Posted on 01/06/2009 7:50:31 AM PST by St. Louis Conservative
We often hear that the Left owns the Net. Like much of what you hear, this is not strictly true. There are no lack of right-of-center websites of all types ranging from personal blogs to influential portals and webzines. (You're reading one of those.) If the total sites of both right and left were comprehensively counted and compared -- probably an impossibility at this point -- the number of sites on our end would likely equal or even surpass those of the left.
It would be more accurate to say that the Left uses the Net better. As the late election clearly revealed, they have yet to be matched in their online organizational and fundraising capabilities. That won't last -- the situation is being confronted by both GOP and independent conservative organizations, who will catch up in short order.
But there is one other major and thus far overlooked example of online left-wing superiority. That is in using the Web as a means of manipulating the national media. The American left -- not to make too great a point of it, the most irresponsible, unbalanced, and uncontrolled faction of the American left -- has contrived a methods of leveraging the particular strengths of Internet communications, its swiftness, ubiquity, and universality, to shape the information reaching public over traditional media outlets.
Fantastic rumors, distortions, exaggerations, and flat-out lies appear on the Web, either on established sites such as Kos or DU, or one-off blogs out of a basement in the back of beyond. These factoids are then reported in the legacy media as "news", exactly as if they were events taking place in the real, three-dimensional world, with witnesses, leaving physical evidence, and having a measurable effect on their surroundings.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
What the left does have is massive funding for their sites and pays plenty of people to spread the lies. There are a few on FreeRepublic. When you spot them, go for the jugular.
Sounds like the “commerce of information flow from the right” from the Clintons, I don’t have the name of th document correct, but it compained that the right was using wild rumor to get stories in “legitimate” news.
We need to think about the effect of the decline in the readership of the NYT type newspapers that they are counting on feeding from the left blogs and the decline in viewership of the main three liberal networks and figure out how a large number of independent voices can fill the empty space that that creates.
Great column.
Thanks for posting!
~ shoptalk
It’s clear that there is a small army of dedicated leftists who jump on the discussion thread of any article about Sarah Palin to repeat even long discredited rumors over and over again and to drag her family through the dirt. I was just in one of them where several people repeated the allegations that Trig is really Bristol Palin’s son until I finally detailed the impossibility of Bristol having two children 8 months apart, at which point one “magnanimous” liberal told the others to give up that line of attack and start suggesting that Levi has other children by other girls, because that “might” be fruitful, instead. Yeah, they are scum of the Earth. They would have made great soldiers in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
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This process reached its apotheosis with the 2008 campaign, and nowhere more than in the treatment of Sarah Palin. The vast media/Internet juggernaut was turned against Palin almost as soon as her candidacy was announced. Neither the McCain campaign, the GOP, or conservative commentators as a whole revealed any sign that they understood what had hit them, much less to come up with any kind of effective response.Talk about nailing it.The most egregious of the stories was a conflation of pregnancy of one of Palin's daughters with the birth of her disabled infant son, Trig. Leftist websites claimed that the baby was actually the child of Bristol Palin, a yarn that might make sense on daytime TV but not in the real world. But even though the story was transparent nonsense, it was seriously reported in the national media.
The "Troopergate" story was based on the premise that a state governor does not possess the power to dismiss an appointee for cause. The accusation that Palin hunted wolves from helicopters was conjured from thin air -- though Alaska operates such a culling program, the governor does not carry it out personally, any more than David Patterson examines all tax returns filed by New Yorkers. An offhand joke about Russia being visible from Alaska was taken as a bizarre, even demented assertion regarding foreign policy. (How many decades must pass before it dawns on politicians that neither leftists nor reporters possess a sense of humor?) The clothes scandal, a typical misjudgment by GOP political operatives, was laid directly at Palin's door, though there is no evidence she was even aware of it.
Manipulating? The national media is a willing consumer for left-wing bilge.
Correct. The Drive-Bys are ideological soul-mates of the Marxist blogosphere. There is no salesmanship required.
Maybe we should learn to lie better. Maybe make up a story about Obama and a girl friend and spread it around.
Monica had the stained dress. Clinton slided. If a lie from the right is exposed, there would be hell to pay. The left always lie and get a pass.
Which is a recycled tactic used against President Bush.
You see, it is far more nefarious than we give them credit.
Liberals can purge the ranks of gov't when they win an election, however, conservatives do not have the same privilege.
Mable a double agent who wins their trusts by lies about conservatives and then slips in a tale about a liberal icon. On the other hand, what could be worst than what is the truth about Teddy Kennedy, that his drunk driving lead to the death of a girl etc.
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