I’m a right of center person, and the fact is that I read lefty blogs for entertainment, not for information. Reading a DailyKos diary called “Barack Obama: Human or Deity?” is just plain fun. For serious leftist thought, I go to the editorial page of a major newspaper. For serious conservative thought, I go to National Review. For rants and paranoia, over to the Democratic Underground and Free Republic (I know, not blogs per se).

That’s what I think your study is missing. Because while many conservatives may not read liberal blogs, we do watch NBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/MSNBC, listen to NPR, and read the NYT/WaPo/LAT/ChiTrib/TIME/Newsweek. Who really gets their opinion’s challenged on a daily basis? The dextrosphere and sinistrasphere are different. One serves as media watchdog more then anything else, and the other serves as fundraiser and soapbox.

For a quick example: I myself am a libertarian, a radical one at that. Yet other than some blogs of fellow radical libertarians, I mostly frequent liberal sites, and my intake of “conservatives” these days consists of Andrew Sullivan & Daniel Larison.

Thanks for your critique, which is I think a very plausible argument (and one which we may end up talking through in a footnote). I agree that there is likely more back-and-forth going on between blogs than between the traditional political opinion magazines.This is something we discussed when doing the research. The problem is, of course, that the dataset we were using didn’t have the right kind of data to do this (it also didn’t have data on newspaper readership, which would also have been very interesting to see). That’s why we did the charts that we did – if we had had more data, we would have loved to have done more comparisons.

To my knowledge, there hasn’t been any statistical research done on readers of these magazines, in part because the readership is small enough that you are unlikely to find enough readers for statistically significant results in the kinds of polls that political scientists do. You could, of course, draw respondents from subscription lists or the like with the cooperation of the magazines’ publishers, although you would then have problems, obviously, in drawing comparisons between the readers and the general population.

It seems to me that the proper “old media” control for this should not be general news sources with a slight ideological bent, but rather openly partisan periodicals: The Nation, Harper’s, Weekly Standard, National Review, etc. (Or Limbaugh on the radio.) That’s where political junkies used to get their fix, and now we’re shifting over to the blogosphere. I’ve always assumed that those worlds were significantly more insular than even a polarized blogosphere, because it’s so much easier to pop over to an opposing viewpoint on the web than it is to, say, subscribe to the National Review. (Crosslinking may be rare, but it’s much more common than it was in the age of magazines, in that they didn’t have links!)

To me, the most accurate study would look at specific articles/posts read by people of different political persuasions. For people on the left who subscribe to the Nation and Mother Jones, how many read an article from National Review in the past month? And then for regular readers of DailyKos, how many read a post from Drudge or Powerline in the same period? My hunch would be that there would be much more crossover in the blogosphere than in old media, but it’s just that—a hunch!

Is there a reason why you did those “violin” charts comparing more “objective” news sources, and didn’t look at more explicitly partisan ones? That’s the apples-to-apples comparison, in my mind…

Anyhow, great stuff and a real contribution to this important debate…

Steven

2. Almost all top bloggers are also establishment hacks. See, for instance, the reactions of various Dem bloggers to the NAFTASuperhighway.

3. Many top bloggers are willing to suck up to the MSM even as they criticize it. See, for example, all those who tripped over themselves to go blog at CNN in 11/06.

4. I’ve had comments deleted and even edited without notice at at least two dozen blogs; do a search at my site to see what those bloggers were afraid of.

5. A partial explanation for the polarization is due to many bloggers regarding those who disagree with them as some form of non-human beings. That might come from the fellow commenters, and in some cases from the hosts themselves.

6. Some bloggers have a habit of getting things wrong (e.g., ThinkProgress), and many have a habit of just ripping and posting without doing any research or much thinking.

7. Compare comments #19, #52, and #71 from me with the post and the other comments:
crookedtimber.org/2007/06/15/tancredo-wall-builder

8. Thank gosh I run sites, not blogs.

WAG THE BLOG: HOW RELIANCE ON TRADITIONAL MEDIA AND THE INTERNET INFLUENCE CREDIBILITY PERCEPTIONS OF WEBLOGS AMONG BLOG USERS
Thomas J Johnson; Barbara K Kaye
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly; Autumn 2004; 81, 3

Always great to see new scholarly work on these issues, especially in political science.

It’s the research that throws up the unexpected results that’s interesting. I find that I’m considerably likely to be left wing, something that’s certainly unexpected.

As it is, Olbermann and Maddow are liberal, Chuck Todd is a neutral numbers guy, Dan Abrams and Dick Gregory are weak neutral centrists who sometimes do good reporting, and Chris Matthews is a Clinton-hating centrist freak with weird sexual obsessions. I guess if Maddow came on full-time and replaced Matthews, I’d be satisfied. (Remember, about 20% of Americans are more liberal than Obama or Clinton).

The reason you’re confused is that you have the weird conservative habit of classifying everyone other than Bush loyalists and movement conservatives as “liberal”. Dick Gregory counts as liberal because he’s reported honestly about Bush a few times. People are even accusing Scotty McClellan of being liberal now, because he told the truth.

On top of that, the quote you ascribe to me isn’t mine, but mqs.

Basically, I hope for a situation within which movement Republicans have been marginalized by us the way we have been marginalized by them for the last several decades. The new political debate would be between moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats on the one side, and liberal Democrats on the other, with moderate Democrats the swing vote.

In politics someone always loses. Since 1980 the losers have been liberal Democrats. I’d just like to see the movement conservatives be the losers for a few decades.

I want to ask a question about what constitutes participation. does participation imply only voting; does it including campaigning, calling a representative, or making a contribution; or could it consist of public debate and discourse? perhaps I don’t understand because I’m outside the political science discipline, but I don’t see a definition of participation jumping out of the paper (granted, I’ve not read it thoroughly, yet). McKenna and Pole (2004 – Do Blogs Matter?) argue that, due to its status as a form of public discourse, political blogging itself actually counts as political participation. I’m curious how this notion of blogging as participation fits into the argument you’re making here that “blog readers are highly likely to participate” (p. 22).

“As already noted, we find that there is a general tradeoff between deliberation and participation among blog readers, an increasingly important group of highly politically aware individuals. Blog readers are more likely to participate in politics than non-blog readers, but also very likely to read only blogs whose political leanings accord with their own.”

Interesting read. Of course, as a political blogger, there is nothing I find more interesting than a study of, you know, political bloggers.

I guess I am among the 6% omnivores as I do read blogs from both the right and left. However, I agree with the markus and mq points that our source data could be highly time and context dependent. Since I advocate for divided government on my blog, in 2006 I spent more time flocking with left of center blogs who at the time were big fans of the divided government meme. Now, not so much. So I find myself spending more time on right-of-center blogs, who are in the midst of an epiphany and are beginning to see the wisdom of voting to maintain divided government into 2009. Funny how that works.

I’ll also note this historic parallel to the authors’ conclusions, linking increased participation and polarization as going hand in hand:

“The period from 1840 to 1890 has been labeled “the party period” and “the golden age of parties” because the major political parties (Democrats and Whigs until the mid-1850s, then Democrats and Republicans) were the strongest they have been in American history. Party leaders used patronage and campaign practices that aroused partisan enthusiasm to gain wide membership and keep them loyal and active. It worked. Voter turnout during this period was the highest in American history: between 70 and 80 percent for presidential elections and sometimes higher in state and local contests.”

Different self-selection and organizing principles, but the more things change…

Thanks, I had seen that but it doesn’t quite get to my question, which is this – are there specific right wing blogs which are favored by the left readers and which are driving that result (lefties read more right blogs than vice versa)?

There are very few omnivores from either left or right (8% of respondents, if my eyes don’t deceive me on Fig. 3, p. 33)), so it wouldn’t take many lefty readers of Drudge to get the result in question. And if the white dot in Fig 5 represents the media, the median Drudge reader is quite different from any of the other five blogs depicted.

Well – from a different angle, I am sure I could find righties who would say something like “Why do I need to read lefty blogs when I am paying $40 a month for the dead Tree Times?”. A righty can find mainstream lefty outlets easily; a lefty who prefers not to abide Fox, Rush, or Sean is probably going to have to check some blogs to see what the right is ranting about.