It was cartoonist Walt Kelly, of course, who came up with that phrase, but it's no less true now, in the ongoing feminist debate over the "opt out" myth, as it ever was back in the days of McCarthy and the Commie scares. E.J. Graff has a piece about the scads of stories on this supposed phenomenon in the current issue of The Columbia Journalism Review--the supposed phenomenon in question being the recent "trend" of scads of working women who are "choosing" to leave behind lucrative careers in order to stay home and raise children. It's a great story; the only problem with it is that it's just not true--or, that is, it's true only for a tiny demographic slice of women (white, highly educated at prestigious institutions, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs). --Oops! Also, there's a tiny problem with the word "choose," since a lot of these women may not have "chosen" to stay home so much as just decided to give up jobs which offered no flexibility whatsoever for a person engaged in the work of child-rearing.
So: why is this the story that refuses to die, especially in the pages of the New York Times? Well, because that tiny demographic slice I mentioned earlier is an influential one, and what it does is by no means inconsequential--but also, I think, because reporters these days are more disconnected from the real world than ever before. I speak as a former reporter for the Washington Post and as someone who worked there for seven years, and as a person who has friends who work at the Times, as well as at Time Magazine, USA Today and any number of other hugely influential publications. When I started in the newspaper business, way back in the mid 1970s, I began at the Atlanta Journal. At the time, the Journal newsroom was home to an oddball assortment of hot young up-and-comers as well as a motley assortment of those coasting toward retirement, a few older gents with a drinking problem, some diehard political junkies and one or two folks who used newspapering to pay the rent while they worked at night on the Great American Novel. We didn't have to invent story ideas that got us out of the building so we could observe Life In The Raw; Life In The Raw came to work every morning. One morning, a colleague of mine stopped in his tracks right beside my desk and passed out from a monstrous hangover he had been treating with hair of the dog. He went down like a felled oak. Stunned, we all just looked at him for a moment as he lay face down on the carpet, and tried to figure out what to do. While we were working on this mental problem Frank gradually stirred, came back to life, struggled to his feet and went on his way. "Thank God," my deskmate whispered. "I thought I was gonna have to do mouth-to-mouth." And then we all went back to work.
Times have changed: if this incident were to happen in any modern newsroom, the offender would be hauled off to rehab, or the Employee Assistance Program, or both, so fast it would make his or her head swim. Nobody comes to work drunk anymore. Newsrooms these days are populated mostly by people who went to elite schools and who have their eye on some illustrious media vantage point--the op-ed page of the New York Times, maybe, or Magazine editor at the Washington Post. They no longer, as in the old days, have a brother-in-law who is a police officer; they're more likely to have a brother-in-law with a Ph.D. who works at a think tank. Reporters at the Washington Post who live in the District, which has lousy schools, are quite likely to have their kid in private schools--and they haul in the kind of money that makes that possible. When I started at the Atlanta Constitution in 1979, my salary was a princely $18,000 a year. By the time I left the Washington Post in 1996, it was more than $70,000, and I was by no means the highest paid reporter on staff. I remember that while I was at the Post, it came to light that Janet Cooke, of made-up-Pulitzer story fame, had been discovered working at a jewelry counter in some state in the Midwest. In retail! people whispered. You'd have thought she'd been discovered turning tricks in Soho. At one point during my tenure there, I got the bright idea that it would do us all good to take stock of our collective socio-economic status, just to a)tell us who we were and b) remind us of our differences from our readers. I wrote a memo to Bob Kaiser, then the assistant managing editor, suggesting an in-house, anonymous survey asking questions like, "Did you go to private school?" and "What kind of work did your father did when you were growing up?" Kaiser's answer was swift and unequivocal: absolutely not. In retrospect, I guess he was probably right. Somebody would have leaked the results and we'd have never heard the end of it. Still, I think I know a lot about how it would have turned out.
So the fact that the "opt-out" story refuses to die is really just an example of journalistic navel-gazing, and that old rule of the newsroom: when in doubt, write about yourself (or people like yourself). These days, the truly adventurous reporter goes abroad (something I never had the guts to do); everybody else stays home, sussing out "trends" from the safety of their newsroom computer screen. Or, if they are like me, they realize they can't maintain even the semblance of a home life and combine it with the kind of work week demanded of a reporter these days, and they decide to stay home. Except I didn't "opt" out. I was pushed.
