National Review has a must-read piece by Heather Mac Donald on the “diversity” thought police and their latest foray against the blogosphere: Diversity Mongers Target the Web. (Hat tip: Hulugu.)

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.

Levy’s complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich’s campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers, a campaign that has caused widespread wringing of editorial hands about male-dominated op-ed pages. For Levy to have mentioned the web at this moment is about as smart as inviting Stephen Hawking to an astrologers’ convention: The web demolishes the assumptions behind any possible quota crusade.

A Harvard conference on bloggers and the media triggered Levy’s concerns. Keith Jenkins, a Washington Post photo editor, had warned during the conference, via e-mail, that the growth of blogging threatened minority gains in journalism. Whereas the mainstream media have gotten to “the point of inclusion,” Jenkins wrote, the “overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere [might] return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.”

Who would’ve guessed it? The mainstream media, Jenkins admits, has gotten to “the point of inclusion.” You’d never know it from the ongoing agitation for more race- and gender-conscious hiring and publishing. Just this December, the National Association of Black Journalists wrung from the president of NBC News a promise to hire more black journalists at the highest levels of the newsroom. At an NABJ conference last April, a Denver Post editor accused newspapers and broadcast outlets of refusing to hire blacks and called on NABJ members to denounce such alleged discriminators. The Association tallies and publicizes black representation in newsrooms to the minutest detail, including the ratio of black supervisors to black reporters. Susan Estrich, meanwhile, has had her female law students at USC logging daily ratios of female- to male-penned op-eds in the Los Angeles Times for the last three years — numbers that she has used to try to bludgeon editor Michael Kinsley into instituting female quotas. The Media Report to Women, cited by the New York Times’s Joyce Purnick, pumps out statistics on the percentage of female interviewees on network-news shows and of female news directors in radio, among other crucial discoveries. Female book reviewers in The New York Times Book Review are weekly stacked up against male reviewers at Edward Champion’s “Return of the Reluctant.”

These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field’s gatekeepers are discriminating against X’s members. The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be proportionally represented in the challenged field.

If the quota mongers really believed these claims, they should welcome the web enthusiastically, since it is a world without gatekeepers and with no other significant barriers to entry.