The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas reported in the August 6 paper about worries in the Yearly Kos crowd that the liberal blogosphere is too white and too male. Critiquing that August 6 article, Jack Turner of "Jack & Jill Politics" disagreed with Vargas' assessment that every attendee at YearlyKos was wringing his or her hands about how to "diversify" the attendance.:
"Everyone" didn't agree it was a problem. Jane Hamsher, who was among those of us interviewed, pointedly remarked that she didn't see a large problem. I'd characterize her position as "if you write it, they will come." Her point seemed to be that all will be included in the discussion if they write, write, write. In fact, her interview in a recent Mother Jones article makes her viewpoint quite clear:
MJ: Do you think that women are adequately represented in the blogosphere?
JH: On the whole, it is men who read blogs. But I think it's a meritocracy. My blog has a much higher percentage of women readers than any other major blog, and I've never found this to be a problem for myself. If your writing is good, they will come. You have to put in the time to figure out how the blogosphere works. If you're willing to do that, I don't think being female is any barrier. In fact, I think it's an advantage at this point. The A-list bloggers are hungry and looking to give exposure to women who write really well. Most of those criticisms of male A-list bloggers shutting out women-I really don't have any other word to call it except just "bullshit."
If you write a good product consistently and market it well, you too can be a big-name blogger, regardless of your race or gender. It's amazing how free market competition works! Hmm, sounds almost conservative, doesn't it?
Perhaps, however, it's not so amazing that even left-wing bloggers get the nature of competition, while the mainstream media are stuck in an industrial old media mindset where an affirmative action model is the rubric for approaching a "solution" to the "problem" of underrepresentation of minorities in the (left-wing) blogosphere.
