This weekend, The New York Times profiled four prominent young, mostly progressive bloggers: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Dave Weigel and Brian Beutler. The hook? They are all friends, they hang out together in DC and they have all emerged quite quickly in the media world — moving from bloggers to serious members of DC’s pundit class. Not surprisingly, they were largely white and all male.
I happen to admire the work of many of the guys profiled. And I admit, when the New York Times calls up for a profile, there are very few people who would stand up and say, “You can only include me if you include XX person too.” I highly doubt I’d be able to do that. Still, like many of the article’s readers, I was turned off by the lack of women (except girlfriends and fiancées), people of color and bloggers with a more aggressive or activist bent in this piece. It was troubling particularly in light of this Times Style article published a few years ago, which profiled a similar group of bloggers with several overlapping members who, at the time, lived together in a house in DC. The previous article wasn’t exclusively male, although it was male-centric. So it almost felt as though the original story, problematic to begin with, was whittled down to its white male core for this unofficial follow-up.
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