Is the punditocracy too white and male?

Nick Kristof asks the question: "Is the pundit class of American journalism too white and/or too male?"

It is overwhelmingly white and pretty heavily male, it seems to me. But who defines "too"? Is the NBA too black?

It's easy to blame the news industry for the disproportionate number of pale penis people in its opinion-maker class. But let me tell you what it looks like from inside. For two years, I was editor of the Sunday commentary section of the Dallas Morning News. One of my responsibilities was making sure to get gender and ethnic diversity reflected in the bylines we published. Every week, I had to go through the columns on the wire and in the opinion journals looking for good topic diversity, as well as searching for gender and ethnic diversity among the authors.

It was far more difficult to do than I imagined it would be. Until I had to start searching out these pieces, I wouldn't have guessed how hard they were to find. Because there are so few minority opinion journalists, aside from the wire columnists, they can command top dollar. I was working with a very limited budget, too. I ran a lot of Leonard Pitts and Thomas Sowell -- both of whom I would have run anyway, because they're very good -- but the pickings were slim. Good luck too finding Latino pundits. Or Asians. And meet the gender and ideological balance as well.

I often rejected essays and analyses that I thought were superior, solely because they were written by white males (amazing how many of these were Jews, but they don't count as minorities in the diversity calculus). It was frustrating to me, because I didn't believe in this kind of discrimination as a matter of principle, but the newspaper industry makes diversity a priority. I knew that when I accepted the job, but in the end, I got discouraged trying to make it work. I was spending way too much time on this aspect of the job -- trying to find first-rate opinion pieces written by women and minorities -- but I wasn't pleased with my work, and felt that I wasn't meeting the responsibilities of my position. (I should say that I was also, as a general matter, not especially organized; not managerial material, that's me). I was fortunate to be able to go back to writing full-time, which I found far less stressful. I simply wasn't very good at being that kind of editor, or a good manager -- and not just because I was running myself crazy trying to hit the diversity sweet spot week to week.

Anyway, the point is it's easy to look at the demographic statistics and conclude that white males are overrepresented in the pundit class. But if you actually find yourself in the position of trying to even out the demographics on your opinion page, you'll find that's it's much more difficult than you think, given the supply.

I don't care what color or gender the analyst or commentator is, so long as he or she says interesting and meaningful things. Do you? I find that the pundit class is skewed toward people of a certain age, and certain life experiences. This is why the blogosphere is more interesting to read than the MSM pundits, in general, are to read or watch; they're more idiosyncratic, and haven't been weeded out by having to go through the journalistic system.

John Derbyshire, for example, is one of the more interesting voices of the commentariat, but there is no way he would survive American newspapering (for that matter, if H.L. Mencken showed up today at any American newspaper, he'd never be able to get away with his blustery brilliance). Derb thrives on the web. Matthew Yglesias is always a great read, but few editorial boards would hire somebody as young as he.

Anyway, if there were any sort of MSM blindness to undiscovered minority and female talent among its opinionators, wouldn't the blogosphere be more diverse? You'd think so. But as Heather Mac Donald takes up this line of discussion:

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. As Steven Levy himself conceded in a column last December, there are virtually no start-up costs to launching a weblog: "All you need," he explained, "is some cheap software tools and something to say." 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 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.)

Appears to whom? Where does this alleged club meet? In fact, the web is the antithesis of a closed, exclusive society. Levy offers no evidence for a white male bloggers club beyond the phenomenon he is trying to explain: the popularity of certain blogs. If the top blogs link to other top blogs, Levy assumes that they are doing so out of race and gender solidarity. Levy is suggesting that if an Alpha blogger comes across a dazzling blog, he will link to it once he confirms that a white male writes it but pass it up if he discovers, for instance, that a Latino woman is behind its sharp and clever observations on current events. The charge is preposterous. Moreover, as Buzz Machine notes, bloggers don't know the race and gender of many of their colleagues.

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.

She goes on to say that at the present moment, blacks and Hispanics lack the reading and writing skills, as measured by standardized tests, to write cutting-edge blogs. That should change ... but until it does, you're going to see an imbalance that will not be rectified without compromising on quality. Sorry, but there you are.