The Information Reformation

Hugh Hewitt wrote in the Weekly Standard Dean Barnett of Soxblog has penned a couple of crucial essays on the effects of lefty blogs on the Democratic party that remain must-reads (here and here). Barnett is expanding on a theme sounded by Michael Barone in a February column in U.S. News & World Report where Barone asked and answered his own question: "So what hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans."

That is because the Dems have become a party of hate, so their blogs just magnify that hate, while conservative blogs, frustrated at the MSM's refusal to tell the whole story, focus on the facts the MSM tries to hide.

While the lefty blogs are helping to push the Democrats over the cliff, the center-right blogs continue to grow in influence and to innovate. Two examples deserve widespread attention.

First, let us now praise Day by Day's Chris Muir, the funniest and sharpest three panel political cartoonist at work in America today. Muir's timeliness and productivity have created a large audience for him online, which is growing wider and wider as new blog consumers arrive in record numbers. Many bloggers routinely cite or even carry the Muir strip of the day (an innovation I first noticed at Captain's Quarters), and Muir's popularity further strengthens the center-right blogosphere's vast humor advantage over the relentlessly profane, vulgar and snarling left. With James Lileks, Scrappleface, Fraters, and ProteinWisdom also at work on a near daily basis, Muir makes the center-right's funny folks the blogosphere's Globetrotters to the left's Washington Generals. It is a very great thing to have the advantage in the humor corner. Ask Joe Lieberman about his 2000 debate with the Dick Cheney. The left has to pretend to like Ted Rall. The center-right gets the real thing.

Again, the left is focused on hate, while the center-right are not filled with hatred, and hence can laugh at good humor.

(Note: Before you send emails noting that some of these center-right folks sometimes--or in Jeff Goldstein's case, pretty much every day--use vulgar and profane humor, let me assure you that I know that. But as a group, they are not addicted to it, and some use it not at all or very sparingly.)

The second significant development is the recent launch of Power Line News by DAILY STANDARD contributors John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, and Paul Mirengoff, who have been writing at their blog Power Line for years and who were Time magazine's Bloggers of the Year in 2004 for their work in exposing CBS and Dan Rather as gullible victims of a crude fraud. But the trio is no longer content with exposing mainstream media absurdities. Now they are about replacing one of mainstream media's remaining utilities: That of news aggregator and editor.

I have been familiar with the blog for a long time, but I just learned about the News site, and will be exploring it more in the future

As the daily information avalanche keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the data mountains higher and higher, the need for sherpas increases. No one person can keep on top of it all, but the technology Power Line News harnesses puts the new media's best content in a compact and easy-to-use display--basically mirroring the function RealClearPolitics performs for old media. Reliable aggregation of content is a huge development, one which further weakens the mainstream media.

It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing--or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away,

Remember how I blogged earlier about how Julie Roehm is spending more and more of Chrysler's ad budget online (Fishing where the fish are)

and not slowly. Other new aggregators are in the works, and the revenue flowing into new media will further strengthen and expand its reach.

Before long corporate America will be calling search firms to find candidates for new positions dealing exclusively with new media, and boards of directors, long used to consulting or recruiting from politics and the mainstream media, will be debating how to persuade Betsy Newmark or Stephen Bainbridge, LaShawn Barber, or Joe Carter to advise (or even join) their ranks.

I am familiar with three of these, and will probably begin checking out the fourth now.

It's fun to be present at the revolution. And even more fun to be on the winning side.

La Shawn Barber blogged I won’t editorialize this to death, but let me say one thing about the information revolution, a force that many people don’t comprehend, can’t see or won’t see. I’m on the inside looking out, and the view from here is spectacular.

Betsy Newmark: blogged Are conservative and liberal blogs so very different today from those publications two centuries ago? Except just not as well written? Seeing how blogs are starting to both mold and reflect the news, I could almost think so. I don't know if Barone and Hewitt are right about the impact of the two different blogospheres on their respective parties. I hope it's true since I belong the side of the blogosphere that they posit will actually benefit the most in the long run.

Captain Ed blogged I wouldn't go so far as Hugh does to say that the port side of the 'sphere has hit the shoals. The Ohio 2nd CD race showed that the more rational among them can organize pretty effectively, although they couldn't beat the GOP in the end. However, it does seem that the Left's more influential sites continue to push the teeming masses ever further towards a radical-left agenda, leaving the center more and more undefended and open for socially-moderate Republicans to fill.

Mitch Berg blogged I read leftyblogs because - well, someone has to. But I've paid the price. It's depressing. A trip through Kos or Ollie Willis is feels like it must have felt in - I don't know, the Führerbunker in April of '45. Box lots of delusion slathered with enough anger to corrode the frame of a semi into red dust. The only thing worse is when they try to be "funny". I've yet to see a leftyblog that does humor - or "humor" - that doesn't wallow in juvenile snark and scatology. I've yet to see a lefty "humor" blog that could write Scrappleface's headlines.