Making Conservatives Cringe Since 1977

I’ve been doing a little looking around lately, trying to see if a hypothesis that keeps occurring to me has any real foundation in reality, or whether it’s just perception playing tricks on me. To me it is pretty much a given that if you don’t allow comments at your blog, what you have is not a real blog. I don’t know what it is, online magazine or some bullshit, but it’s not a blog. I’ve also noticed that it seems that more Conservative “blogs” than Liberal follow this trend of sacrificing debate in order for maximum effect to be achieved by the day's meme. For the first part of my hypothesis I went through the top ten or fifteen blogs as listed on TTLB, and the top ten listed at Technorati. The only left-wing blog I found that didn’t allow comments was Talking Points Memo. On the other hand, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Power Line, Hugh Hewitt, Andrew Sullivan. That’s five to one. Case closed.

I still believe this, only now I feel it has developed to such a degree that the right-wing blogosphere itself has been all but annihilated. Most major right-wing bloggers have now been incorporated into the established news media apparatus. Glenn Reynolds is a columnist for MSNBC. Andrew Sullivan is a columnist for Time. Michelle Malkin is a frequently published columnist in a number of offline outlets. And now, RedState co-founder Ben Domenech has a regular column in the Washington Post. Despite being the latest in a long line of conservative bloggers to achieve "mainstream" status with the established news media, his first column was, predictably, an attack on the same institutions that just hired him and gave him space.

That’s just it. The blogosphere, Left, Right, or indifferent, caught fire because it gave the people an opportunity to speak to what they feel. You could post your feelings and observation, find consensus, or debate the facts. If you said something stupid someone could call you on it. The days of being spoon fed by the corporate media were supposed to be at an end. With this quantum leap in democracy why would someone close their comments? Now we know. It’s because the one’s who’d go that route were never interested in what the blogosphere had to offer beyond using it as a lily pad to jump onboard the MSM Express.

posted by Frederick  # 3/22/2006 10:23:00 AM