Opinion: Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times’ snark-in-chief, gets a public scolding

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Some writers aspire to snarky. Maureen Dowd is already there and not looking back.

At least until this week.

Reading Dowd is reminiscent of watching a Don Rickles’ nightclub act, only with a lot more hair. You never know what outrageous thing is going to come out next.

That, frankly, is why so many people read her regularly. She sounds spontaneous, producing the unexpected reading experience, not preformed and formulaic like so much modern newspaper writing.

She’s a buzzmaker at a publication that has, until her, always wanted the institution to be the star, not the individual.

Which is why over the years so many gifted writers like Gay Talese, David Halberstam, David Broder, E.J. Dionne, Hedrick Smith and others left the well-paid but cloisterly confines of that paper.

Dowd showed early snarkiness and a keen eye for the scalpeled phrase while writing about George H.W. Bush. The borderline inappropriateness of some of her writing in the news columns and the fear of losing her....

...saw her ‘promoted’ to the opinion pages in 1995, where Dowd earned a commentary Pulitzer in 1999.

Dowd gets away with writing things in the old grey lady and on its spiffy website that have made colleagues cringe and grumble jealously for years. As her boss, Andrew Rosenthal, defensively points out, she’s not paid to be objective. And she earns that pay.

This past primary election season some people thought she went overboard in her acerbic assaults on the New York Times’ hometown Sen. Hillary Clinton.

‘I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,’ Dowd says.

The newspaper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, initiated a review of Times coverage in general and Dowd specifically. He found some examples of gender bias -- an autumn examination of Clinton’s alleged ‘cackle’ that was unmatched by any analysis of Rudy Giuliani’s sudden gales of inappropriate laughter when pressed.

Hoyt sought independent analyses of the coverage, which he reported in a column Sunday, found some offenses (such as more frequent references to Clinton’s clothing and none to the male candidates’), but a general tone on the careful side of the gender bias issue. (By the way, in his website photo Hoyt prefers a striped shirt and goes coatless.)

However, Hoyt wrote: ‘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.’

Dowd responded that no one ever complained when she wrote that way about male candidates. Hoyt noted that Dowd had, in fact, also written searingly about Barack Obama, criticizing his ‘feminine’ management style and often calling him ‘Obambi.’

Hoyt, however, critiqued the ‘relentless nature’ of Dowd’s ‘gender-laden assault on Clinton,’ involving 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1.

Hoyt’s catalogue said Dowd wrote that ‘Clinton’s ‘message is unapologetically emasculating,’ and that she ‘needed to prove her masculinity’ but in the end ‘had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.’ In one column Dowd wrote, ‘She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.’’

Hoyt concluded in his column: ‘Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.’

What impact, if any, such a sudden scolding in public might have on Dowd and her writing will emerge in time. Colorful writers whose words wound often have surprisingly fragile egos themselves.

It would be a shame, however, at a time when American newspapers are going through their own fragile era centered on feeble finances and declining readership, if one of the brighter if occasionally offensive voices was somehow muted. The number of newspaper writers that readers make a mental appointment with is, alas, miniscule.

If anything, dowdy American print journalism needs even more writers who arrange words in ways that customers actually want to read. Which, admittedly, is much easier to say when you haven’t been her target -- yet.

--Andrew Malcolm