Information Gaps on the Right
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 24th, 2007 1:34 amMemeorandum’s Leaderboard just went up. I think this can inform the lively discussion on how conservatives get information that Joe Carter and Soren Dayton are currently engaged in.
The Leaderboard is an interesting metric. It’s not about popularity, or even actual reach. It’s about who provides original information that then becomes fodder for commentary. So Daily Kos is way down on the list. The Politico (Martin, Smith, Simon, Allen, etc.) and the Atlantic (home of Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan) are very high, along with the big newspapers.
Looking at the list, I can identify two information flow problems for the right, neither of which have to do with “blogs” as commonly understood:
- The “leans left” character of the information behemoths at the top — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the AP.
- The lack of “feeder” blogs that act as a source for original research, breaking news, and reporting (the TPM network, Think Progress).
It seems kind of old fashioned to keep harping on the tyranny of the mainstream media, especially as a blogger. No, it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be. But the agenda-setting power of old media remains huge. As a re-elect staffer, I can tell you it was palpable and everywhere in 2004, especially in the spring and summer months when they tried to keep Bush down with an Iraq/jobs narrative. Nothing expressed this power better than ABC’s then-dominant The Note (e.g. of “Kerry’s race to lose,” “Halperin Memo” fame), which rarely if ever made reference to blogs, rued Drudge, and waxed poetic on the iron lock the media had on the news cycle, in which New York Times would set the agenda for the cables and for that evening’s news.
To be fair, they vastly overestimated the power of a dying system. Rathergate was a real punch in the gut. And that fall’s coverage was primarily horserace-driven, so they couldn’t ignore the Bush lead.
In 2006, the media narrative about GOP scandal, etc. was also very powerful, but you can’t say they made it up out of whole cloth. Still, does anyone believe the coverage would have been as ferocious had Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha, Fortney Stark, and Bill Jefferson been the protagonists?
In 2008, the media’s decision to cover the Democrats at a 2:1 or 3:2 ratio over the Republicans is also agenda-setting, and has arguably had real consequences for fundraising. Their decision to cover Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as “celebrity”-candidates is important, especially when Rudy Giuliani and John McCain had similar claim to “celebrity” status based on their wide appeal. This media interest has meant that Clinton and Obama have had real success raising money online.
And the Bobby Jindal story is also a litmus test. The fact that an Illinois state senator with few accomplishments got fawning coverage when he first ran, while the younger Jindal’s storied accomplishments and unique narrative are A17 news speaks volumes.
“Conservative media” is downstream media — talk radio, talking heads, columnists, opinion sites, blogs. Liberal media is upstream media — print, some TV, and high-level “feeder” blogs like TPM and ThinkProgress that do their own reporting and frame narratives. This equation means that conservative voices are represented, but only after liberals get the first crack. This anecdote from Soren speaks volumes:
I was at a recent panel, not at FRC, where a Republican asked a reporter why the reporter didn’t write about the conservative perspective on the S-CHIP bill. The reporter responded that he never heard that perspective. His friends were almost all liberal and they talked about the lefty argument. He had a couple of libertarian friends who told him the libertarian argument. No one ever told him the conservative-populist argument.
Conservatives can get their message across through dedicated channels, but it’s always going to be the “alternative” viewpoint. About 50% of Memeorandum is mainstream “news.” About 30% is partisan — split pretty evenly between left and right. The rest is the long tail. Holding our own in that 30% doesn’t matter much if the other 50% leans left and dominates the narrative.
Iraq is illustrative of this emergency. The fact that we have to scrounge for change between the pillows to send guys like Jeff Emanuel to do real reporting in Iraq is a disgrace. There should be a standing $10 million annual investment to fund 50 embeds in Iraq at a time, who can not only churn out readable 900-word pieces but can also do video from the front, including when the guns go off. All this original reporting should be aggregated on a dedicated channel like Politico, ThinkProgress, or OfftheBus. There should be a partnership with Fox News to provide video in places mainstream reporters won’t go.
The lack of such an infrastructure is not for lack of interest. Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff, Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.
Every movement or media phenomenon starts with amateurs improvising. But at some point it has to be professionalized if it’s going to be sustained and grow. The new progressive movement started with guys like Atrios, who then got picked up by Media Matters. Dozens of lefty bloggers are employed by the new lefty infrastructure. As far as I know, Erick Erickson at Red State, and possibly my Townhall co-bloggers MKH and Matt Lewis, are the only ones employed full time by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Blog Division, who aren’t primarily journalists and as such have real freedom of action.
The Left also seems to be developing a lead in powerful feeders mechanisms that do little more than tee up information for other blogs. ThinkProgress provides a valuable service to the left by leveraging a full-time research staff to be the first to report and frame up news stories. Their content is rarely witty and original and isn’t meant to be. It’s just meant to provide context and a prod for others to cover these stories. The research backing also means they do the legwork to connect the dots in ways that bloggers rarely do. If John McCain says something today, they’re all about telling you what he said about the same thing in March, what he said in 2003, what he said in 1999, and so on.
Republicans have research operations as sophisticated if not more. The challenge is that they’re tied up on campaigns, the RNC, Congressional leadership, think tanks, etc. They can only release information that supports their message on any given day. Or they’re focused on long term policy studies, not day-to-day political battles. To the extent they’re “official,” they’re also seen as less credible. If any of these operations could release the majority of their work product on a blog, it would be incredibly powerful. But they’re prevented from doing so, for institutional reasons.
If someone has $2 million to throw around on Rush Limbaugh’s letter, then someone has a few million to spend on a blogger-journalists to investigate Democratic corruption or on a sustained project to get out different storylines about Iraq or to set up an open-source research operation to more closely bracket the coverage. And it doesn’t have to be done through any existing institution, with all its offline encumbrances. The Politico, already at #4 on Memeorandum, shows the power of doing it as a startup.
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Jeff Emanuel has direct experience in exactly what story leads his readers to hit “CONTRIBUTE NOW”.
Don’t you think he’s tempted to write the storyline that pays, over and over again?
This is not an attack on Jeff…but it is my skepticism of socalled “independent journalists”.
Patrick, I agree. This is exactly why we need a media infrastructure to help free the journalists from their ‘biased’ audience.
Isn’t that what think tanks are for?
Come to think of it, left-wing blogs appear to be doing “battlespace preparation” in trying to discredit think tanks in general. Maybe we should try devising pro-think-tank memes.
[…] PATRICK RUFFINI HAS A NICE POST addressing how “Conservative media” is downstream media — talk radio, talking heads, columnists, opinion sites, blogs, and ”Liberal media” is upstream media — print, some TV, and high-level “feeder” blogs. […]
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[…] GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication: Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box. […]