The media hasn't been happy with the ongoing fact checking that the Blogsphere provides, and they've been casting about for something negative to hang on it. Here's the latest bunch of crap hurled against the wall by Newsweek - they wonder why blogging is dominated by white males:

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

Oh please. One of the joys of the net is the "on the internet, no one know if you're a dog" phenomenon. This all seems to stem from the Technorati top 100 blogs list. You know what I notice about that list? It seems to be a pretty eclectic mix of opinion, across politics, technology, media - and a bunch of other topics. Compare that to the MSM, where I can get homogeneous group think without regard to the outlet I pick. I neither know nor care whether the top 100 listed there are black, white, asian (what have you). What I'm happy about is the intellectual diversity shown.

That's sadly lacking in, say, Newsweek - where I can find a nicely homogenized set of ideas every week. Here's a tip for Jenkins - when you find some people who don't all subscribe to the same worldview, maybe you'll stop bleeding readers. In the meantime, you can watch me not renew my subscription to Newsweek - I no longer need to read it in order to know what the content will be each week. That's kind of a problem.