Flipping through the channels this Saturday I made the mistake of dropping by MSNBC's weekend Horserace Hardblogger show. What a friggin' crock. They made note that Slate.com and Salon.com were both nationally recognized and democratic. They went on to say that they were both being dwarfed in traffic to the likes of Daily KOS which they stated was one of the top rated bloggers. They also made note that democrat bloggers had been aranging bus trips to battleground states to blog. Hopefully, this piece is strong enough to directly tie MSNBC to the ranks of officially democratically biased.
Let's start this thing off at the top: Slate.com is a sister website to MSNBC in the MSN parenting structure. That would indicate to me a democratic bias. The opinion paper being put out by the parent company is democratically biased would direct me straight away to believe that their news agency was as well.
Now for the Daily KOS, Markos Moulitsas. He is one of the hottest bloggers in the sphere according to N.Z. Bear's TTLB ecosystem. He is the number two "pundit", second only to instapundit, Glenn Reynolds. Although Glenn tries to err on the side of independent he frequently and unapologetically errs on the side of republican. But these aren't the only two guys in the sphere. Let's roll down the top 10 on the TTLB:
Instapundit - Republican
Daily KOS - Democrat
Talking points memo - Democrat
The Drudge Report - Republican (barely)
Atrios - Democrat
Little Green Footballs - Republican
Andrew Sullivan - Democrat
The Volokh Conspiracy - Republican
Blogs for Bush - Republican
The Washington Monthly - Democrat
Tally: D:5 R:5
This gives the demographic representation that there is no real superpower in the blog realm. There is no super organized democrat group. If anything, it shows a super organized republican group: Blogs for Bush. All others are individuals with followers, dictators if you will.
But that's not the end of the KOS story. I no longer know where the article is but KOS actually gave credit to the Bush bloggers for being a more organized group of bloggers. It looks to be that the Democratic Republic of MSNBC is not giving us the whole story. Talk about trying to create the news.
I almost forgot: we ride busses too.
Update: I almost forgot the most important blogger in the entire ranking structure. N.Z. Bear himself (gatekeeper of the ranking structure) is on the Bush bandwagon.
Update again: Washington Monthly has just been bumped from the top ten buy everyone's favorite Dan Rather killer POWERLINE! That changes the score from 5/5 to 6/4 (7/4 if you include N.Z. Bear).