George Will’s Rape Column Was Edited By A Bunch Of Men

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, best-selling author, television commentator and Newsweek essayist George F. Will addressed a crowd of about 300 in the Wolf Kuhn theatre of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing... Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, best-selling author, television commentator and Newsweek essayist George F. Will addressed a crowd of about 300 in the Wolf Kuhn theatre of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts at Penn State Altoona.Will’s newspaper column appears twice weekly in about 500 newspapers in the United States and Europe. He provides a bi-monthly back-page essay for Newsweek magazine and has written a dozen books on baseball and politics. MORE LESS
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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.

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Notable Replies

  1. The Washington Post editors must have no ability to question themselves. No wonder they are in that handbasket with George Will.

  2. Hiatt’s hacks at work promoting misogyny

  3. “These days a lot of people are going to read into something what they want to read into it.”

    I’m not buying that BS…

    Maybe the writer sucks and you should fire him? Isn’t a writer’s job to communicate?

  4. What surprises me is not what they think but what they say (or don’t). How in this day and age can they be so tone deaf? And how can they imagine that with such a topic the gender of the editors would be irrelevant (“if that is important to you”)?

  5. Earth to the WaPo: Involving women in a story that is deeply about women is expected, down here in the real world.

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