Has the US political blogosphere shifted left?
Inna Kouper pointed me to a report by a left wing think tank claiming that there are now more readers of left than right wing weblogs. It is a pretty partisan report making some bold and not substantiated claims - for example that the right wing blogosphere is "nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative,
right‐wing media machine" while the left wing blogosphere is "introducing new actors into the political scene".
The most interesting claim which they support with some survey evidence (though without giving enough methodological detail) is that "as of 2003, the conservative blogosphere was between two and three times as large as the progressive blogosphere, and held a commanding lead in terms of overall traffic", but "In less than two years the progressive blogosphere had grown from less than as big as the conservative blogosphere, to nearly
double its size" [in terms of traffic].
I find it hard to get too excited about the stats until I read some more detail about how the statistics were collected (particularly because the organization they say did much of the research, MyDD, is a Democrat politics blog not a market research organization). But if they were true it would be an interesting springboard for future research…
September 15th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
I think its the Michael Moore syndrome…
when you are in opposition you have a lot to say and a sustained sense of outrage to mobilise. I saw it in detail watching DailyKos (probably the leading ‘operational’ democrat blog) grow during the 2004 campaign, and ditto Atrios Eschaton (the Ur-blog for liberals I think).
Part of the key to the Conservative movement is that even though they dominate all 3 branches of government and increasing chunks of mainstream media they continue to maintain that they are the oppressed minority (or rather the silent majority) and under continual threat and attack for ‘their values’.
So they can sustain this sense of outrage and ‘guerilla warfare’. One often feels reading conservative blogs that Jimmy Carter (or at least the hated Bilary combination) is still in power and the Democrats are the majority party.
Mind you, when you poll what Republican voters believe their party stands for, vs. what it *does* stand for, you see they have a point– Republican voters (not party members) in the main are well to the left of the party itself, and do not believe that the President and his party’s stated policies are as they are.
It’s an extraordinary sleight of hand and one Karl Rove has exploited most adroitly. How the party will handle religious conservative expectations vs. actual outcomes is very interesting.
September 26th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
I’d be very interested indeed to see any way that anyone proposes to map the content of the Web. I think this is a reallly difficult methodological challenge - one that we actually should be trying to deal with somehow. But how?