Though Hillary Clinton "suspended" her campaign more than two weeks ago, it took until yesterday for NYT public editor Clark Hoyt to get around to discussing what the rest of the chattering class has filled the Democratic primary void with for weeks: whether the news media was one big ball of sexism against the New York senator. A June 13 story, from Kit Seelye and Julie Bosman, did discuss the possibility, and while they mentioned the National Organization for Women's Media Hall of Shame including their newspaper's own op-ed-ers Maureen Dowd and William Kristol in the list, they barely touched on the Times' own potentially sexist coverage. So what did Hoyt find? Two words: Maureen Dowd.

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, said that as the highest-ranking woman in the newsroom, she thinks a lot about the potential for sexism in coverage and looks to eliminate gratuitous references to a woman’s appearance or voice without “being so politically correct that you interfere with a reporter’s descriptive voice.”

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

[NYT]