{"id":1190,"date":"2007-08-14T04:33:09","date_gmt":"2007-08-14T09:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1190"},"modified":"2007-08-13T12:53:45","modified_gmt":"2007-08-13T17:53:45","slug":"1190","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1190","title":{"rendered":"The Air Ceiling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed and I talked about Ellen Goodman’s intensely stupid wrapup<\/a> from Yearly Kos (Motto:\u00a0 “If you’re not irate to the point of incontinence, you’re probably a spy”) in which she lamented the supposed dearth of female bloggers, on the show last Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, there is another, less flattering way in which broadband has followed broadcast and the liberal political bloggers mimic the conservative talk-show hosts. The chief messengers are overwhelmingly men \u2014 white men, even angry white men.<\/p>\n

I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard\u2019s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the \u201ccoed\u201d mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.
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\nNext year, Yearly Kos will undergo a name change. The assembly of progressive bloggers will call themselves Netroots Nation. But when will the members of these netroots look more like the nation?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The answers, of course, are head-smackingly obvious to anyone who doesn’t depend on Media Matters for their talking points; when non-whites and non-males want to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because setting up a blog is probably easier than subscribing to the typical newspaper.\u00a0 In fact, I’ll let you prove it to yourself.\u00a0 Anyone who’s interested – especially you ladies out there – go to one of these sites (like this one<\/a> if you’re right-of-center, or\u00a0this one<\/a> no matter what<\/em> you are) and go to town.<\/p>\n

From that point on?\u00a0 It’s entirely up to you!\u00a0 The blogosphere doesn’t care (indeed, needn’t know, and frequently has no idea<\/a>) if you’re white, black, female, hispanic, gay, or even human. Indeed, many of the best conservative<\/em> bloggers are, counter to the left’s inherently paternalistic stereotypes, women:\u00a0 Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks, La Shawn Barber, and the list goes on and on.\u00a0 Good female leftybloggers are much rarer – hysterical scolds are more the norm – but they do exist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But we’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n

Jeff Kouba notes the blazingly obvious<\/a> in a way that eludes Ellen Goodman (with my emphasis added):<\/p>\n

Hard to imagine anything more wide open than the blogosphere. There\u2019s no gatekeeper standing there with an iron rod ready to beat back any woman who aspires to enter.<\/p>\n

Women have just as much opportunity as men to wade out into the Sea of Bytes and try and carve out an audience for themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Jeff notes…:<\/p>\n

The blogsophere is both a seductive angel and a cruel mistress. It is fair and not fair. It rewards talent, or loses it in the shuffle…Maybe female bloggers (I refuse to use \u201cwomen\u201d as an adjective) do experience abuse in ways that men don\u2019t. Just ask Michelle Malkin<\/em>. But to allow oneself to be cowed and driven away by sickos, maladroits, cowards, misogynists and neanderthals is a choice one makes for oneself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One can sure invite abuse when you write a blog – or, indeed, put yourself out there in any way at all.\u00a0 I remember getting anti-semitic death threats twenty years ago at KSTP-AM (although I’m as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger; this was two years after Alan Berg was murdered in Denver, so it wasn’t entirely an academic issue to me (“Gosh, Mitch, why do <\/em>you support “shall issue” laws?”).\u00a0 And while I’ve done OK since the blog started, I’ve drawn my share of drooling moral incontinents to my comment section (never moreso than when Democratic Underground, Jesus General or the Freep linked to me, although most of the real persistent jagoffs came from another pack<\/a> of delusional hysterics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Threatening anyone for what they say, or believe, is a loathsome thing, and should be punished to the full extent of both the law and society’s ability to inflict shame.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter who the sender or receiver are.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 If it were in my power to find out and punish (or at least humiliate) someone who sent a threatening email to, say, the shrieking hysterics at Shakespeare’s Sister, I’d do it as quickly as I would for someone threatening Michelle Malkin.\u00a0 There is no compromise there.<\/p>\n

Speaking of shrieking hysterics, MNob – a woman who writes for pretty much every leftyblog in the Twin Cities sorosphere, and who is reputed to be a lawyer, although I know I’m not paying her for legal advice<\/a>, ever – tried to take Kouba to what passes for “task”, in her little world, writing this time at “Yowling From The Fencepost<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

Shorter Jeff Kouba: “Why, no, I’ve never received anonymous email with images of my face photoshopped onto a mutilated and ejaculate-covered corpse with my home address posted below. Why do you ask?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So to sum up the “logic” of MNob’s “keen” “legal” mind:<\/p>\n