A George Will column about sexual assault, which received lots of criticism and caused one newspaper to drop the longtime syndicated conservative columnist, had all male editors, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple reported on Friday.
“On that day, there were three males, if that is important to you,” Alan Shearer, CEO and editorial director of Washington Post News Media Services, which is the company that syndicates Will’s columns, told Wemple in response to a question about whether any women had reviewed the column.
Shearer said Thursday that the editorial team had discussed the piece’s content at length with Will before it was published, Wemple reported.
“Let’s say we had a lot of discussion about it with George and he knew what he wanted to say,” he said then. “These days a lot of people are going to read into something what they want to read into it.”
Will’s column was dropped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of his 476 syndicated clients, after the controversy.