The Information Reformation ~~ It's speeding up and conservatives are still coming out on top.

The Daily Standard ^ | 08/18/2005 12:00:00 AM | Hugh Hewitt

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Information Reformation
It's speeding up and conservatives are still coming out on top.
by Hugh Hewitt
08/18/2005 12:00:00 AM

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."

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.

(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.

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, 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.

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

Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Good night though, my eyes need rest, too much strong sun light today!

[MikeHu]

You'd be mad as hell too if you discovered you weren't as bright and clever as you always thought you were.

[Marine_Uncle]

"Good night though, my eyes need rest, too much strong sun light today!"
Night night. Sleep tight and don't let some lib bug get ya.
2AM, I can't see straight. I must be nuts.

[Marine_Uncle]

"I got out today....went for a decent drive thru the hills and then back down to the beach ."
Must be nice. I'm living in a dark basement. My aunt calls it the pit. Ha ha! If I go outside I might get knocked over by the sun beams. I'm losing it.

[backhoe]

Crosslinked:

-Pajamahadeen Rule... rise of the New Media--

[Cruz]

ping

[SunkenCiv]

"CBS and Dan Rather as gullible victims of a crude fraud"

Gullible? To be gullible means to already believe something in the first place, to want to believe it. It's a quality which doesn't fit the journalistic ideal. Gee, I wonder how someone at the pinnacle of the news business could have risen so high?

[SunkenCiv]

Chris Muir's current one is apropos:

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/Cartoons/08-19-2005.gif

[SunkenCiv]

The strength of the blogosphere is in mobilizing opinion that isn't shaped by or in agreement with the MSM, as the MSM is irreparably partisan. If Rush (for just one example) replaced Peter Jennings, that would be called controversial; while critiques of, say, Dan Rather as a partisan shill, are dismissed as right winger.

Among the mistakes of the left is in seeing politics in stark terms, but that's a function of their hunger for a single party state.

Another mistake is in their belief that everyone worth worrying about agrees with them, and that those who don't need to be repressed because they're repressive. :')

Still another is their belief that, to build a more tolerant society, we need zero tolerance policies about lots of things.

One thing to keep in mind is, democracy and concensus are not the same thing. When the concensus is dictatorship, the people are ruled by a dictator.

[Dont Mention the War]

It's his Blog....

The Weekly Standard is not Hewitt's blog.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks backhoe.....

Tubebender..... see link supplied by backhoe.

[backhoe]

[tubebender]

While conservatives rule the Blogs the Left controls the newspaper Letters to the Editor pages with their seminar letter writers. And don't try to tell me that no one reads the papers. That may be true of conservatives but there are a lot of gullible readers soaking it up and they have never heard of a Blog...

[dirtboy]

And don't try to tell me that no one reads the papers.

However, the number of readers dwindles with each passing year. That's the point - we'll never eliminate the MSM. But we bring them down a few notches with each passing year.

[dirtboy]

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.

The lefties are mired in conspiracy swamps far more treacherous than those the right found themselves in during the Clinton years. Our use of the internet has matured to where we use it as a tool to research, vet claims and present factual analysis. The left uses the net to promote their latest conspiracy theory or trumpet their hero du jour such as Cindy Sheehan - which we can demolish with a few minutes of research, leaving them to sputter impotently about the right-wing attack machine - and the swing voters to wonder about the mental state of someone who considers facts to be a right-wing attack.

It's really not even a fair fight. Not that I'm complaining.