gchidi

Here's one: David, you have a masthead with 62 names on it. After a quick, crude and perhaps imprecise examination, I find one -- the recent-intern Aisha Harris, is African-American. One -- Blaine Sheldon -- is Latino.

We just re-elected an African-American president, and Slate has published several pieces about the increasing power of the multi-racial Democratic coalition. And yet ... Slate's staff is demographically less diverse than the Republican Party.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like The Root. But it's the publishing equivalent of telling people at a party about how many black friends you have. How do you expect to get stories that accurately reflect the society you cover when you have a staff that has no cultural connection to the South, to communities of color or to people who don't live outside of New York and Washington D.C?

I agree with camtns. This isn't a reply. I can almost see him put on his serious face for the 15 seconds it took to type out these three short sentences, before returning to the universal praise of Slate's fans.

Look, I've been a journalist for 20 years and a reader of Slate for at least 12 of those. It's my favorite site, hands down. I miss Christopher Hitchens fiercely, and I admire Saletan deeply.

But I look at that masthead, and I struggle to overcome a sense of how deeply unfair their enterprise seems, how arbitrary. It's hard to argue that they're making the best use of available talent when it looks like that.

Do regular Egyptians care about how Egyptian culture is perceived in Western media? Do they believe we focus too much -- or too little -- on Islamic extremism, or misogyny, or political unrest?