STEVE SAILER: NYT: “When ‘Long-Form’ Is Bad Form”.

On January 25, 2002, J. Clifford Baxter, the former chief strategy officer of Enron, shot himself in the head. This was widely viewed not as condemning but as confirming the journalists, such as Bethany McLean of Fortune, who had broken the Enron story.

Today, if the Enron executive had been wearing women’s clothes when he killed himself, there would be a full-fledged agonizing reappraisal of the journalistic inquiry into Enron. How dare anyone report that Enron was run by “conmen” when the appropriate noun is “conwomen!” Why is the press worrying about details of accounting when proper pronoun usage is all that really matters?