Guaranteeing Diversity in the Blogosphere

The diversity mongers have a new target in their sites - blogs. Apparently there's a move by some of these weenies to require that the top 100 blogs to provide links to other sites based on sex, race, religion and various other criteria known only to them. Once again the free market is apparently a little too free (from National Review Online).

Bad move, guys. The "diversity" mongers have just brought up the one thing that they should have stayed far far away from: the web. Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. The goal? A blogosphere whose elite tier "reflects the actual population" — i.e., where female- and minority-written blogs are found among the top 100 blogs in the same proportion as females and minorities are found in the general population.

These are the same people who want to reestablish the "fairness doctrine" to ensure a diversity of opinions on the airwaves (OkieontheLam has a post on that subject). It was the abolishment of the fairness doctrine that gave rise to talk radio and completely resurrected AM radio. Instead of having meaningless shows on that no one listened to, stations were free to employ hosts with a point of view that the listeners would actually want to hear. As it turns out, most of those hosts were conservative, and led by Rush Limbaugh, dominate talk radio.

Something similar has happened in blogging. Although there are a few big-time liberal blogs, one can only take so much whining and complaining, and as a result the majority of the top sites are conservative or at the very least libertarian. This is not sitting well with the diversity crowd.

One of the great joys of the blogosphere is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can set up a blog for free and post whatever they want to it. It's the ultimate expression of free speech. If you don't believe me, just try this: Go to blogger .com and click on the link that says "create a blog". Within two minutes you'll have your own free blog and you can begin posting to your heart's content. That's pretty much how I got started, and thanks to the help of other bloggers, I've been able to spiff up the site a little bit and add some features that make it more attractive and more usable (sorry, I can't do anything about the photo of the blogger).

With your new blog you will have the freedom to write what you wish, but that right does not include right to be read. In other words, just because you write it doesn't mean someone else has to read it. What the diversity mongers are trying to do is create a right for their selected "disadvantaged" groups to be read by requiring that the megablogs link to them. That still won't guarantee readership, but I know I wouldn't mind having a link on Instapundit if I could get it, and it would probably increase my traffic more than just a little bit.

We used to think that freedom of speech was guaranteed by our Constitution. However, freedom in this country is no longer guaranteed (see campaign finance reform). It's whatever a judge decides it is, and if some judge somewhere decides that you can't post a conservative opinion without referencing an opposing view, that will be the law of the land. Of course with something like 8 million blogs in action and more coming online every day, policing such a law would be nearly impossible. That may be why the diversity mongers have chosen a smaller target - the top 100 blogs.

There's no telling where this will go, but I can't imagine the blogosphere giving up without a really messy fight.