Hugh Hewitt provides an analysis of the rapidly-increasing impact of the blogosphere, and determines that while the Leftist site have floundered, the center-right has expanded its reach and credibility. His Weekly Standard column will certainly prompt a furious debate in the blogs today:

While the lefty blogs are helping to push the Democrats over the cliff, the center-right blogs continue to grow in influence and to innovate. Two examples deserve widespread attention.

First, let us now praise Day by Day's Chris Muir, the funniest and sharpest three panel political cartoonist at work in America today. Muir's timeliness and productivity have created a large audience for him online, which is growing wider and wider as new blog consumers arrive in record numbers. Many bloggers routinely cite or even carry the Muir strip of the day (an innovation I first noticed at Captain's Quarters), and Muir's popularity further strengthens the center-right blogosphere's vast humor advantage over the relentlessly profane, vulgar and snarling left. ...

The second significant development is the recent launch of Power Line News by DAILY STANDARD contributors John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, and Paul Mirengoff, who have been writing at their blog Power Line for years and who were Time magazine's Bloggers of the Year in 2004 for their work in exposing CBS and Dan Rather as gullible victims of a crude fraud. But the trio is no longer content with exposing mainstream media absurdities. Now they are about replacing one of mainstream media's remaining utilities: That of news aggregator and editor.

I wouldn't go so far as Hugh does to say that the port side of the 'sphere has hit the shoals. The Ohio 2nd CD race showed that the more rational among them can organize pretty effectively, although they couldn't beat the GOP in the end. However, it does seem that the Left's more influential sites continue to push the teeming masses ever further towards a radical-left agenda, leaving the center more and more undefended and open for socially-moderate Republicans to fill. Hugh mentions Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, but I could also mention Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal, Karol Sheinin at Alarming News -- all of whom, incidentally, have branched out into talk radio.

Read all of Hugh's analysis, and especially consider what the continued radicalization of the Left's bloggers might mean for 2008 -- the kinds of candidates that will get the rhetorical and financial support they can generate. It should make for an interesting year.

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» The Information Reformation from Don Singleton
The Dems have become a party of hate, so their blogs just magnify that hate, while conservative blogs, frustrated at the MSM's refusal to tell the whole story, focus on the facts the MSM tries to hide. [Read More]

Tracked on August 18, 2005 10:31 AM

» Is There An Echo, Echo, Echo In Here? from Beltway Blogroll
Conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt penned a column for the conservative Weekly Standard today. Now conservative bloggers are going gaga over all the praise Hewitt heaped on his compatriots in the center-right blogosphere. The liberal blogosphere had simi... [Read More]

Tracked on August 18, 2005 3:57 PM