The Story My Male Editors Kept Killing

While women have made strides in media and publishing, it seems we’re still often subject to the whims of men

Photo: Ralf Geithe/Getty Images

A year and a half ago, in the wake of the tragic Las Vegas shootings, I was struck by a single idea: If mental illness is such a prominent culprit in the phenomenon of mass shootings — as so many politicians and media pundits claim it to be — where are all the female mass shooters? After all, we have mental illness too, in arguably much greater numbers than men (at least according to the best available data). And yet, almost all mass shootings to date have been committed by cis men (most of them white).

In October 2017, I shared my idea with AlterNet. The female editor I emailed enthusiastically accepted my pitch and, after a couple of weeks of rigorous research and interviewing, I filed it. Her initial remark was that it looked good to her as is, and she would be passing it on to her superior for a final review. Then something strange happened. She came back with a slew of criticisms, copy and pasted from her supervising editor, and the outlet’s publisher: a man.

After perusing his comments, the first thing I understood was that he hadn’t read my piece thoroughly. This became clear when he scolded me for blaming gun violence on mental illness. He then asked me to insert commentary and quotes that were already in the piece. But the most distressing part was when he began making grand — and factually incorrect — assertions. For instance, he said that women didn’t commit mass shootings because “women don’t own guns.” Additionally, he wrote that men often begin to become violent with women when they try to leave the relationship. Though women on the whole own less guns than men, 22% of adult women still do — far from none. And while men with a history of domestic abuse are more likely to try to murder their female partners when they attempt to leave or succeed at leaving the relationship, the first instances of violence often begin far earlier than that.

I found this editor’s comments jarring, even offensive. Nonetheless, I wanted to try to maintain a working relationship with the publication, so while I gently pushed back on some of his false claims, I assured the female editor I would try to address some of his concerns as best I could. I took a few days to revise it and then re-filed. But my piece was killed because the male publisher believed that “…making the claim that gender is a stronger [predictor] of violence than mental illness counters our editorial priority at the moment.”

Many female editors are still supervised by male editors, whose implicit biases can impact a piece in a way that affects its original intention.

In the end, I was informed I was expected to label toxic masculinity a “form of mental illness.” When I refused — because I found it unethical to call something a mental illness that is not formally classified as such — my piece was squashed.

I shopped the killed piece around for a few days until it piqued the interest of a female editor at Politico, who accepted it as it was on spec. However, my piece was again passed on to a male editor to review — who asked me to change the premise of the piece to shift more of the blame for mass shootings on mental illness rather than toxic masculinity. He based his request on his own misinterpretation of some data in my article. When I gently corrected him, clarifying the data and sending him a half-dozen links to peer-reviewed studies that supported my hypothesis, he went silent nearly two weeks and then sent me a brusque one-line email killing my piece.

This time I balked, emailing the female editor at Politico who initially commissioned the article to let her know I thought male editorial bias was at play. This was the second consecutive time a female editor had accepted the piece only for a male editor to ask me to change its premise and then yank the piece when I wouldn’t. Eventually, I convinced her to overturn her peer’s decision and run my piece anyway. In the weeks leading up to my piece going live on Politico, the AlterNet publisher who had refused to run my article in the first place, Don Hazen, was fired amid an egregious #MeToo scandal. As I watched my Facebook feed blow up with women’s stories regarding Hazen’s sexual and professional misconduct, my suspicion that sexism had played a role in my piece being killed seemed validated.

So was the suspicion that experiences like mine are not uncommon.

“The idea about what is newsworthy and what isn’t has always been filtered through a male lens, and so often through a sexist lens,” says Jennifer Pozner, a journalist and media critic, as well as the author of Reality TV Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV and the forthcoming media literacy graphic novel, Breaking [The] News. “Men’s opinions have never been considered biased, especially white men’s opinions, which are considered the standard neutral opinion in journalism, while those of women and people of color are considered biased, inaccurate or not newsworthy.”

Pozner explains that until recent years, men held virtually all high-ranking editorial positions at most media outlets, serving as the gatekeepers who decided who and what was published. But as the internet gained mainstream popularity, women became prominent contributors to the blogosphere, where they accrued high readerships. Magazines and online publications took note, hiring them on as editors and writers.

But while that may have led to some considerable progress, women and those of other marginalized identities still have a long way to go in achieving true equality in the newsroom and the larger world of publishing.

Consider this: According to the Women’s Media Center’s 2017 report on the status of women in U.S. media, women produced only 37.7% of news reports in 2016 at 20 of the nation’s top news outlets. During this same time, work by women anchors, field reporters, and correspondents in broadcast news actually declined, falling from 32% in 2015 to 25.2% in 2016. Even in regards to reproductive issues, women were found to have authored only 37% of bylined news articles and opinion pieces on the topic in the nation’s 12 most widely circulated newspapers and newswires. Meanwhile, the nonprofit VIDA, which runs an annual count to discern how many women have bylines in major literary outlets in a given year, found that in eight of the 15 major publications they analyzed, women writers didn’t even make up 40% of 2017’s bylines.

This isn’t even considering the issue of compensation, as surveys consistently show that significant gender and racial pay disparities exist at most major national newspapers, even those with union representation. It also does not account for the pattern of harassment and violent threats female reporters often receive when they do publish pieces that tackle misogyny or gender-based violence— as I did when my Politico piece finally went live.