'Tough Luck, Ladies,' by Katha Pollitt

Originally printed for The Nation's June 25, 2007 issue:

Do you know how much your colleagues earn? I thought not. You probably know more about your co-workers' sex lives than you do about what's in their pay envelopes. Unless they volunteer the information, or leave their pay stubs lying out on their desk, it can take years to learn that someone else is being paid more than you for the same work, if you ever do. My lucky break came decades ago at another magazine when I was inadvertently mailed someone else's check. How often do the postal gods help out a worker like that?

But now, ladies--and all of you whose color, religion or national origin leave you open to prejudice--you can just quit your fussing. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the Supreme Court All-Male Five just ruled that unless you figure out that you are the victim of pay discrimination within 180 days of said discrimination's commencement, it doesn't matter. You're too late. While decades' worth of previous judgments have always held that each discriminatory paycheck constituted a new act for purposes of meeting Title VII's six-month deadline, the Roberts Court holds that only the original one counts. Six months into being screwed over by your boss, pay discrimination is your own damn fault--like so much else in life! Those small initial discrepancies you suspected but accepted because you wanted the job and figured you'd fix them later when you'd made yourself indispensable? Too bad for you, Ms. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, Mr. Gotta Show Them I'm a Team Player. You should have peeked at the white guy's paycheck sooner--much sooner. During her nineteen years at Goodyear, Lilly Ledbetter--the only woman in the group of sixteen at her level--remained unaware that her male colleagues were raking in hefty raises while she received meager ones. By the time she found out, she was close to retirement.

At least the Court recognized, albeit grudgingly, that discrimination does occur. For some time, conservatives have argued that what look like rather large pay differentials--around 75 cents on the male dollar--actually reflect women's "choices." Women earn less because they choose to become daycare workers instead of parking valets and pediatricians instead of heart surgeons; because they "opt out" of the workforce for family reasons; because even if men and women do the same work, the women show up late and go home early. They just don't care about their jobs like the men do. If you ignore everything you know about how the world actually works--something conservative economists are very good at doing--this line can even appear persuasive.

The Independent Women's Forum puts out a regular stream of disinformation to explain away unequal pay. "What they call 'choices' are not unconditioned by discrimination," Heidi Hartmann, head of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, told me on the phone. "If a woman knows a field is unfriendly to women, she is less likely to go into it. If she knows she has less chance of promotion, she may decide she and not her husband should stay home with the baby. Choices are not made in a vacuum."

True enough. But now we can forget all that obfuscatory conservative flimflam. We're back to square one: Discrimination exists--when she retired Ledbetter was making $6,700 a year less than the lowest-paid man at her level. But so what? By not figuring it out right away, by trusting your employer, by following the mossy pathways of company procedure, you've given your consent. You're almost like a woman who gets date-raped because she thought the guy was a friend. I'll bet her chances in the Roberts court wouldn't be so good either.

If we can't rely on the courts--to which George W. Bush continues to propose cave dwellers like Leslie Southwick even as I write these words (he's the one who thinks the N-word is acceptable workplace speech and that bisexual mothers should lose custody)--there's always the law of unintended consequences. A lot more women and minorities may bring suit first, rather than try to work things out politely with their employer, as right-wing antifeminists are always advising women to do if they feel, no doubt mistakenly, that they have a grievance. For those who believe the feminist movement marginalized itself by taking its eye off the dollar, this is the perfect opportunity to get back to economic issues that have cross-class appeal. Economic populists take note: You might want to add eliminating sexist and racist pay discrimination to your definition of the common good. And those who think feminism is no longer necessary might want to consider the connection between Ledbetter and the Court's upholding of the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. Putting women back in their box, anyone?

The good news is that Ledbetter is one decision that can be remedied through legislation, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her stinging dissent. Within days of the decision, Democrats moved to address the ruling with new legislation, with Hillary Clinton in the lead. (Hmmm, isn't she supposed to be the all-corporate big-bucks candidate who should be siding with the Chamber of Commerce on this? Maybe there's something to this sisterhood stuff after all.)

Meanwhile, wish good luck to the women of Wal-Mart in their ongoing legal battle and to the 1,500 women executives of General Electric suing the company for sex discrimination. And to Justice Ginsburg, lonely voice of sanity and justice, Centi anni!

A Brief History of Journalism

The Principle of Relevance: History

"Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. That purpose is to provide people with information they need to understand the world. The first challenge is finding the information that people need to live their lives. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant, and engaging."

The principle of engagement and relevance means exactly that – journalists are asked to present the information they find in interesting and meaningful ways, but without being overly sensational.

There are two sides to this principle, however, and they must be balanced for the journalist to be successful. Engagement is what makes the story intriguing and readable. Relevance is what makes it worth the reader’s time, what makes the story important to the reader’s life. The industry has struggled to find that balance throughout its history, but studies, such as those conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, have shown that in the long term journalism that tends more toward the engagement (or entertaining) side without adequately addressing the relevant side will not be as successful.

During the Penny Press era, news consisted of little political debate and much human interest appeal. Stories focused on sex, violence, and features instead; they were sensational and engaging, but not always especially relevant to their readers’ lives. In 1851, however, the New York Times was founded, declaring its commitment to objective and reasoned journalism, and the swing toward the relevant side began. To aid that shift, the inverted pyramid style was developed in response to the strategic destruction of telegraph wires during the Civil War. Journalists had to transmit the most important, or relevant, information first in case the transmission was cut short. This style was then carried through into the post-war era.

During the period known as the era of Yellow Journalism, newspapers became for-profit ventures. Sensationalism still had a hold on the industry, with a focus on high interest stories and attention-getting headlines rather than useful information for the public. Stories focused on the mass appeal of death, dishonor, and/or disaster. In the 1890s, however, relevance made more of a comeback. With immigrants moving into the middle classes, news became more of a commodity. Sensationalism began to give way to the sobriety and objectivity of the New York Times. Two story models were in use at that time: the story model of the Penny Press and Yellow Journalism eras, and the informational model of objectivity.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, even Joseph Pulitzer’s notoriously Yellow New York Sun had become more literary. By the 1920s, though, objective style was beginning to be questioned. Objectivity presented only the facts, the relevance parts, without any commentary or color, and the world was becoming too complex for information alone. Parallel to the rise of radio, interpretive journalism was born to help explain what was happening.

From the Depression through the Cold War, tabloids continued to give way to seriousness in reporting. This trend continued into the 1960s and ‘70s, as the Great Newspaper Wars whittled down the number of papers in each town. The surviving papers were not the tabloids, but the serious papers, and the same was true of television news programs. The news products that people chose in the long term were those that provided them with the more relevant information, rather than entertainment.

During the USA Today era of the 1980s, news was increasingly being produced by companies outside of journalism, and a resurgence of primarily engaging news began. Radio and television had long since replaced newspapers as the dominant news sources, and papers began to add more feature-centered sections. When the industry addressed its readership losses, rather than addressing this substitution of entertainment for content, it focused on cosmetic solutions such as layout, design, and color, thus continuing the decline of relevance in newspapers. To illustrate, a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news magazines such as Newsweek and Time were seven times more likely in 1997 to share a cover subject with an entertainment magazine like People than they had been in 1977. Whereas in 1977 those covers would have contained a political or international figure 31% of the time and a celebrity or entertainment figure only 15% of the time, in 1997 political figures were down to about 10% of cover stories, and celebrities were up to about 20%.

“Infotainment,” or the new version of tabloidism, is still a prevalent format for today’s news, but as a result “avoidance of local news has doubled in the past ten years,” according to data from Insite Research. The public continues to show a preference for relevant information over entertainment-centered coverage. Another study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, conducted between 1998 and 2000, found that stations that produced higher-quality news programs were more likely to have higher ratings, and even rising ratings, than those that produced lower-quality ones. In this Internet era, also, the web has become a vehicle for up to the minute updates on news and information, providing the public with a venue for relevant and engaging information 24 hours a day, allowing for public and civic journalism to get a foothold among the many other choices the public has to choose from.

Over the decades, the journalism industry has swung like a pendulum between a focus on the entertaining and on the significant sides of the news. Whenever it reaches one extreme or the other, the pendulum begins its swing in the opposite direction. Always, the optimal position for the industry and for the public is somewhere in the middle.