Conservatives Blog It Better?
I know I’m a few days late in posting this, but here’s a link to a short piece from this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine that has all the liberal bloggers griping. The piece’s most quoted assertion:
Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders. (Hillary Clinton, for instance, is routinely vilified on liberal Web sites for supporting the Iraq war.) Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.
The standard retort to this is that if abandoning critical thought and intra-party debate makes for a more powerful blog — and that’s a big if — liberals would rather be less powerful, thank you very much. But over at AmericaBlog, John Avarosis has been showing over the last week or so what happens when a liberal blogger starts treating his readers like foot soldiers, issuing marching orders and coordinating a campaign in pursuit of liberal values: Big companies like Ford listen. If Avarosis can succeed in turning Ford around on the issue of homosexuals, expect to see more big liberal blogs being used as command centers.
Meanwhile, Slog readers, what do you think? Does the liberal blogosphere really need to be more like an army and less like a college symposium?
From a reader's perspective, I hate the marching-orders model. Why would anyone want to read something called "Talking Points Memo?" It's insulting.
I've heard it referred to as "the echo chamber effect," and that seems pretty fitting to me. A bunch of acolytes mindlessly intoning the party line. Ugh.
However, if these (completely boring) outlets mobilize political action, I can't get too upset about it.
There are currently discussions taking place in Congress about requiring a whole layer of financial reporting for sites that explicitly endorse candidates or political positions. I think this is a predictable response to the power of these sorts of sites to mobilize people. If it wasn't having an effect, there wouldn't be any impetus to regulate it.