A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions.

The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts aggressively pursuing an ideological agenda on-line and on TV and radio.

From birthers to tea parties to town halls and ACORN, the scandal-plagued anti-poverty group — not to mention President Obama’s speech last week to school children and the background of former White House aide Van Jones — issues initially dismissed or missed entirely by the national media have burst, if only fleetingly, onto the national agenda after relentless coverage on Fox News, talk radio and in the blogosphere.

“If it wasn’t for Fox or talk radio, we’d be done as a republic,” Glenn Beck declared Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” Beck, who’s aggressively pushed the Van Jones and ACORN stories, told the morning show hosts that he plans to devote his hour-long, top-rated 5 p.m. show to new undercover tapes of ACORN employees.

Last week, Big Government, a site run by conservative Andrew Breitbart, showed videos of undercover stings in three ACORN offices, where journalists posing as pimps and prostitutes were instructed by employees on how to skirt legal restrictions on housing. The tapes got big play on The Drudge Report—where Breitbart has worked—and right-leaning news outlets and commentary shows. But only after the Senate voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN on Monday did the story get more attention in the mainstream media.

ABC “World News” anchor Charles Gibson seemed caught off guard by the ACORN tapes on Tuesday when he told Chicago radio hosts Don Wade and Roma that he hadn’t heard of them, in a clip flagged by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Gibson added that “maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.”

Gibson’s executive producer, Jon Banner, echoes that sentiment: “There’s a tremendous amount of – for lack of a better word – ‘noise’ out there. We’re not in the business of noise.”

And he’s got a point. Heck, I saw a lot of these stories percolating on the blogs and Twitter and didn’t get around to blogging about them until they were pretty developed — if at all.  And I’ve long since stopped trying to cover every major story here, going back to focusing just on topics on which I have something to say.

The problem with Banner’s argument, though, is threefold. First, even in the context of a show that gets 22 minutes to cover all the major news of the day, there’s plenty of fluff.  Usually, a good third of the show is filled with fluffy human interest stories. Second, as Jeffrey Lord notes in a tangentially related piece, there’s a pretty long history of the mainstream media gatekeepers keeping a lid on stories harmful to Democrats while running with rumors harmful to Republicans. (Although, to be fair, there are surely examples of the reverse happening.) Third — and most importantly, perhaps — is that the networks are still operating as if they’re the only game in town.  Given that there is now a reasonably mature alternative media percolating these stories to rather large, if self-selecting, audiences, the judgment as to what constitutes “news” has been democratized.  It’s simply unwise for large media outlets that claim to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print” to ignore big political stories when millions of people are talking about them.

Related to the third, because there are alternative media for the left and right, it’s now incumbent on the mainstream press to investigate the big stories that percolate in those venues to ensure that they’re shared outside of self-selected cliques and to present the story in proper context, not just the cherry picked facts touted by the partisans.  Is there more to Van Jones than youthful sympathy with Communists and having put his weight behind the Truther movement?  Is ACORN corrupt at its core or is it merely mismanaged, with a shoddy business model that invites corruption?  Are the Tea Party protesters racist yahoos marching to the tune of Glenn Beck and Freedom Works, a diverse grass roots movement, or what?  The partisan media generally lack both the resources and incentives to report these things.

Update (Alex Knapp):The Daily Show took a look at this last night, and it was both funny and took the media to task on the story:

Update 2 (Alex Knapp): For the record, it appears that at least one of the ACORN workers “caught” in this video was just playing along because she thought it was funny:

ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke is shown meeting with them, telling them that she once was an escort and got away with killing her husband.

But Kaelke insisted Tuesday she made up her story for shock value.

“They were clearly playing with me,” she said “I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

[...]

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke’s former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

Heh, yeah. I would say that talking with someone is generally a good indication that they weren’t murdered.

And of course, as always, there’s some question over whether the videos were themselves selectively edited to make ACORN look bad:

San Bernardino resident Jim Miller, who lives near ACORN’s office and is also featured in the video giving business advice, said he thought the “whole thing was a preposterous production.”

He said he continued talking just to learn more.

Miller, a retired businessman, said he couldn’t believe the people wanted to propose such a “ludicrous enterprise,” but continued talking to them and asking questions to see where it would lead.

In the video, the filmmakers claim they would bring underage prostitutes from overseas

Amy Schur, ACORN’s head organizer in California, said the video is selectively edited. Kaelke repeatedly said ACORN couldn’t help the fake pimp and prostitute, but that does not appear on the video, Schur said.

I have to admit, if I saw two people dressed up in ludicrous costumes asking outrageous questions, I might play along for the fun of it, too, at least just to see where it was going.

Update 3 (Alex Knapp): Whew! After reading a few other stories, it looks like Tresa Kaelke is something of a nutjob. Additionally, and just for clarification, I’m not saying that the ACORN workers in these videos are all playing along or anything like that. Just that they have a side of the story, too. I’m generally inclined towards the more conventional interpretation of the videos (as noted in the Stewart clip above.)

As if more evidence was needed that Sarah Palin is a pop culture celebrity as much as a political figure, she’s now fending off rumors from tabloids and blogs that she’s getting a divorce and moving to Montana.

I take her at her word that these are completely made up but, as David Adesnik notes, “This is one of those stories where truth will out. Either she’s getting a divorce or she isn’t. ”

Jonathan Martin makes the rather odd argument that, by dignifying the rumor, this is all Palin’s fault:

Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman Saturday took the unusual step of posting a statement on Facebook denying an anonymous blog report that the former Alaska governor was getting a divorce and moving to Montana.

[...]

Actually, no journalists had reported the allegations. They were made on an Alaskan blog called “The Immoral Minority,” and then repeated on other blogs, including Gawker, a well-trafficked New York gossip site.

[...]

By having her spokeswoman repeat the charges to rebut them in a public form, Palin effectively guaranteed coverage from the mainstream media that otherwise would not report claims attributed to unnamed sources on an anonymous blog.

But that’s nonsense.  Mainstream media sources — including Politico and including Martin (remember the way premature “John Edwards is quitting to be with his sick wife” rumors?) — report rumor and rely on anonymous sources all the time.  The fact that people are talking about something is often in and of itself newsworthy.  Especially when it’s about Sarah Palin.

When news broke Monday afternoon that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford went off the grid the previous Thursday and that neither his wife nor his staff knew where they were, I was interested but not particularly motivated to write about it.  It was essentially a gossip story that would have been purely speculative and there was the chance that something tragic had happened and I’d have felt like a real jerk for wisecracking about it.

Soon, the story evolved into Sanford’s having gone off to hike the Appalachian Trail with some weird, unsourced rumors that he was doing so bereft of clothing.  I continued largely ignoring the story.

Well, now that he is back on the grid — purportedly after a solo trip to the densely urban Buenos Aires for an exotic drive down the coastline — and has announced a press conference for this afternoon, I’m compelled to write something.

I’ve seen suggestions on Twitter and elsewhere that this is a liberal mainstream media hounding a conservative Republican widely considered a viable contender for the 2012 presidential nomination.  Sorry, folks:  This is real news.

I share Annie Lowrey’s assessment that the story is “bizarre” and that Sanford’s actions were “so vastly irresponsible — not just weird, but irresponsible — for a major public official to do that, in my mind, it disqualifies him for the job.”  I also echo Steven Taylor’s judgment that “I have no problem if a governor or other public official wants a vacation. If his family is okay with the notion of him going off by himself without contact, that’s their business, although I personally find that odd.  However, if one holds an office of public trust, especially a chief executive position, then one should make arrangements for one’s absence, even if it is done in a way as to avoid media attention. To do otherwise strikes me as irresponsible.”

“Bizarre.  Weird.  Irresponsible.”  That’s not exactly an ideal campaign slogan.

See also:  “The Missing Governor: A Timeline” at TPM. and “Mark Sanford’s press conference: A viewer’s guide” at Politico.

UPDATE:   Ugh.  It gets much worse:  Add “Adulterer” to the tagline.

Gov. Mark Sanford says he is publicly apologizing for letting down South Carolinians after admitting he was having an affair during a press conference at the statehouse in Columbia Wednesday. Apologizing to his wife, sons and all of South Carolina, Sanford says he has engaged in a relationship with a “dear friend” from Argentina.

Sanford confessed the relationship between him and the unidentified woman began very innocently through emails, and says over the past year developed into much more than a simple friendship.  Since the development of the relationship, Sanford says he has seen the woman three times.

“I hurt you all, I hurt my wife, I hurt my boys,” said Sanford, with tears in his eyes.  “All I can say is ‘I apologize.’”

Sanford says his family has been struggling with his unfaithfulness for the last five months, noting his wife, Jenny Sanford, and sons knew about his trip to Argentina before he left the country.  “I’ve spent the last five days crying in Argentina,” said Sanford.  Despite his unfaithfulness, Sanford stands by his relationship with his wife, saying they are not “formally separate,” but are rather trying to “work through something.”

Sanford also noted during the Wednesday’s press conference he will be stepping down as the chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association.

John Hawkins offers the unsolicited advice that he might as well step down as governor while he’s at it. He adds, “Sanford was a rising star in the Republican party and it was really sad to see him throw away his promising political career this way.”

Indeed. I’d add: At least we’re finding out now rather than in the midst of the presidential race.

Like many others I’ve been following the events unfolding in Iran with great albeit not obsessive interest. I haven’t been following the tweets for a number of reasons not the least of which is that I can’t distinguish among rumors, reports of actual events, and disinformation. So I’ve been using more conventional news sources and have found the English language the best, not merely because English is the language with which I’m most familiar.

I think The Guardian’s coverage has been particularly good. They’re updating automatically and the updates are coming pretty frequently with lots of good background.

The Times of London has been good, too, although not quite as good as The Guardian.

Next on the list would be the New York Times.

I haven’t found other U. S. sources particularly useful. CNN has lots of coverage but I don’t find it nearly as useful or insightful as the sources listed above. I haven’t found German, French, or Russian language sites particularly useful.

The American Enterprise Institute has started a site called IranTracker. On the site they’re aggregating “incident statistics and map for protests, arrests, and deaths”. They’re listing both corroborated and uncorroborated reports, and plotting them using Google Maps. The graphic above is a screen capture of their map.

I’m not sure of how much credit to give the site. If there’s any validity to the info they’re presenting, the protests have largely been quelled following a violent crackdown by the Iranian authorities and paramilitaries.

I’d appreciate suggestions of other useful sources in comments, particularly from media outside the Anglosphere.

Politico’s Mike Calderone has noticed quite a few Republicans blogging at the left-leaning Huffington Post lately. While its namesake founder posits that” is a reflection of our traffic, our brand, and the fact that we are increasingly seen … as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news,” a more practical explanation is more plausible:

Just as Democrats learned to love — or at least understand — the Drudge Report, Republicans flock to The Huffington Post largely because of the site’s broad reach. In April, The Huffington Post brought in a record 8.8 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen — a number that includes quite a few mainstream media journalists and cable news producers.

“With The Huffington Post, particularly, we see a lot of value in engaging with people who wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to agree with our point of view,” said Coburn press secretary John Hart, who added that it’s one of a handful of sites that can have an instant impact on the national debate.

“HuffPo and [Talking Points Memo] really are the assignment editors for many in the Washington press corps — particularly the cables,” said Brian Rogers, who was a spokesman for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign. “That’s not just a Republican hack saying it — that’s speaking as a press guy fielding calls and e-mails daily from the MSM that start with, ‘Did you see this thing on Huffington Post?’ They were effective and they wasted a lot of our time.”

Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” those trying to influence political opinion will go wherever they can get the most buzz for their buck.  It’s the same reason, incidentally, so many Republicans are willing to go on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.

Barack Obama is taking great pains to reach out to opinion journalists, Michael Calderone reports for The Politico, and it’s paying off.  After some anecdotes about Obama personally calling pundits who wrote negative things with respectful explanations of why they were wrong, Calderone observes,

The communications team for President George W. Bush would have been much more likely to let the initial response stand and then blast the Times after publication — all the better for fanning the passions of a political base deeply distrustful of the mainstream media.

Andrew Rosenthal, The Times’ editorial page director, says the Obama White House has been more “proactive” than the Bush White House was, offering up policy thinkers to more fully explain the administration’s positions — both before and after columns and editorials run. “I’ve had more unsolicited offers for participation from the Obama people in 45 days than in the last eight years from Bush,” said Rosenthal.

[...]

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt said in an e-mail that the Obama team has been “open and responsive” to requests from The Post’s editorial writers. Hiatt said that helps The Post “produce smarter and more knowledgeable editorials.”“My general view is, the more exchange of views, the better,” Hiatt added. “I welcome any outreach from the White House to my columnists or editorial board.”

One could quibble about whether this is a good use of a president’s time but it’s a perfectly reasonable aim. Why not try to influence the influencers?

There’s a downside to all the media-courting, a risk that the new administration will seem preoccupied with the chattering classes from Georgetown and the Upper West Side and therefore out of touch with flyover country.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is sensitive to that perception. As The New York Times Magazine reported just weeks after the election, the Obama campaign “bragged that [Obama] never even visited with the editorial board of The Washington Post.” And Gibbs talked about how “you could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and understand that people aren’t reading The Washington Post.”

But the White House knows that what gets written in Washington and New York filters out into the country — and that it needs support from those who are most likely to get their news from the inside-the-Beltway press, members of Congress, policy wonks and, of course, other journalists.

This strikes me as a silly objection, indeed. Talking to the pundits doesn’t preclude crafting a message aimed at the heartland.  For that matter, a not insignificant number of people live in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

And I think this is right, too:

Part of the reason for [a more aggressive outreach effort than displayed by the Bush team], says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, is that, like former President Bill Clinton, Obama “likes this sort of thing — the exchange with pundits.”

For good or ill (or perhaps both) Obama is an intellectual.  It’s not surprising that he cares what opinion leaders think and write.

Story via memeorandum.  Photo from Reuters Pictures.

Via Taegan Goddard, I see that Harry Jaffe is proclaiming an age of fluff in the newspaper business.

Today’s news is there is no news on the front page of today’s Washington Post. Not one of the six articles on  page A1 begins with a hard news lead that imparts real news to readers.

Welcome to the new age of daily newspapering, where the actual news of the day has migrated to the Internet or TV or radio or the inside pages of the paper.  Bye-bye to the old  “who-what-when-where-why.”

He’s referring to the Friday edition but, alas, his link goes to the current day’s edition of the paper which, oddly enough, contains several hard news items.

Note to bloggers: Screencaps are your friend.Thankfully, Media Bistro understands this important lesson and provides one, which I’ve expropriated for this post.

Jaffe prints a response from WaPo executive editor Marcus Brauchli which strikes me as pretty compelling:

It’s not news when auditors for the company that once was America’s industrial giant express concern about whether it can survive? Or when the likelihood rises that the government might have to acquire what once was the country’s largest bank? Or that the world’s monetary authorities are scrambling to revive the global economy?The front page was thick with news. News isn’t defined by a subject-verb-object lead sentence. We tell our readers what’s happening, why it’s happening, how it might affect them and what’s likely to happen next.  Kimberly Kindy, David Cho and Blaine Harden did something much more difficult than simply reporting what other said or did. Their enterprise work told you what you won’t learn from other sources, but what really matters. Your definition of news would favor news conferences and press releases.

That strikes me as exactly right.

If I were making decisions for the front page of WaPo, I wouldn’t have given above-the-fold space to the Ohio police rescue story, let alone devoted the space to the photo rather than a write-up.  It is a visually interesting photo, to be sure, but adds no news value.

The Limbaugh-GOP fight is probably not deserving of the off-lede, but it’s certainly newsworthy.  And, given that the industry’s in sad shape financially, I wouldn’t bedgrudge using something sexy like that to sell a few extra copies.

But nothing else on the front seems even remotely questionable.

Bloggers, myself included, like to make fun of the “mainstream media.” And for good reason: They do plenty of shoddy work and are frequently sloppy and ignorant in their reporting.   But the great papers, in whose company I’d put the Post, still put out far more quality journalism than crap. Let’s strive to call them out for the latter while not ignoring the former.

The New York Times has investigated Fox News’s report that McCain staffers claimed that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent. As I had suspected, the story was a complete hoax.

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months.

One of the problems with the 24-hour news cycle is that there is a lot of pressure to just get new stories out there, which makes it easier to get stories run on less than credible evidence. In theory, the “new media” of the blogosphere is supposed to be a check on this, right? But bloggers have the same kinds of pressure to keep adding new content in order to keep visits and hits up. The result is frequently that some stories get pounced on right away. This is especially the case because a lot of times this type of story fits conveniently in with a bloggers’ bias. (Indeed, I have been guilty of this myself.)

A little skepticism is always in order.

UPDATE (James Joyner):  An AP story on this matter says, “The hoax was limited to the identity of the source in the story about Palin — not the Fox News story itself. While Palin has denied that she mistook Africa for a country, the veracity of that report was not put in question by the revelation that Eisenstadt is a phony.”

If the hoax is merely Eisenstadt having claimed to the Carl Cameron’s source — when in fact the source was an actual “McCain campaign insider” — the story is still alive.  If, contrariwise, Eisenstadt was the source of the story itself, then it’s dead.

Cernig is outraged at the sex-obsessed American press.

I am now officially disgusted with America’s insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed shores?

Maybe someone can enlighten me as to why the story of yet another politician who ran as a Loyal Family Man but was unable twice to gain the highest of offfices being revealed as a lying hypocrite unable to keep it in his pants is remotely as newsworthy as a full-on war between one of the world’s great powers and a nation which is a vocal ally of the USA. Because I admit I’m utterly perplexed by the allocation of priorities here.

I almost wrote a variant of that post this morning, whilst looking for updates on the Georgia story and noting that the Edwards story dominated the front page of the Washington Post’s website.  I went to the NYT website, though, and saw that the Georgia story was well covered there and, lacking a hook, let it go.

While Cernig and I are generally on the opposite sides of issues, I respect his integrity so decided to give the story another looksee.  It turns out that, while there’s no doubt that the Edwards story is getting major play, the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia story is getting far, far more.  Indeed, even the Olympics is getting more coverage than the Edwards story.

The screencap at the top right of this post is from Memeorandum.  As of this writing (6:37 Eastern Saturday evening) even the blogosphere has made Georgia the top focus [a marked contrast from 7:40 am, when, as Cernig's link shows, the top two-thirds of the page was dominated by Edwards coverage].  I say “even” because it’s a relatively hard story to opine upon, in that almost every political blogger already knew who John Edwards is and understood the concepts of lying and adultery.  Conversely, most are catching up on the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia story.

I went to Newseum, which archives the front pages of virtually every paper in the world, to get a broader sample of the mainstream papers.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The major national papers all gave more prominent treatment to the Russia-Georgia clash than Edwards.

The New York Times:

The Washington Post:

The Wall Street Journal:

Even the conservative Washington Times, which presumably has no love for Edwards, did so:

My hometown paper, the Anniston (Alabama) Star did, too:

Indeed, the only paper I checked that played the Edwards story first — and rightfully so — is the Charlotte Observer, the major paper in Edwards’ home state.

I tend not to watch much television news but I presume that the 24/7 coverage skewed towards the Edwards scandal.  But that’s, no pun intended, a sexier story.

I must admit, I’m surprised by this outcome.  The publishers of papers around the country chose to highlight a story that was very unlikely to sell papers over one that would.  Let’s face it, the average person is much more interested in celebrity sex scandals — and this one has plenty of good angles to it — and not than in foreign policy.  Much less conflicts over obscure secessionist areas.

Let’s face it, most Americans were only vaguely aware until yesterday that there’s a second place called Georgia.  I have my PhD with a specialization in national security policy and would only be somewhat more informed about this conflict than the man on the street if I hadn’t been surrounded for the past several months with smart people who study European politics for a living.

Both Mark Hemingway and Ross Douthat have linked to these recent Pew polling numbers, which indicate that Obama has one point less white evangelical support than Kerry did at this point in the 2004 election. Douthat notes that this isn’t actually good news for McCain:

Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in ‘04. I’d choose the latter reading. In July of 2004, only 4 percent of white evangelicals said they were undecided about whom to vote for. Now 12 percent say that they are – and while it’s possible that nearly all of those undecideds will come home to the GOP once the chips are down, undecided voters do tend to break against the incumbent party, which seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.

Mark Hemingway, on the other hand, notes this news with a bit of glee:

Despite all the hype over Obama’s religious outreach, a new Pew survey indicates Obama actually has slightly less support from evangelicals than John Kerry had at this point four years ago. Not that this translates into evangelical enthusiasm for McCain, but the survey is worth noting for no other reason than it challenges the prevailing media assumptions about how Obama’s overt religiosity is helping his campaign — which my better half details here.

Personally, I think that both Douthat, Pew Research, and Hemingway are all missing the boat on this one. The story here isn’t that Obama’s score is one point less than Kerry’s among Evangelicals. The story here is that right now, Obama is leading among religiously affiliated voters with a score of 45-43. In 2004 at this point, Bush led among religiously affiliated voters 50 – 44.

Clearly, it’s tougher to make comparisons among religious demographics at this point, because there are much larger numbers of undecided voters than there were in the comparable 2004 election. But the fact that Obama is winning among overall religious voters even as he’s losing among evangelicals points out what should be obvious: despite the media narratives of the past couple of decades, Evangelicals are not the end-all, be-all of religious communities in the United States. Which makes the idea that Obama’s “religious outreach” is unsuccessful because Evangelicals largely support McCain less than convincing, and somewhat insulting to the vast majority of religious Americans who aren’t Evangelical. Last time I checked, they vote, too.

Image credit: neilalderney123’s photostream

Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides have collaborated on a paper, still in late draft stages, entitled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics.” A PDF of the working copy is available here.

Henry reports that,

[B]log readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like. Furthermore, blog readers are politically very polarized. They tend to clump around either the ‘strong liberal’ or the ‘strong conservative’ pole; there aren’t many blog readers in the center. This contrasts with consumers of various TV news channels, as the figure [thumbnailed at right] illustrates. All of this suggests that blog readership is unlikely to be associated with the kinds of deliberative exchange between different points of view that some political theorists would like to see.

Sides adds,

Only 6% of political blog readers named both left and right blogs. Thus, most blog readers are “carnivores” rather than “omnivores”: they like partisan red meat, as it were. This is the self-segregation that the paper discusses.

I’m clearly an outlier, a right-of-center blogger who not only reads from both sides of the aisle but reads predominantly the other side. I suspect this stems from my tendency to read blogs written by academics and journalists, which skews the choices of quality blogs available to me.  Further, I’ve got numerous commenters from the left, right, and center.

That aside, the results don’t much surprise me.  After all, we’re a polarized polity right now, so it stands to reason that we’d see the same in the blogosphere.  Given that the mass media outlets to which blogs are compared in the chart above are ostensibly “neutral” whereas the blogs are openly biased, it’s remarkable how polarized the audiences of the former are.

Further, as I’ve discussed perhaps ad nasuem in posts over the past five plus years, most blogs are frankly unreadable by those not sympathetic to the point of view of the author.  This holds true even when one excludes the 90-plus percent of political blogs that are unreadable, period.   Few people have an appetite for being rudely insulted on a regular basis, having their intelligence, decency and patriotism questioned.

Writing for Slate, Tim Noah nails exactly why the possible destruction of the Earth later this year when the Large Hadron Collider is switched on isn’t getting much attention in the press:

I can well understand why the Times doesn’t want to give sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or around Labor Day. In addition to the civic-minded concern that this might create worldwide panic, there are practical matters of self-interest. If the possibility weren’t realized, as most scientists seem to expect, then the Times would look foolish. If the possibility were realized, it would have no opportunity to collect a Pulitzer, because the Times, the Pulitzer board, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which gives out the award, and every last Times reader would all be obliterated, along with the rest of the planet.

Makes sense to me.

When I first started the blog, a little over five years ago, most of us wrote constant posts about blogging. Mostly, I suspect, this was just a function of the novelty of the medium, as evidenced by the plethora of mainstream media stories on blogging during the same period. Both trends have settled down to a trickle in recent years, though, as blogging has become more established.

There has been a recent surge of metablogging, though, on the sites that I read regularly. Megan McArdle, noting the spate of hirings of bloggers by media outlets and think tanks, believes that the supply will soon run out because “the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job.” Several of her readers resent the idea that bloggers want to sell out, anyway.

Professional blogger Kevin Drum, commenting on a recent proposal for the Netroots to organize a boycott of Fox News, points out that bloggers aren’t nearly as influential as we think we are, noting that the nomination process in both parties has proceeded in a manner not to the liking of their respective blogospheres.

Law professor Stephen Bainbridge ties these together noting that, with the handful of exceptions, “blogging tends to be the hobby of people with full-time jobs who do it because it’s more fun than stamp collecting.”

That’s right and certainly describes my venture into the blogosphere. At the same time, though, the political and public policy blogosphere is no doubt heavily dominated, as Megan suggests, by academics, journalists, and others who have the resources to devote to their hobby. As I wrote a couple years back,

People who are passionate enough about politics to obsess about it 365 days a year, even in non-election years, are likely candidates for graduate and professional school. Grad school also helps hone writing and research skills, which are useful to bloggers. Further, the jobs one gets with that kind of education are more conducive to providing time to read, write, and think about things.

Still, I’m not sure that looking at the top 10–or even top 100–bloggers tells us all that much about “blogging.” Technorati is “currently tracking 53.2 million blogs.” Presumably, some substantial number of them are defunct or are updated once every six months. Then again, there are likely a large number of blogs not tracked by Technorati for one reason or another. My guess is that something like 52.9 million of them are written by people who are non-professionals.

Furthermore, I’m not sure why amateurism in the sense of not having a clue about the things one opines about is all that desirable. The lure of political blogs, to me at least, is that one often gets better insights from them than from the professional punditocracy. Many if not most of those who are regulars on the television and radio talking head circuit simply don’t have much to offer as commentators. They might be attractive and have soothing voices but most of them are just recycling the conventional wisdom. Many of us watched those shows and thought “I could do better than that!” but had no way to prove it.

The beauty of the blogosphere is that an obscure law professor from Knoxville can build an audience of millions simply by putting his words out there for free and having people gravitate to what he has to say. Or a former MLRS crewman fresh out of law school can build a media empire that has changed the way a major political party raises money and runs campaigns.

Neither InstaPundit nor DailyKos are likely to change the outcome of a democratic nominating process, let alone decide an election. But, considering the avenues available to similarly situated people just a few years ago, their ability to influence the debate is nothing short of remarkable.

Elizabeth Edwards, who despite no public policy credentials other than having been married to a one-term senator and yet oddly seems to get op-ed space in the major papers whenever she requests it, has a rather strange editorial in today’s NYT whining about how the mainstream media is failing in its duty to inform the public.

The first several paragraphs make the silly argument that the press covers only the drama of the race and ignores the issues, with the effect that “voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.” This, frankly, is nonsense. There’s so much information out there that it’s virtually impossible for those who can’t devote full time to immersing themselves in it to read it all. And who are these people who are simultaneously starving for information about Joe Biden’s health care proposals and yet lack Internet access? Presumably, there are people who are poor and don’t work in a connected office who are interested in public policy. But there’s always the public library.

Interspersed in this is a more interesting, if not particularly novel, complaint: That the press decides who the legitimate candidates are.

What’s more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. Just to be clear: I’m not talking about my husband. I’m referring to other worthy Democratic contenders. Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden’s health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.

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Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

This is fair enough. Then again, Thompson was a more plausible contender than Dodd or Vilsack or Brownback for the same reason that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Barack Obama — are relative novices — were. It’s a Catch-22: Candidates with name recognition and decent poll numbers are deemed legitimate enough to warrant press coverage but without press coverage it’s very hard to build name recognition and poll numbers.

Then again, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul managed to do so.

The press, while holding a certain public trust, is ultimately not a collective but rather a myriad of private businesses that together form a web. Do we really expect the Big 3 networks, already losing viewers at a rapid rate, to devote their 8-12 minutes of nightly political coverage equally among all declared candidates? Or to spend it on the eye-glossing details of Joe Biden’s health plan rather than the interesting kerfuffle of the day?

Similarly, newspaper circulation is declining in almost every market. Papers have more space to devote to features than the television networks and, sure enough, they provide more in-depth coverage. But how often are they supposed to print charts comparing the health plans of the various candidates? If they do so once, are they good? Or must they do so repeatedly to reach occasional readers or those who happened not to read that particular edition?

Here’s the thing: If the public displayed an appetite for these things, the businesses would cater to it. Instead, readers demand more comic strips, horoscopes, recipes, movie listings, gardening tips, “human interest stories,” “good news,” and so forth.

At the same time, though, the incredibly tiny minority of us who are interested in public policy have more ability than ever in human history to get that information in as much detail as we want, as often as we want, and at a time that is convenient to us. That’s a pretty good trade-off.

John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Mitt Romney, and the others lost, not because the press didn’t cover them properly but because the public looked them over and didn’t see them as “presidential.” It’s probably true that most people couldn’t tell you much about the health plans of these guys. But, really, who cares? There was never much chance that these people would be president. Why waste your time reading their white papers?

Ben Armbruster, a Think Progress research associate, reports that the press is giving John McCain soft treatment because he invited some of them over for a barbecue recently. His evidence?

The Associated Press published an article this afternoon that focused solely on the fact that, even though he has access to a charter plane, McCain took a train from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia. More than that, the article praised him for it, calling him a “man of the people.” Yet two sentences later, the AP included a detail of the trip that completely undermines that claim:

John McCain traveled like a man of the people Friday morning, riding an Amtrak train to Philadelphia after a late night of voting in Washington.

“Nice to see you, nice to see you,” McCain said to workers and passengers who greeted him on the 8 a.m. high-speed Acela Express train.

McCain, accompanied by a campaign aide, was left alone by the public as he sat in the first-class car for much of the 1 1/2 hour trip. [Emphases all in original.]

Having taken the Acela Express from DC to New York once upon a time, I can report that the 1st Class accommodations aren’t much to write home about. Nor are they, as is typical for air travel, expensive (which explains why we splurged).

Out of curiosity, I went to the Amtrac site to check out ticket pricing from DC to Philly (WAS to PHL, if you want to try it yourself) on a random Friday morning. It turns out that coach seats are very hard to come by if you’re booking early morning trips without much advanced notice; that’s especially true on the Acela trains, which run less frequently. Indeed, there were no coach seats for the morning of March 21st or March 28th.

One-way business class for an 8 a.m. departure the 21st will set you back $122. At 9 a.m. the 28th, $137. In both cases, the 1st Class upgrade is $69. You hardly have to be Bill Gates to afford that.

While it’s silly to classify McCain as a “man of the people” for traveling by train — or perhaps period given his relative wealth — it strikes me that Libby Quaid was simply saying that he was out mingling with the people rather than cloistered away on a private plane as is customary for someone in his position. Indeed, “traveled like a man of the people Friday morning” seems to suggest that he doesn’t travel that way otherwise; it’s virtually a simile.

My Ruckus colleague Oliver Willis takes Armbruster a step further: “The biggest obstacle to a national conversation in the election this fall will be the way in which the mainstream media will run interference for John McCain.” Barack Obama is welcome to host barbecues and grant reporters the level of access McCain has. Indeed, I’d welcome it. There are serious risks to that much exposure. But, undoubtedly, there are rewards.