Liberal ‘Russia expert’ calls Moscow media pool a ‘boys' club’. Female journalists beg to differ.
Julia Ioffe, liberal GQ correspondent and popular “expert on Russia” has lamented the absence of women in the ‘boys’ club’ of foreign media in Russia. The response was like a who’s who of foreign women journalists in Moscow.
Soviet-born Ioffe, whose family moved to the US in 1990, is a frequent critic of the Russian government and of US President Donald Trump, as well as being a fighter for LGBT rights and female empowerment.
Her fellow Russia-focused journalists must have been all the more baffled when she tweeted that ‘the Moscow foreign correspondents’ pool has become a boys’ club’, aside from the Washington Post’s Amie Ferris-Rotman and AP’s Natalya Vasilyeva.
I keep thinking about this tweet and how relevant it still is. Aside from @Amie_FR at the @washingtonpost and @NatVasilyevaAP at the @AP, the Moscow foreign correspondents' pool has become a boys' club, especially the all-male @nytimesworld bureau. https://t.co/D2Av6b71Fn
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) May 30, 2019
Members of several outlets’ teams rushed to set the record straight.
As she was making the point that important woman-centered stories happening in Russia go under-reported in the West, Ioffe managed to overlook the existence of female journalists (“live women with vaginas”, as the LA Times’ Sabra Ayres put it, for added clarity) in the Moscow offices of: the BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, LA Times, ZEIT and the New York Times (which she specifically described as “all-male”).
For the love of f'ing god! THERE ARE WOMEN IN MOSCOW covering the shit out of this place. Actual, live women with vaginas. Me, for one, at @latimes Ann Simmons at the WSJ, @torreyhclark at Bloomberg, @sarahrainsford at the BBC. @dimagnay at Sky News. @annanemtsova@MicheleBerdyhttps://t.co/bDMzqM09Uy
— Sabra Ayres (@SabraAyres) May 30, 2019
Julia, the NYT’s Moscow bureau is not all-male: https://t.co/tIR7gFWvqo. Nor has it neglected to cover either women’s issues (https://t.co/gDq4oF4bEo) or the Nastya Rybka affair (https://t.co/gWZ68KfwKI)
— п и г м а н о в и ч (@lincolnpigman) May 30, 2019
Those are just the ones pointed out to her by the commenters – sharing not only Ioffe's profession, but also her liberal ideological lean. With a comet tail of ‘Russia expert’ appearances on mainstream media, bylines in numerous publications and an announced ‘book about Russian women’ coming out in 2020, one could be forgiven for expecting Ioffe to know the field.
She has been called ‘condescending’ before – though it was on Fox News and by a man, so it probably doesn’t count.
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