Posted March 16th, 2005 at 3:22PMAt a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the “comments” space of her blog … The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine. “It has taken ‘mainstream media’ a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion,” Jenkins wrote. “My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere … will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.”
After the comment was posted, a couple of the women at the conference—bloggers MacKinnon and Halley Suitt—looked around and saw that there weren’t many other women in attendance … [The crowd was] representative of the top 100 blogs according to the Web site Technorati—a list dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety.
Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem?
I mostly enjoy this story for the simple reason that it ties in well with this blog’s name. However it is an interesting question. The largest blogs out there are, by and large, run by white males.
But I have to ask — how does this differ from any other media? How many A-list evening news anchors can you name who are black, Hispanic or Asian? Or female even? Really, I don’t watch TV, but as far as the sort of elderly, eminently-respectable news anchors like Brokaw or Cronkite, none immediately pop into my mind.
Minorities are similarly underrepresented in print media – at all levels. Jenkins talks about the mainstream media having reached a “point of inclusion,” but that could very well be disputed.
We read all about how blogs are this or that. They lack journalistic integrity, they’re base muckrakers. And now – it’s a ‘white men’s club.’ But through all of this, I always wonder how this differentiates blogs from other forms of media. Because I see the same things from the same media sources constantly lambasting the blogosphere.
MSNBC article found via Elliot Back
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More importantly, should it matter if the blogosphere is dominated by white males and issues they want to discuss? White males are still a majority in the U.S. Why should this be of concern to anyone?
Racism is silly, and this is racism towards white males. It’d be great to see more females blogging, and better yet to see more minorities blog. But it’s not something that should be worried about, it doesn’t matter if this is ‘the white male’s club’, that sort of thinking and labeling is racist itself. Damnit.
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