Hard to believe Rachel Maddow would let this pass had it been the Wall Street Journal or Washington Times instead.
Responding to news of the death of former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, Maddow recounted Bradlee's three-decade long tenure at the Post, the sole daily newspaper in his career. The paper's masthead on Tuesday still included Bradlee's name, Maddow pointed out, with the masthead being shown --
Ben Bradlee retired from the Washington Post in 1991 but he did stay active as a vice president at large for the paper. This is today's edition of the Washington Post. You can see Ben Bradlee's name still appears in that role on the newspaper's masthead.
Sure enough, there was Bradlee at the bottom of the graphic shown on the Maddow show, and above Bradlee's name were nine others in the high reaches of the Post hierarchy. Their names are --
Frederick J. Ryan Jr., publisher and chief executive officer
Martin Baron, executive editor
Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, managing editor
Kevin Merida, managing editor
Scott Vance, deputy managing editor
Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor
Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor
Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager
Kevin Gentzel, chief revenue officer
Notice a curious common denominator when it comes to gender? So would Maddow had it been Rupert Murdoch's demise she was faking her way through lamenting, and his name topping an all-male masthead. Hard to believe this ardently vocal feminist would let such a juicy target pass unassailed. But because Bradlee and the Post represent one of the foremost liberal bastions in American media, Maddow bites her tongue.
It occurred to me this wasn't the first time the Post was represented as a male domain with women playing only supporting roles. That's how the paper was depicted in the hugely popular 1976 film "All the President's Men," based on the book of the same title about Watergate by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Dust off your copy (mine is still video) and see for yourself. In the opening credits, all six of the top cast members are men, including Jason Robards as Bradlee, for which he received an Oscar for best supporting actor. Moreover, all nine of the names listed as leading figures in production of the film are male, with Robert Redford in the dual role of playing Woodward and co-producing.
Remember any women from that movie? There were a few, none spending much time on the screen, including Jane Alexander as a conscience-stricken bookkeeper for the Committee to Re-Elect the President and a pre-"Family Ties" Meredith Baxter as Hugh Sloan's wife. You kept waiting for publisher Kay Graham to drop by the newsroom and she never does, though that was essentially her when Nancy Marchand played Lou Grant's boss on television in the late '70s.
True, the movie depicts events of four decades past, when the workplace bore little resemblance to those we see today -- which makes it all the more strange that the Post's masthead in 2014 bears such a striking resemblance to the opening credits of "All the President's Men" from the mid-'70s.
By a fluke of timing, the Post was led by a woman until three weeks before Bradlee's death on Oct. 21. Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of Katharine Graham, was succeeded as publisher by former Politico exec Frederick J. Ryan Jr., severing the Graham family's 80-year control of the paper that was bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013.
Maddow's unwillingness to speak ill of the dead, or the place where Bradlee was so long employed, is understandable. But now that the dust has settled on Bezos' acquisition of the Post, and its last remaining female exec shown the door, how much longer will liberals look at the Post's leadership and then look the other way?
