This is specious, and thus hardly a fact. Reporters typically spend years and big bucks on educations and experiences that allow them to navigate among sources of all sorts, reporting a vast array of stories. Clinging to the notion that you have to be a certain race or gender or sexual persuasion (thanks for introducing that element here, Kat) in order to report and write about something is like a cranky football player telling a writer, “Yeah, well you never played the game.” Most medical reporters haven’t performed heart transplants but many can do the work necessary to write about them. And so on and so on.

To me, it’s a form of stereotyping and racism/sexism/whateverism to presume that, by having a black and a Hispanic and a woman and a gay, a news operation therefore has captured THE voice of ALL blacks, all Hispanics, all women, all gays. As if one or even a dozen of any group speak for the whole group. I’d rather trust good journalists working hard to understand the issues, rather than a rainbow coalition in which membership was conveyed at birth.

Kat, you’ve got to stop picking on straight white males. They are, after all, swiftly becoming a minority in their own right. And the least protected one out there.

In the Duke case, reporters relied on info from police and the D.A. In the case of WMD’s, reporters relied on reliable sources in the White House and Pentagon. No rape and no WMD’s.

Both cases show a dramatic need for reporters to be much more suspicious of the information they receive from sources, especially when they are people in the highest places, be it criminal justice or national security. It also shows that a little independent investigating can turn up plenty that contradicts the official line.

As for Looloo’s comments, you’re not supposed to feel anything. People feel what they feel. In this case, for me, it’s sorrow over another young life lost to violence. Just as you don’t want people telling you you should feel bad, I think it’s hypocritical to criticize others because they do.

Why is this city so obsessed with the Skins as “native sons” when all of the above applies? Football is a money-making corporation, not some rah-rah hometown alliance. Those players have absolutely no affinity or bond with this fair city…

Couldn’t we have given the poor man one day of sympathy before starting in on him?

What’s more, people from different backgrounds come up with different — often better -story ideas. When your entire staff are white middle class men, you tend to get stories that arise from the world view of white middle class men.

The result is a sort of bland sameness in which anyone different from a white middle class man is written about as an “other.”

The fact is, having people with different backgrounds and perspectives at any publication allows those media to cover more stories. If SI is a bunch of straight, white men, good luck covering a world where most people are not.

I want to read good writers telling great stories in Sports Illustrated. I don’t want the staff hired according to some politically correct, but not quality-journalism-driven agenda. When are you media people going to get over the fact and accept that jobs should go to the MOST qualified person, regardless of skin color or gender? If someone is a good reporter or writer, their skills should transcend their race or sex.