G. Frink's

Well, of course, the New York Times pushed condescension at BlogHer.

Disdain for bloggers is a long-running Times lite motif, and the Times is historically one of our society's enforcers of certain boundaries.

This week, when the Old Grey Lady pushed, Erin Kotecki Vest pushed back. AKA QueenofSpain, she struck IMHO exactly the right tone when she wrote:

Apparently I can push political agendas, but I'll always be seen as an Oprah-watching, bon-bon eating, Katie Couric-esq, shoe-shopping, GIRL.
Even the New York Times will write about how powerful I am, and how I'm not getting my props - yet they will publish the article in the "Fashion and Style" section.

Unlike Amy Gahran, who called the Times piece "pretty good," I thought it inexcusably trivialized BlogHer. It seemed to me that the Times simply underlined the failure of understanding reflected in the story by placing it on the same page with Bill Cunningham's foot-lover-pleasing The Appeal of the Heel. Kara Jesella of the Times wrote:

Last weekend, about a thousand bloggers, almost all without the Y chromosome, attended the annual BlogHer conference, which began in 2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure. It has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a ?60s consciousness-raising group.

In short, these ladies are not to be taken seriously by any real movers and shakers who happen to be reading the Fashion & Style section.

It seems to me ironic that the Times chose to look down its nose at women bloggers in the same week that a study of 7.2 million students in 10 states reported finding no gender differences in math aptitude, thus undercutting at the root another rationalization for treating women as somehow second-class members of the tech world.

No one is waiting online for the Times to tear down the walls of its story-topic ghetto. Business and other decisions appear to have been unrestrained by it, as QueenofSpain observed in a list which includes BlogHer's $5-million deal with iVillage.

At this juncture, the Times errors in perspective and placement were fundamentally a self-inflicted wound. The matter certainly deserved well-crafted comment, but another miscategorized, miscast story will not slow the change now.

In this country at least, where there are still impeding ghetto walls, they are being knocked down, unleashing valuable human resources and benefiting everyone.