminist writer Christina Hoff Sommers (author of the notorious "Who Stole Feminism") launched a new attack on feminists in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal , entitled "The Flight From Science and Reason" (7/10/95). Sommers holds feminists (and other leftists) responsible for promoting "irrationalism," a "flight from reason," and the rejection of "objective scholarship," because one or two academic feminists consider scientific objectivity to be a patriarchal fallacy. Yet somehow Sommers misses the nation's single greatest threat to "reason" and "objective scholarship" Ñ the religious right. Highly-organized grassroots groups want to put Creationism in the schools on equal footing with evolution; supporters even include GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes, who has strong support from the religious right and is being widely touted as a Vice Presidential candidate. Nor does Sommers note the contributions to "rationalism" of Ronald Reagan, who believed that "trees pollute" and relied on the advice of astrologers.

    -If white women are slighted by the news media, women of color have it exponentially worse. We have been particularly dismayed by the lack of coverage of Myrlie Evers-Williams, who was the first woman ever elected chair of the NAACP, despite the long history of leadership by African-American women in the civil rights struggle. This week, the NAACP held its first convention under Ms. Evers-Williams' leadership, and we would have expected substantive articles about her ascension to the leadership of the male-dominated movement and her vision for the troubled organization, which was run into the ground by the men who deliberately kept women out of positions of leadership. We have been particularly appalled by the coverage in the New York Times, which ran two AP photos of her but not a single quote. Apparently, Times editors have decided that black women in power, like children, are to be seen but not heard.

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