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    The Last Thing Newspapers Need ...

    Photograph of Maureen Dowd by Alex Wong/Getty Images.I don't know how this escaped my notice, unless maybe it's because I never read anything newspaper ombudsmen (or ombudswomen) have to say, and not only because they are so boring. (With the business model failing, the industry in apparent freefall, staffs shrinking so fast the survivors have to scurry just to keep up on government disinformation, and left and right uniting against the lazy, dull-witted, and otherwise very bad people without whom we would know nothing—nothing!—that is going on in the world, aren't in-house scolds superfluous?)  Anyway, as the rest of you doubtless saw, the public editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, called out Maureen Dowd for her supposedly sexist Hillary coverage. Maybe I wouldn't feel this way if I hadn't agreed with every last nasty word of it, but since when does the public editor tell columnists what to think? "Dowd's columns about Clinton's campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism,'' he wrote. OK, I never read Clark Hoyt, but he never reads Maureen Dowd? (And since she is a woman, does that make Hoyt's opinion of her opinion sexist, too?)
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