WOIFM

John Leo discovers weblogs

Conservative columnist John Leo discovers weblogs:

Political bloggers are overwhelmingly right of center, either conservative or libertarian. The conventional wisdom is that the strong rightward tilt is a reaction against the mandatory liberalism of the modern newsroom.

While this may be true now, it hasn't been the case for very long. Obviously Mr. Leo missed the Golden Age of Weblogs, where I could count on one hand the number of bloggers I would consider "right of center."

(Of the 23 blogs listed in jjg's "ye olde skool" list - the only onces known to exist in the beginning of 1999 - only Wes Felter could be considered libertarian, and none would be anywhere close to conservative.)

Now, and especially since September 11, conservatives have discovered weblogs, and they've taken weblogs to the next step - by and large, they're more prolific than the old school, and for the moment, they've embraced causes which are widely popular even outside the conservative school. The combination of volume and consevative populism had made the new wave of webloggers a formidable force. As more readers discover weblogs for the first time - including journalists - they inevitably stumble across the high-volume sites that everyone else is linking to in a frenzy of head-nodding and high-fiving.

So... now the media thinks that conservatives dominate the weblog world. If that's true, is it bad that conservatives have found a voice in blogging? Absolutely not. This last wave of webloggers have offered something the weblog community hasn't seen since the very first wave - a strong contribution to the public discourse. Unlike many of their peers in the intervening time, these bloggers are collectively making an impact on political discourse on the web.