Digital Divide
Published by BG on Monday, May 21, 2007 at 2:50 PM.A Bit Late? Washington Post Discovers The Digital Divide -- Balloon Juice
investigative reporters at the Washington Post have found that online Democrats run circles around the GOP.
[snip]
As the old saw goes, ask three Democrats and get four opinions. The flip side of that has long helped to explain the huge popularity of conservatism in the old media. As demonstrated exhaustively by researchers like Bob Altmeyer, conservative followers like being told what to think and conservative leaders don’t tolerate input from the masses. In that way radio is the perfect medium, sending the Party line through a select group of reliable disseminators to the polloi with little chance for feedback, which liberals value but authoritarians hate. It helps explain why few conservative blogs allow comments and why Clear Channel radio often jettisons popular local conservatives to make room for a Limbaugh/Hannity/Savage monoculture. Feedback is a bug and the more mouthpieces you have the harder it gets to control the Party line.
An interesting take on the reason for the digital divide - both from Balloons Juice and the WaPo. Republicans have done a much better job of organizing and homogenizing the channels of communication (his point about radio), which was a strategy that worked brilliantly when media was simply print, TV and radio. The Internet isn't an easy place to control a message, but it's still interesting to me that the divide between the left and right is as enormous online as it is.
Who is the reasonable right-wing analyst of policy and the judiciary that Glenn Greenwald is? Who is the analogous right-wing reporter to Marshall at Talking Points Memo? Who on the right is turning dense political trial reporting on its head the way Firedoglake did?
Hugh Hewitt seems reasonable, as does the Balloon Juice site, but between the link-it-and-leave style of Instapundit, the breathless xenophobia of Little Green Footballs and the non-satirical giggle fits side-by-side with the finger-pointing nastiness of Michelle Malkin, it seems like the more reknown sites on the right don't have as much substance as they could.
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