New York Times Claims Blogosphere is Mostly for Democrats

Sometimes I think that if you really want to know what’s going on in the world, you should read The New York Times…and assume the exact opposite is true. Take Saturday’s article “Gathering Highlights Power of the Blog” for example. Author Adam Nagourney visited Las Vegas to attend the meeting of mostly liberal bloggers discussing how they’re going to change the world in an event called “Yearly Kos” not so inconspicuously named after the blogosphere’s liberal mainstay, Daily Kos. Unfortunately, after listing and quoting some Democrat dignitaries in attendance – quotes to follow for your amusement! – Nagourney actually wrote (emphasis mine), “Blogging is nowhere near the force among Republicans as it is among Democrats.”

Really, Adam? And exactly how did you come to this conclusion? Could you provide some statistics to support this assertion, or did you pull this non sequitur out off your…hat?

In reality, the data quite refute Nagourney’s contentions. NewsBusters executive editor Matthew Sheffield recently compiled some statistics on this very subject that quite go counter to this report. Now, to be sure, the two most popular political “blogs” as measured by Alexa are the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. Yet, as the following list demonstrates, ten of the top 20 political blogs are conservative leaning: 

MOST POPULAR POLITICAL BLOGS
(Based on SiteMeter data and Alexa estimates)
1.  Huffington Post         530,000*
2.  Daily Kos     490,261
3.  National Review         355,000*
4.  Raw Story               354,152
5.  Free Republic           255,000*
6.  Crooks and Liars        177,634
7.  Instapundit.com         142,855
8.  Michelle Malkin         131,645
9.  Eschaton                115,447
10. Talking Points Memo    110,000*
11. Common Dreams          105,774
12. America Blog           101,450
13. Little Green Footballs 100,098
14. Firedoglake            65,888
15. Power Line             65,723
16. NewsBusters            54,899
17. Wizbang                48,475
18. Washington Monthly     43,642
19. Hot Air                39,779
20. Hugh Hewitt            35,976

However, this data don’t tell the whole story. After all, the granddaddy of the blogosphere – and still by far the most powerful! – is the conservative leaning Drudge Report which, on a daily basis, receives more visitors than all of the top twenty blogs combined. In fact, on Friday Drudge got 12.6 million visits.

How does that impact your “Blogging is nowhere near the force among Republicans as it is among Democrats” premise, Adam?

Beyond this, two other extremely popular conservative websites – NewsMax and World Net Daily – aren’t figured into blog rankings because they are not considered blogs per se. Yet, their existence does pull from the total available traffic looking for conservative opinion on the Internet.

As such, when you add the daily visits of the Drudge Report, World Net Daily, and NewsMax to those of the top seven conservative “blogs,” these numbers thoroughly dwarf the visits to the top liberal blogs by at least a factor of ten.

This suggests that Nagourney’s view of a Democrat-dominated blogosphere is as accurate as Al Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet.

Speaking of goofy statements made by Democrats, here’s what Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) was quoted by the Times as having said about blogs: "One of the reasons I so admire them is they have the ability to spread the truth like no entities I've dealt with in recent years.”

Isn’t that delicious? Here’s a guy that is regularly quoted and referred to quite favorably by all of the drive-by media stating that blogs “spread the truth like no entities I've dealt with in recent years.”

I guess from that statement, Harry, we can assume that, in your view, The New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN aren’t spreading the truth?

Thanks for making our case for us, Harry, and fully validating the mission of NewsBusters and the Media Research Center.