Pig Herder

We're familiar with the Estrich rant that there are too few women in the high echelons of opinion journalism, and that this is the result of discrimination. What is wanted, we are always reminded, is a regime that is free of the reactionary features of a men's club, the results of which are so much in evidence at major newspapers and magazines - well, really, everywhere you choose to look in society. Such a regime, the implication goes, would allow all the talented women writers to rise to their natural place and number, an outcome that is prevented by ubiquitous male discrimination. You could even say that such a regime would resemble the blogosphere, where all it takes is a computer (well, a PC anyway!) and a free registration with any number of blog hosts, and something worthwhile to say - just these barriers surmounted and there is nothing stopping the most underappreciated writer from reaching their natural audience.

But that too would be wrong. Because now we learn that there is a lack of "diversity" in the top 100 blogs; and that this lack must be corrected, presumably by the righteous forces that are battling discrimination in journalism generally. Even worse than the predominance of white males in the top 100 blogs, this development threatens the minority inclusion that has been so gallantly (and successfully) fought for to date.

If you think this sounds like having your cake and eating it too - in other words that a medium where there could be no gatekeepers would be the ideal remedy for eliminating white male discrimination of talented female writers, but that said medium has in fact produced a wholly unsatisfactory outcome; and that this is due to just the thing the medium is widely seen as making impossible - then you will want to read a very fine column by the always astute Heather Mac Donald, in today's NRO.

These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members. The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be roportionally represented in the challenged field.

So isn't the completely open and egalitarian web the perfect means of obviating the hidden barriers to entry and creating the shining city on the hill, where writers rise to the heights their talents warrant?

If the quota mongers really believed these claims, they should welcome the web enthusiastically, since it is a world without gatekeepers and with no other significant barriers to entry. Imagine someone coping with real discrimination — a black tanner, say, in 1897 Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market. Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product based solely on its quality — a universe where race is so irrelevant that no one will even know his own — and he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

For allegedly discriminated-against minority and female writers, the web is just that heaven. They can get their product directly out to readers with no bigoted editors to turn them away.... In case reader prejudice is a problem, web writers can conceal their identity and simply present their ideas. And there is no established hierarchy to placate on the way to the top. As Levy [Newsweek's technology columnist, Steven Levy] wrote: "Out of the inchoate chatter of the Web, the sharpest voices simply emerge."

So here is the perfect medium for liberating all those qualified minority and female "voices" that are being silenced by the mainstream media's gatekeepers. According to diversity theory, they should be far more heavily represented in the blogosphere's upper reaches than they are in traditional journalism. In fact, the opposite is the case, as the Washington Post's Keith Jenkins pointed out. The elite blogging world is far less "diverse" than the mainstream media.

Why? Could it be that the premise of the "diversity" crusade is wrong — that there are not in fact hordes of unknown, competitively talented non-white-male journalists held back by prejudice? Don't even entertain the thought. Steven Levy certainly doesn't. After fleetingly rehearsing his own previous analysis of the web as a pure meritocracy, he dismisses the argument without explanation and trots out the hoariest trope in the "diversity" lexicon: "the old boy's club." Why is the top rung of the blogosphere so homogeneous? Levy asks. He answers: "It appears that some clubbiness is involved" — that is, that white male bloggers only link to other white male bloggers. (Susan Estrich likewise accused the Los Angeles Times's Michael Kinsley of favoring writers in his old boy's club.)

This is simply preposterous. As any blog reader knows, links are the foundation of the medium's effectiveness. For a blogger to purposely omit linking to other blogs or on-line opinion because the author of a given piece happens to be a woman (or a minority) - when the link bolsters the blogger's argument - is irrational. If it were attempted by one or a few or a dozen they would find themselves outside the top 100 so fast they wouldn't know whether they'd been shot, snake-bit or powder-burned.

Here's a different explanation for why the blogosphere is dominated by white males: because they're the ones producing the best product. Sorry, ladies, but there aren't as many of us engaged in aggressive, competitive opinionizing and nonstop consumption of politics as our male tormentors....

As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moment, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog....

Here's Steven Levy's minimum prescription for joining the ranks of Alpha blogging: "You have to post frequently . . . link prodigiously," and, like one technology guru he describes, spend two hours daily writing your weblog and "three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs." If you have difficulty reading, you're probably not going to find that regime attractive. Obviously, many individual blacks and Hispanics possess more than the necessary skills to power their way into the top 100 blogs. But diversity zealots don't look at individuals, they look at aggregates. And in the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics lag so far behind whites in literacy skills that it is absurd to blame racial exclusion for the absence of racial proportionality on the web....

No one has succeeded in closing the skills gap yet, but over the years we've developed numerous bureaucratic devices to paper it over. These devices will undoubtedly prove highly useful in addressing what Levy calls the web's "diversity problem." Levy proposes, as an initial matter, that the power-bloggers voluntarily link to some as yet unspecified number of non-male, non-white writers. The history of 'voluntary' affirmative action efforts need not be rehearsed here; suffice it to say, once 'voluntary' race- and gender-conscious policies are proposed, mandates are not far behind.

Well, I think you can see where this is leading. There's lots more to Heather Mac Donald's article, so I recommend reading it even though I have excerpted heavily from it here. It's a goodun.