America’s Next Great Pundit? A Middle-Aged White Guy From Ohio

by Michael Triplett | 1:22 pm, November 24th, 2009

» 4 comments

huffman_145x100 The Washington Post launched its America’s Next Great Pundit contest to identify new voices and the winner is . . . a middle-aged white guy who is an executive for a liberal non-profit.

The paper announced that Kevin Huffman will get a weekly column for 13 weeks at $200 a pop as the winner of the contest, that included around 4,800 contestant. Huffman is a former corporate lawyer who is a top executive with Teach for America, having spent time teaching first and second grade with the organization after graduating from Swarthmore. He later attended NYU’s law school.

The winner was picked by WaPo readers, who chose Huffman over Zeba Khan, a social media consultant for nonprofits who would have added some actual diversity to the WaPo opinion pages: female and Muslim.

Okay, so it’s only a contest and the winner was picked by the readers. And the winner seemed to meet the main WaPo demographic: liberal, white, male, middle-aged, well-educated, lawyer. Now–glancing in the mirror–that’s not always a bad thing.

But, the WaPo only has three female writers, all white, who regularly appear on the editorial pages–Ann Applebaum, Ruth Marcus and Kathleen Parker. While WaPo does have a number of African American male editorial writers--Colbert King, Eugene Robinson, Courtland Malloy and Jonathan Caperhart–the editorial pages do have a very middle-aged white male feel to them.

Huffman’s columns and blogs were fun to read and he has a great sense of humor, with a keen ability to tie that into the news. But the fact that he was considered America’s Next Great Pundit, by readers and judges, says something about the pool that WaPo dips into when it chooses voices on its editorial pages.

http://glassbead.info Magister

I thought about entering this contest, but the lag time between the actual writing and the contest end meant that you needed to avoid being overly topical. Then I got distracted with other things and by the time I thought about it again, the contest had ended.

Though, unfortunately, I also seem to fit their columnist demographic.
http://the-w.com/ CRZ

I entered, but didn’t make the cut. I really wanted to at least make the final cut just to stick it to Mediaite that I knew what I was saying when I said any idiot can be a pundit, but so much for my clever plans. M 1, CRZ 0. They exists.

I kinda thought I didn’t make it BECAUSE I was a late-30s white male, so now I don’t know *what* to believe. I tried to craft my entry so that it would appear too liberal to conservative readers, and vice versa. I may have fallen prey to their distaste for the word “anniversary” in entries, which they seemed to say was a mark of lazy punditry. More likely, I’m just not really as clever as I think I am. Gasp!
(Here’s my entry, if you’re bored.)

“I” count for this comment (including that one to prevent bad luck): 14
http://glassbead.info Magister

@CRZ: If it makes you feel any better, the bio link for both finalists say they currently live in DC, so maybe cost-cutting factored into the race.
megaread

I entered too. Didn’t make the cut. Actually, the white guy is from DC, but plays up like he’s from Ohio. The muslim girl is from Toledo, Ohio. Go figure they’d pick a local over a real midwesterner.