It was mail call for the Public Editor in this week’s Sunday New York Times, and newly minted Arthur Brisbane began his column with this note:

The Times hears a multitude of concerns from readers each week,  far more than can ever be dealt with in this space. To give a public airing to a few more of the issues raised, I will periodically — starting today — publish comments from readers, along with brief responses from the Times staff and, when appropriate, myself.

Here’s the first letter out of the mailbag:

Women rarely die, it seems. Check the Aug. 27 and Aug. 28 obituary pages of The Times.

Eight men were noted in obituaries and only one woman. I think you will find this consistent over any period you look at. Take any recent period, whether it is a week, a month or a year, and the numbers are consistent.

MIKE SPONDER

Manhattan

Brisbane gave the first word to Times obituaries editor Bill McDonald, who started off by asserting that any Times obit “has to be news to a national and international readership.” McDonald then adds this:

The other thing to note is that obit pages are by definition backward- looking. Most of the people we write about now were born in the 1920s and ’30s. They largely came of age around midcentury and began making their marks in the postwar years. It was an era largely run by men, and white men at that. So if you apply our rigid selectivity — a focus on movers and shakers — to that era, it should come as no surprise that an overwhelming percentage of the people we write about were white and male.

Brisbane’s response? “Mr. McDonald shows how social mores of the past dictate the demography of the obituary page today.”

Nonsense.

If Brisbane had done his homework, he’d have acknowledged that McDonald’s defense of the manbituary page (this Sunday’s Times scorecard: three men, zero women) was challenged by the diligent Times watchdog website NYTPicker last month.

Headline:

All The Men That’s Fit To Print: So Far This August, NYT Has Published 76 Obituaries — 70 Men And 6 Women.

Bigger picture:

And for the year 2010 to date, the NYT has chronicled the deaths of 606 men, and only 92 women.

As for McDonald’s claim that the disparity is generational and things are getting better, here’s NYTPicker’s response:

We were so struck by the seeming ludicrousness of that statement that we devoted several hours to a painstaking count of NYT obituaries in 1990. That’s two decades ago, long enough in the past that the supposed disparity noted by McDonald should have been even more pronounced. Right?

Wrong. What we found was a disparity between men and women nearly identical to the extraordinary current gender split.

Of 691 NYT obituaries published in 1990, only 92 of them were of women — almost exactly replicating the 2010 numbers.

Times editors have consistently blown off NYTPicker by saying that the paper doesn’t respond to claims by anonymous bloggers (the site has a contributing staff of six, but no bylines).

It’s entirely predictable that NYTPicker would be dead to Times editors dodging responsibility.

But that shouldn’t extend to the Public Editor.