Daschle : Limbaugh :: Liberal Critics : Blogs

Speaking at the “Revenge of the Blog” conference at Yale Law School yesterday, Featured Speaker Mickey Kaus asked (among other things), “Why are bloggers so right wing?” (Excellent report of his speech, questions, discussion, etc., appears on LawMeme.)

His answer: “reaction against left-leaning media bias…. Why should left-wingers become bloggers when they have the New York Times?”

Now compare Howard Kurtz, writing on “Dashle’s Rush to Judgment” (obviously judgment of Rush) in the Washington Post today:

What may really rankle Daschle is that Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North and a slew of like-minded local hosts have honed radio into a scathingly effective message-delivery system…. [T]hey have emerged as a real force that is driving Democrats up the wall.

The search for a left-wing Limbaugh has failed — Mario Cuomo was among those who tried to fill the vacuum — in part because conservative listeners hunger for an alternative to what they see as the liberal mainstream media.

So, the dominant political voice of both the old media, radio, and the new media, blogs, is conservative because both are rebelling against the liberal monopoly of the established mainstream media (New York Times, Dan Rather, NPR, etc.).

Interesting.

ADDENDUM – According to the notes of his keynote address on LawMeme, Glenn Reynolds made a similar point (or a point that I will argue is similar):

Most importantly, he’s learned first-hand the real value of free speech. When you get a lot of traffic and email from people, you learn how smart people can be, and how many smart people are out there without Ivy League credentials, or jobs that you would associate with smart people. And that’s an experience that, Reynolds feels, more academics should have: academics simply don’t appreciate the general intelligence of the general public.

That disdain for the intelligence of most people (or at least most people who live in the “red” states) also permeates the establishment media and the people whose understanding of the world is shaped by it. It is my experience that people who see the world through lenses provided by the New York Times, NPR, Macneil/Lehrer, Dan Rather, et. al. not only disagree with but literally are scornful of people who listen to Limbaugh, watch Fox News, etc. In that sense at least, bloggers and Limbaugh-listeners share a democratic distrust (and for many of the Limbaugh-listeners, resentment) of the cultural elite who produce and consume the established media.