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March 07, 2005
Setting Up Female CEOs
The two front-page stories in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times on March 6 featured two female executives of major companies, Meg Whitman of eBay and Marjorie Scardino of Pearson. Both articles damned the two women and their companies with faint praise; in my opinion because the Times is setting them up in case they fail, as Carly Fiorina did, so the newspaper can claim a gotcha.
Why else would The Times Sunday Business section run two major front-page stories about high-powered, successful women who are CEOs just a little over three weeks after the announcement that the HP board ousted Fiorina? The story about Meg Whitman, written by Gary Rivlin, had a headline that read “EBay’s Joy Ride: Going Once…” and a sub-head that read “A Seller’s Rebellion May Be the Least of Its Worries.” The story went into detail about eBay’s commission rate for sellers going up from 5.25 percent to 8 percent and about how sellers were rebelling (too much detail for me—a congenital disease of the Times that is beginning to really bore me, and I suspect bore many readers in this new age of one-minute TV news packages, USA Today, and brief, three sentence blog entries).
Wall Street Journal front-page stories tend not to be as long as the Times’s stories and the WSJ’s are much easier to read because they are humanized; they are carefully crafted stories about people. And in reading about these people, readers gain insight into larger issues, almost like in a short novel. But I digress. The WSJ had stories about Fiorina’s problems before she was ousted by the board—more stories leading up to the firing than the Times did, so I’m guessing that some of the Times media writers felt scooped, vowed not to let it happen again, and started looking for female CEOs that might possibly be in trouble.
If that is true, and whether it is true or not, it smells like it’s true, and that’s the same thing as being true because perception becomes reality readers’ minds, then the Times writers were stretching with Whitman and Scardino, especially with Whitman. If I were either one of these CEOs, I’d be pissed that the Times ran stories about a possible leveling off or a slowdown of my company’s business so soon after Fiorina was ousted. And if I were a woman, I’d feel like Whitman and Scardino were being set up for failure.
As a male reader I see a competitive battle between Gary Rivlin, who wrote the Whitman story and who was the lead writer on the February 10 and 14 stories about HP firing Fiorina, and Geraldine Fabrikant, who wrote the story about Scadino and who has been covering the business reality series (stranger than fiction) at Cablevision. (The Cablevision story as reality TV is not my idea. The Sunday Business section had a refreshingly short and insightful column by Andrew Ross Sorkin titled “Family Feud, Showing Only on Cablevision.”) I’m guessing that Fabrikant felt cut out of perhaps the biggest media story of the year so far in Fiorina’s ouster and wanted to set up another big corporate firing so she could have the story—never mind that it was about a woman, this is big by-lines in The New York Times we’re talking about here.
So, don’t bother reading the stories about Whitman and Scardino because they are dull, speculative, and unnecessarily muckraking pieces. But do read Sorkin’s column about Cablevision and John Motavalli’s feisty piece titled “Fox vs. CNBC? Now That Would Be a Grudge Match.” Both pieces are relatively short and fun reading. After I read Motavalli’s story, I vowed to watch “Topic A With Tina Brown,” a show I kind of like, because it probably won’t be around long.
If CNBC cancels Tina, then PBS ought to pick her up because I think she’d do a much better job of interviewing people and be more successful than the self-absorbed, sycophantic Charlie Rose. Also, she'd be a success that the Times would have to write positively about instead of apparently setting up two female CEOs.
Posted by Charles Warner at 12:29 AM
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