Conventional Media and Magic Invisible Bloggers

Photo by Flickr user MissMiou. Used under a Creative Commons license.

MissLaura of DailyKos says

There's this question that the traditional media likes to ask:

"Why aren't there more women blogging about politics?"

...

Recently, Megan Carpentier of Glamour magazine's blog Glamocracy asked Markos why there aren't as many female political bloggers. He answered:

I disagree with that notion. The Daily Kos executive editor, a blogger, of course, is female. Digby is female. Jane Hamsher is female. There are other prominent women (including seven on Daily Kos) writing in group blogs.

That answer didn't fit the premise of Carpentier's piece, so it wasn't used. To maintain her premise, Carpentier also sloughed off Arianna Huffington in a sentence -- sure, the blogger who's building a freaking empire, who appears on television the most and whose site was recently written up in the New Yorker is a woman, but...

...

Bloggers do not succeed or fail in a bloggy vacuum. Site traffic and links from other bloggers are relevant measures of success, but by the standards of the traditional media, appearances in said traditional media are equally important. And we [i.e. bloggers] do not dole those out.

...

If the New Yorker fails to name the blogger they quote responding to Robin Morgan, then Ann Friedman doesn't get credit as either a political or a feminist blogger. It's a truism in the blogosphere that links are currency, but it's as true that traditional media mentions are currency, albeit of a slightly different sort. Links get you more traffic, but media mentions get you the kind of external validation that leads to still more media mentions.

Read the quote in context here.

It's like the erstwhile BrownFemiPower wasn't a political blogger she was a "blogger of color," Amanda Marcotte isn't a political blogger she's an "athiest feminist blogger." (Even though she and Melissa McEwan were driven from John Edwards' presidential campaign by conservative religious activists.) Marcotte's blogging partner Pam Spaulding isn't a political blogger either since she only blogs about national and international issues of race, feminism, and homophobia. And, I suppose, all the links Kathy G's been getting since she launched don't count because she isn't a political blogger either because... um... yeah. And Xeni Jardin doesn't count at all since nobody reads BoingBoing for *anything* to do with politics. And if you're going to object that no, you're only talking about *really, really* big blogs then Michelle flipping Malkin somehow doesn't count even though her Truth Laid Bear's Blog Ecosystem (admittedly somewhat improbably) pegs her blog as second only to DailyKos in terms of incoming links (a *real* measure of weight in terms of impact in the blogosphere) and thus well ahead of Instapundit (#3), TalkingPointsMemo (#8), all the (mostly male) bloggers at Powerline (#9), and Atrios/Eschaton (#22.) NRO/The Corner icon Kathryn Jean Lopez also doesn't count either, but not, for some reason, because she's a total conservative wingnut. All them dames at Feministing probably *would* have counted but then Instapundit guest-blogger Ann Althouse (who doesn't count) blew the whistle on Jessica Valenti's boobs... and how could any of them count after *that?* The bloggers over at Feministe talk about the law a lot and everyone knows if you talk about how laws affect men, women, and children then you're *law* bloggers and not *political* bloggers. Lindsay Beyerstein doesn't count because she's independent. MeganMcArdle doesn't count because she moved her independent blog (Jane Gault?) over to The Atlantic (never mind that Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias did likewise.) In fact, I guess because Catherine Morgan doesn't count her list of A List Of Over 275 Women Blogging On Politics doesn't count either.

Update: Virginia Postrel doesn't count either because... um... she's been blogging for too long?

Anyway, MissLaura closes her post with

If a reporter looks at a political blogger, will she be counted as feminist, not political, blogging?

If a reporter looks at a political blogger, will she stop counting as a woman?

If reporter looks at a political blogger, will her existence be acknowledged at all?

We're here, writing thousands of words a week on every political topic imaginable. If you don't see us, look to yourself.

And that I can rattle those off all those women political bloggers in just a few minutes and could rattle off plenty more if I didn't have to go do the family shopping for the week and then start supper? What do I know? I don't count either because I'm just a sex blogger.