While I usually like your column, I found your E-Male piece this morning entirely missed the mark. (Goodman wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe about how angry white males have taken over the blogosphere. It was lame.)
Here's a taste:
The typical political blog reader is a 43-year-old man with an $80,000 family income. Is it any surprise that Hillary Clinton gets only 9 percent in most online-activist polls, while garnering more than 40 percent in traditional polls?
It's not that women are invisible. There are "women's pages" on the Internet. Technorati counts more than 11,000 "mommy blogs." There are "women's issues" blogs like the funny and bracing Feministing.
I am a woman, early 50’s and an avid member of Daily Kos.
To your complaint about women. One of the most influential voices in the blogosphere belongs to a woman. Arianna Huffington runs huffingtonpost, one of the top blogs in the country, in fact huffngtonpost gets even more hits than kos. You mentioned her only in passing. Huffingtonpost publishes articles about the war, about Guantanamo, the economy, the FISA hearings, the attorney general, Katrina, our crumbling infrastructure, and our election process. You’d have to agree that these are not just “women’s issues.” Arianna is a regular guest on talk shows.
Daily Kos links to Huffington, and to sites run by other influential woman. On her site firedoglake (also linked to by kos) Hamsher reported live from the Scooter Libby trial and had everyone glued to her up the to the minute accounts of the trial and her insightful day-by-day analysis. Again, hardly a “woman’s issue” either.
On Daily Kos, plenty of women write regularly and eloquently – there's Georgia10, mcjoan, Miss Laura, and nyceve. Other women including grannydoc and madgranny publish diaries and regularly receive top comment scores.
Now let’s talk about the men. On Kos, I can read great economic articles by bonddad, an economist, historical and thoughtful pieces by teacherken, a history teacher and of course election coverage of house and senate races all over the country written by kos. I can interact with other readers and with the authors themselves. Try to get a letter to the editor published and you’ll see why more and more people come here for links to news and to share opinions about politics, the environment and what’s going on in the mainstream press.
Talkingpointsmemo is a site that I regularly visit. Josh Micah Marshall is on par with your colleague Charlie Savage when it comes to great investigative journalism. Josh Marshall and his crew broke the attorney general firings story through leg work and the innovative use of document dumps, where massive amounts of documents presented as evidence are “dumped” on the site and pored over by readers.
Sure, these guys are angry, but so are the women. We’re all angry at the direction this country is going. We’re angry that Americans and Iraqis are dying in a bungled war, angry because Osama bin Laden still hasn’t been caught, angry that our children will have to pay for this war, angry about the disregard for our environment, angry about the erosion of the bill of rights, angry that our country tortures prisoners, angry that Dick Cheney wants to wage war In Iran, angry about health care, angry about tax cuts for the wealthy, angry about corruption in government and we're angry that much of the reporting in this country has let us down. In short, we’re angry about lots of things that we have a right to be angry about.
If you really want to find out about the blogosphere, put aside your academic papers and hang out on these sites for a couple of weeks. Sign up for an account at kos and start making comments. Read Josh Marshall every day and watch his video. Keep track of what Arianna Huffington and her writers have to say. Link to some of the great stories by Jane Hamsher and other writers and you’ll find an exciting world of writing, commentary and engagement that the print world has left behind. Sure there are some whackjobs out here, but there are some extraordinary writers and thoughtful readers. And maybe by the end of your two weeks, you’ll be just as angry as we are!