Megan McArdle, the libertarian blogger known as Jane Galt, has joined the blog lineup at the Atlantic Monthly.
Take a look at the rest of the Atlantic's bloggers, and see if you can't discern a certain pattern in the educational pedigree:
Ross Douthat -- Harvard.
Matthew Yglesias -- Harvard.
Marc Armbinder -- Harvard.
James Fallows -- Harvard, graduate degree from Oxford.
Andrew Sullivan -- Oxford, with master's and Ph.D. from Harvard.
Failure to gain admission to Harvard University, it seems, is tantamount to permanent disqualification from the staff of the Atlantic. It's a club, a clique, an elitist fraternity. Or at least it was, until they invited Miss McArdle to join. Not that she's exactly a peasant with a pitchfork -- she got her bachelor's degree at Penn before getting an MBA from the University of Chicago -- but compared to the other members of the Atlantic's all-Harvard blog crew, Miss McArdle is a provincial plebian.
For some years now, bloggers have been portrayed (and have portrayed themselves) as grass-roots outsiders, rebels storming the privileged bastions of the journalistic elite. I'm not sure that image was ever accurate, and the hierarchy of the blogosphere is probably becoming more elitist every day, as more establishment organizations seek to carve out a place in the medium.
It might be worthwhile, if only as a research project, to catalog the credentials of leading bloggers (e.g., Ana Marie Cox, U Chicago '94/Berkeley grad school) in order to develop a true picture of the socioeconomic context of blogging. I'll bet Jacksonville (Ala.) State University alumni -- like myself and James Joyner of Outside the Beltway -- are few and far between in the blogosphere.
-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times
UPDATE:
James Joyner comments:
[I]t stands to reason that the blogosphere would be dominated by academics and lawyers, who tend to have both the intellectual training and the time available to spend large chunks of their day processing information and churning out interesting commentary on it.-- RSM
Comments (2)
Academics and lawyers with "intellectual training"? Better include politicians in there too. They somehow feel that the grass roots doesn't have enough sense to know whats good for the nation. "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said his party was delivering on the nation's priorities, including raising the minimum wage and enacting the last of the September 11 commission's recommendations.." I"m a little confused about minimum wage and the 911 Commission being hot button issues, just like someone from Harvard telling me how to deal with with global warming or the power entropy and Sino-Russian expansion created by anti-Americanism. Bottom line, you don't need intellectual training to read and write.
Posted by Larry Stone | August 22, 2007 4:36 AM
Okay,Why Is It A Liberal Who Goes To Harvard Is"Elitist" But A Conservative Who Goes To Yale Is"A Man Of The People"???!!!
Hey!!Guess What??There Are Just as Many Conservative Elitists As There are Liberal Elitists!!
A Little Advice:Grab All Your Ill gotten Gain and Head For Bermuda Before The Villagers Get Wise To Your Little Schemes and Come After You With Pitchforks and Torches!!
Posted by King Bushwick the Toity Toid | September 2, 2007 10:51 PM