Consider these snippets from a fresh New Yorker profile on Jill Abramson, who’s been in the job as head honcho at The New York Times since early September, taking over from Bill Keller:
- Four decades ago, women and minorities were second-class citizens at the paper. According to Nan Robertson’s book The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times, only 40 of the Times’ 425 reporters were women, and this included not a single national correspondent. There were no female photographers, columnists, or editorial-board members.
And then digest these numbers, quoted in a recent report on women in the media by Sally Jackson in The Australian:
- Last year, women made up just 4.9% of all directors of media companies, which was down from 8.3% in 2004, according to a survey by the federal government’s Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency.
- Women held 14% of executive management positions in the media industry, which was down from 15.4% in 2004, although still better than the national average of 10.2% across all sectors.
- A survey of 15 boards of commercial media companies and public broadcasters backs this result, finding 13 of them have between zero and two female directors.
- The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media, put out in December by the International Women’s Media Federation, surveyed 522 companies covering 170,000 employees in 59 nations and found women held just 27% of the top management jobs and news-gathering positions. In the Asia and Oceania region, which includes Australia, women were barely 13% of those in senior management.
It’s not going to be smooth sailing for Abramson. Despite great results from the paywall system so far, the latest report around The New York Times involves slashing 100 newsroom jobs (about 8% of the total) by the end of the year due to a downturn in advertising revenue.
But for now, just over a month in, let’s take a moment to at least admire the view — a female name below the masthead as executive editor of The New York Times.
Well hopefully she’ll do a better job than that establishment hack Keller.
And look on the other column! Who is CEO of the company?
I am not sure of David Murray’s scientific qualifications, probably about the same as Ross Garnaut’s, but your correspondent Brian Keane has by his comments demonstrated his own scientific illiteracy. Whatever the Greenland icecap is doing now it is vastly more extensive than in the Medieval Warming Period (900 to 1300 BC) when a thriving agricultural industry existed in the country. David Murray is absolutely right, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it is essential for all life and has virtually nothing to do with climate change. The principal driver for climate change is cyclical variation in the energy emitted by the Sun. The oceans not the atmosphere are the great repositories of carbon dioxide. As increased solar energy warms the planet the capacity of the oceans to hold carbon dioxide in solution is diminished and degassing into the atmosphere occurs. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide is a result, not a cause of global warming . Ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland icecaps covering more than 160,000 years of climate history show that peak atmospheric CO2 levels post date peak temperatures by 800 to 1000 years. In the coldest period of Earth’s history, about 760 million years ago when the the entire planet was covered by ice, atmospheric CO2 levels were many times higher than at present.
There is no scientific consensus on climate change. There are many thousands of impeccably qualified scientists worldwide who maintain that climate change is essentially natural. There are also many who maintain that it is essentially anthropogenic. However a large proportion of the latter are directly or indirectly funded by governments and are waxing fat on the global warming gravy train.