A letter to the editor from City Newspaper:
POLITICS: McCain and the "b" word
Nov. 28th, 2007
Scenario Number 1: All polls are showing Barack Obama as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. At a John McCain fundraiser, a McCain supporter raises her hand and asks, "How do we beat the nigger?"
After the laughter dies down, McCain responds: "That's an excellent question."
In 2005, Brown University’s student newspaper ran a piece entitled “Do women have opinions?” What prompted it was a concern about the sparsity of female voices on the paper’s opinion page. Even though the editors had beat the bushes trying to find female writers, male writers continued to dominate the paper’s opinion page by a wide margin.
School newspapers aren’t the only media outlets with a dearth of women’s voices. Earlier this year, the NY Times reported that “Many opinion page editors at major newspapers across the country report that 65 or 75 percent of unsolicited manuscripts, or more, come from men.” At the Washington Post, 80 to 90 percent of op-ed submissions come from men.
There has been much conjecture about why women are so reluctant to voice their opinions in print. Author and activist Catherine Orenstein decided it was because women didn’t know how to write op-eds, so she has been traveling around the country conducting workshops to teach them how.
First grade girls from a Canandaigua school created this video on girls and technology. They won first price for a competition sponsored by Interwrite Learning. It's definitely worth watching.
