NY Times Magazine: Liberal Blogs Accomplish Little

The top liberal blogs are up in arms over an impending New York Times magazine article by Michael Crowley that has been reported in Editor & Publisher. E&P claims the article will declare:

...that conservative blogs continue to best liberal blogs in political and electoral influence.

The title of the piece by Michael Crowley in the magazine's 5th Annual Year in Ideas cover package says it all: "Conservative Blogs Are More Effective."

Crowley, a New Republic writer, claims that with the 2006 elections approaching, Democrats are now "trying to use blogs more strategically." But he concludes by embracing the view of Matt Stoller, an activist who ran a blog for Sen. Jon Corzine during his 2005 race for governor of New Jersey, who believes that next year conservative bloggers "will certain have an upper hand." Crowley adds: "Again."

Armando at Daily Kos wails:

Well if you define effective as being a part of the Mighty Wurlitzer, having no respect for the facts and shilling for the Republican Party, Crowley is 100% correct.

Markos no doubt will have some insights on this. For me, I am proud to say we will never be "effective" in the way the Right Blogs are.

On cue, Kos adds:

Good. Let people think that. People have always been naysayers. Instead of getting riled up about, we'll keep doing what we're doing. And at the end of 2006 we'll be able to take stock of the situation and declare, definitively, that the conservative blogosphere is merely a redundant extension of their noise machine.

And "doing what we're doing" has been very effective so far.

Another leading liberal blogger, Duncan Black whines:

In a sense conservative blogs are more effective because both the massive right wing media and the mainstream media (remember Kurtz inviting Assrocket on to discuss his picked entirely out of his ass theory that the Republican Schiavo talking point memo was a Democratic forgery) are willing to pick up and retransmit their bullshit. So, the right wing wankosphere are yet another cog in the massive right wing media operation, and in accordance with the self-similiarty of the wingnut function, basically identical in all but scale.

But the liberal blogosphere is a much greater value added for our side because we have such a shitty media infrastructure. If all the wingnut blogs disappeared tomorrow it really wouldn't have any impact on the national discourse. Sure they're there and the Right is better at using them but they don't really *need* them. They have plenty of other ways to launder their horseshit.

Why, with language like that and such thoughtful commentary, don't you wonder why moderates aren't flocking there in droves for serious discussion?

Not only is their language unnecessarily abrasive, but Black has certain... shall we say, believability issues when he starts claiming that the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Time, Newsweek, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press, Reuters and the majority of the international press constitute what he crassly regards as a "shitty media infrastructure."

Is this conservative media bias from CNN? (h/t Sister Toldjah)

By their own freely-given, self-selected admissions, most members of the media are politically liberal. So why are liberal blogger-supported national political campaigns in America complete (0-16) failures?

Ace-of -Spades sums it up nicely:

Unlike the liberal bloggers and readers, conservative bloggers and blog-readers are not, as a rule, diagnosable paranoid schizophrenics and general lunatics.

Conservative bloggers tend to discuss live, real issues. They take reasonable positions, certainly mainstream among conservatives, and reasonable even to moderates. (Even if moderates don't agree with this or that, it's not as if the position is simply absurd.)

Liberal bloggers tend to be obsessed with conspiracy theories, criminal investigations unlikely to result in convictions (and unrelated to actual policy debate, in any event), and general moonbattery. The basic dynamic of the sinestrosphere is everyone attempting to out-crazy each other, and, last time I checked, it's a million-way tie for first place.

Liberal belief in a right-wing dominated media plays to that most special kind of delusional behavior that the far left proudly refers to as their "reality-based" view of the world. The fact that have had to spin this alternate, fantasy-based reality is just one symptom of their underlying problem.

Update: The author, Michael Crowley , is wrong about much of his thoughts about why the conservative blogosphere is more successful. QandO and Professor Bainbridge explain.