Dean's World

James Joyner notes a study which says that leftish blogs pull in more ad revenue than rightish blogs.

I said most of this in James' comments, but it bears repeating: The real reason they do better rests in who controls the White House and, to a much lesser extent the Congress.

Let a Democrat take the White House in 2008, and you will see a surge in right-wing ad buys and interest. Do you really think Drudge would be anybody today if it weren’t for Clinton? Or Coulter? Rush Limbaugh was at his height when Clinton was in office.

If you want to see what’s going on in the political blogosphere today, The Life and Death of the American Spectator by Byron York. It's a fascinating study in a right-wing magazine that reached absurd heights of popularity, and then completely flamed out, on Clinton-hating obsession.

I suggest reading the article carefully, and noticing certain things: the small network of fanatically rabid and often irrational partisans, working outside the beltway, feeding insatiably on anything that remotely hinted of scandals; the breathless belief that the administration was the most dishonest, slimy, and dirty one in history; the notion that our freedoms were on the brink of totalitarian collapse as a result; the multimillionaire financiers; the obsession, the obsession, the obsession.

See any difference between that and what goes on at places like Daily Kos every day, or in the machinations of people like Michael Moore and George Soros? Except for the wider use of the internet, I see none at all.

What I hope is that after another ten years or so of this, most people will start to notice what really goes on with this stuff.

But then, maybe not.

Anyway, read that piece on the American Spectator.

* Update * I just noticed by link to the article on the The American Spectator went to a page that was incomplete. I've found a new URL that has the whole thing, so click the link again. (Yes, it goes to the Free Republic folks. Just deal with it, it's a good article.)