Atlantic editor's comment on women journalists causes uproar

The editor of The Atlantic magazine faced an outcry on Friday, accused of sexism and racism, after seeming to suggest in an interview that few women are capable of writing long-form journalism.

"It's really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males," Jeffrey Goldberg said in an interview with Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab published on Thursday.

Goldberg, a prominent magazine writer and columnist who became editor of The Atlantic in 2016, made the comments as part of a lengthy interview about the role of women at the magazine.

Goldberg's statements were met with outrage, with commenters online calling him "toxic," "racist," and "sexist."
Goldberg later apologised, saying on Twitter that he was "trying to explain (and obviously failed to explain) that white males dominate cover-story writing because they've had all the opportunities."