The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias(South Park Conservatives)

Real Clear Politics ^ | May 3, 2005 | Tom Bevan

[kellynla]

Brian C. Anderson is a busy man. Since his book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias hit the shelves just two weeks ago it's been non-stop action: Anderson has done more than 40 interviews on talk radio, appeared on the Fox News Channel four times, and churned out e-interviews with Human Events, Ed Driscoll, and Powerline, among others.

On top of that, reviews of Anderson's book have been popping up all over cyberspace, from the pages of The Wall Street Journal (here and here) to The American Enterprise to web-zines like TechCentralStation to individual bloggers from all walks of life (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for starters).

What's more, the string of publicity for South Park Conservatives isn't likely to stop any time soon. Anderson says he's working through several more Q&A's with bloggers and that there's "no end in sight" to the schedule of talk radio interviews.

This is all as it should be, because Anderson is now living proof of one of the central arguments of his book: conservatives today are able to reach the public in much greater numbers than ever before thanks to the growth of "new media" outlets like talk radio, Fox News, right-leaning book publishers and the blogosphere.

After an appearance last week on The O'Reilly Factor (now the top rated show in all of cable news) sent the book zooming up to number seven on Amazon.com's non-fiction best-seller list, South Park Conservatives currently sits at number twenty-nine and is in the top 150 titles carried by Amazon overall.

Pretty impressive numbers, given that South Park Conservatives has received close to zero attention in traditional "mainstream" media outlets - notwithstanding Frank Rich's rather fatuous critique in The New York Times the other day.

[skinkinthegrass]

Thanks, For posting this article...add another "notch" to his foray into the blogsphere.

[Milhous]

The book provides an easy to read history of new media with few surprises for new media activists.

[Thoro]

The fact Frank Rich is aware of South Park Conservatives - and that he felt compelled to devote 1,511 words in a Sunday column to try and rebut some of the book's arguments - only serves to confirm the truth of Anderson's thesis.

Rich's column completely, and I suspect deliberately, missed the point of South Park conservativism. He focused on a *single* episode(the Terry Schiavo issue) to broadly paint South Park conservatives as hypocritical bible thumpers. It was an incredibly offbase, clueless and poorly researched piece.

I know these Brian Anderson articles are somewhat plentiful in the last week or so, but I'm sending a ping out to the SP list anyway.

[traviskicks]

The blogosphere is a threat to the left. This is what Kerry said about it:
http://www.neoperspectives.com/kerryblogs.htm

"We learned," Kerry said to the gathering, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"