Conservatives Do It More Effectively

Armando at The Daily Kos seems a little miffed about a New York Times Magazine piece (preview available here) by Michael Crowley that will run this Sunday, discussing the efficacy gap between the right and left hemispheres of the blogosphere (namely that conservative blogs are more effective than their liberal counterparts).

Taken in aggregate with Kos' follow-on comments, and those of fellow liberal blogger Atrios, the excuses offered are threefold:

1) The naysayers misunderestimate the actual effectiveness of the blogging left, an advantage to be reaped in 2006.

2) The liberal blogosphere may be comparatively meak, but it adds much more value, because without "our blogs and a handful of radio programs", the left has no media infrastructure (!).

3) Liberal bloggers are more concerned about true intellectual debate and challenging elected officials - even among their own party - in their quest for informed public policy.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are simply a well-organized extension of the Republican "noise machine", a "Mighty Wurlitzer, having no respect for the facts".

#1 is a fine example of self-delusion.  #2 is a fine example of something that's the opposite of true.  To the extent that conservative blogs are more effective than liberal blogs, it's undoubtedly due in large part to the fact that conservative blogs represent such a proportionately large incremental voice, as compared to the conservative media landscape, ex-blogosphere.

But excuse #3 takes the cake.  The notion that the liberal blogosphere is somehow an intellectual arcadia of diverse opinion is unvarnished tommyrot.

Read through the comments on a typical Kos post and you'll swear you're reading the same diatribe vomited up by a lone, mouthy adolescent with dozens of screen names, invariably placing far more emphasis on carping than on logic, proof, or persuasion.  On the other hand, read through a couple days worth of Ankle Biting Pundits, Michelle Malkin, PoliPundit, or Right Wing News (or dozens of other leading conservative blogs) and you can't help but find slews of merciless, unyielding callings out of RINO's, faithless fiscal "conservatives", porkophiles, and other Republicans that need taking to task.

The argument that conservative blogs simply stump for Republican politicians and toe the party line is reduced to absurdity by even the most cursory observation.

Further, the relative concentration of authorship and of readership of left vs. right is illustrative. 

Borrowing from economics, this is brought into sharp relief if we apply a Herfindahl Index to the readership of the left and right sides of the blogosphere.  The Herfindahl Index is a method used to measure industry concentration and is calculated simply by summing the squares of participating firms' market shares.  The measure ranges from near 0 (nearly infinite number of firms, each with negligible share) to 1 (pure monopoly).

Including all partisan political blogs with more than 20,000 daily visitors, as measured by The Truth Laid Bear traffic rankings, I calculate the following values:

Lefty Blogs' Herfindahl Index: 0.31
Righty Blogs' Herfindahl Index: 0.15

Liberal blogs in the sample included Daily Kos/Washington Monthly, Eschaton, Common Dreams, Crooks and Liars, Wonkette, Andrew Sullivan, Smirking Chimp, firedoglake, and Talkleft. Conservative blogs included Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Powerline Blog, Hugh Hewitt, Captain's Quarters, RedState, Confirm Them, and Volokh Conspiracy.  (If you disaggregate Daily Kos from Washington Monthly, the liberal index drops to 0.29.)

Thus, it stands to reason that the blogging left should be less effective.  Not only do they represent a rough facsimile of the opinion that already saturates most mainstream media outlets, but they also lack the opportunity to leverage the blogosphere's greatest strengths: widely distributed thought, commentary, and analysis; a real-time, frictionless exchange of a true diversity of insight and background; and a merit- and credibility-based free market of ideas.

As concentration and centralization increase, effectiveness is sure to decrease.

I'm looking forward to reading Crowley's observations to that effect.  But then again, you can't really trust anything you read in The New York Times.  After all, it's just another cog in the deafening right wing noise machine.

Update:  That's all?  I think the preview was longer.

Elsewhere: Malkin is, it's safe to say, not impressed by Crowley's "embarrassing little squib", which makes the same untenable arguments floated in presponse by the lefty bloggers.