How women in media missed the woman's vote

In fact, the medium became part of the message. Journalism, gender studies, media, and sociology majors—the young women, like Jessica Valenti, Anna Holmes, Irin Camron, and Jill Filipovic, names now well-known to cable news producers and booking agents—didn’t exactly cover the news: in the early years of the Third Wave and the blogging revolution, they were the news. On sites like Jezebel and Feministing and at lefty zines like Salon and Talking Points Memo, they had the freedom to explore their feelings about sex, men, politics, popular culture, and feminism. Speaking to their own (single, educated millennial) peer group, they didn’t worry much about persuasion or analytical rigor.

Soon enough, an ailing mainstream media, trying to diversify staff and desperate to grab the attention of younger readers and viewers, came calling. The bloggers moved into cubicles at the New York Times, Slate, MSNBC, the Guardian, and The New Republic. There they learned to search Google for articles from the expanding oeuvre of gender research to support the positions that they were already convinced were true. They made a formidable sorority: stylish, full of sexy bravado, and, unlike their baby boomer mothers, wholly at ease with technology. Under the auspices of the media and cultural establishment, they quoted one another’s bon mots about the patriarchy and sat on the same gender panels at the 92nd Street Y or at Yale “sex weeks,” where they mocked the Michele Bachmanns of the world. In the past few years, their influence has only grown, as mass-market fashion magazines like Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire have given them column space, effectively crowning them the new elite experts on women’s issues.

They weren’t. They had heads full of academic theory and millennial angst but little life experience with—and virtually no interest in—military wives from South Carolina or Walmart managers from Staten Island, who also happen to fall into the category “women.” Nor did the new luminaries or their bosses seem to notice that the latter group far outnumbered their own rarefied crowd.