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She's quite a person...NOT!
lol
It's like The Blob.
I've known people whose parents donated a bldg, or a department chair, and had no problem getting in, even though they were lousy students.
One thing about the internet, though, it doesn't judge you by how much money you have. I've never been kicked off a blog because I'm poor!
LOL.
I’ve noticed a few last names of pimply-faced C-SPIN visitors from congressional newspapers to suspect the latest generation of old Beltway media looms…
But it is how they justify themselves. Listen closely and you will hear their success-laden resumes buried in nearly everything they say.
The NYT Magazine story caught this aspect of Tweety and nearly all TV types in hideous perfection.
It's most decidedly not a meritocracy. It has more to do with money and proximity than anything. The biggest blogs are in or around DC and NYC and have strong ties to politics. The major bloggers have the money and the access to attend conferences and make TV appearances. You get the most attention if you are male and talk exclusively about politics several times a day. If you are female, you'd better be young and good-looking. Heaven forbid people get the idea that you write about "women's issues" because then you become invisible to the big boys. (No one has yet explained to me how an issue that affects 54% of the population is unimportant, but that's the way they get treated.) Bloggers who can't make a living from their blogs are second class citizens no matter what they do.
If you work for a living you'd better be a journalist, political operative, lawyer, or something impressive. Education isn't enough - you have to be from an impressive school, too. If you have a regular job, or worse, you're disabled, no one will pay any attention to you except a few women and a couple of anti-feminist or racist or xenophobic or homophobic men who stalk you and occasionally threaten you. They're lots of fun. My stalkers have included a member of the National Guard - I know this because he used his official email - and someone who worked in a Sheriff's office, who also used an "official" email address.
I there's anything about you that's not "mainstream" you'll be just as marginalized as you would in real life, and the Progressive blog community is vehemently prejudiced about things like religion, gender, and race. They say they're not, but they kid themselves. The sad part of it is that there actually is diversity out here, and the majority of bloggers are women of every description, but you'll never see that reflected in the major outlets.
A couple of things I'd add to MorgaineSwann's excellent comment: even if it's not intended as sexist or misogynist, the confrontational and flaming discourse of much of the progressive blogosphere tends to marginalize women [see for example Herring's 2001 paper on Gender and Power in Online Communications, just as relevant in the blogosphere as on Usenet].
Also, women of color are almost completely excluded from the "mainstream" blogospheres (and didn't even make your list of diverse examples: a latino guy, unracially attributed woman, and gay guy), let alone having their views further percolate to the mainstream media. What's especially disappointing is that so many progressives and feminists seem unwilling to acknowledge this problem, let alone do anything about it.
What I see happening here is straight out of Freire's "Pedagogy of the oppressed": people in a potentially-liberating situation instead recreating the conditions of oppression. Unequal starting points in terms of access, connections, time (= money), credentials, etc., make the problem more acute.
The good news is that many different voices are out there -- high quality, covering a much broader set of issues from a lot more perspectives than you get from "the usual suspects". As a blog reader, it's more work to find them -- but well worth it. As an occasional blogger, I remind myself to link to them as well as the better-known sites. It's really too bad that so few professional bloggers and journalists do the same.