Robert Cox’s article in the Examiner is absolutely on target:
But it’s not just Google’s media and financial muscle that benefits the left. Liberals run the leading blog search engine  Technorati. They run the leading blog software manufacturer  Six Apart. They invented two of the most important blogging technologies  Podcasting and RSS. The list goes on and on.
It may not matter who manufacturers your radio since all points on the dial are equally accessible and the choice is tiny compared to the number of Web sites, but on the Internet, where popularity is often directly proportional to technological acumen and popularity, once achieved, breeds more popularity, who builds what means everything.
Malkin may have been the first casualty in the coming information war but she certainly will not be the last. Yet online conservative elites seem not to care. They fail to realize that voters are increasingly accessing news and information from these new media sources and that these sources are using their editorial discretion to publish and promote a liberal  not conservative  agenda.
Cox is wrong about one thing: the Information War is here. Right now.
Look at the attack that shut down Lieberman’s web site during the primary. Look at last week’s exposure of a fake web site designed to baffle the American voter with bullshit about Foley’s IM habits. Look at the constant, blatant, alteration of historical fact at the Wikipedia. Look at the Left’s agenda in the DOI to ’disappear’ conservative web sites.
Look, moreover, at the Google purchase of YouTube. Google knows exactly what it’s doing. $1.6B is chump change when you’re paying for the ability to shape American elections in the future. Backed by its billions progressive Google, which even now censors its news feed to omit news sources with which it disagrees, can do incredible damage to our democracy. Google boss, Eric Schmidt, believes within 5 years, someone will have produced a political truth-detector program.
He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programmes to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.
But, Eric, you are in charge of truth. A web site doesn’t effectively exist if Google ignores it. Your algorithms separate exposed news stories from unexposed news stories. Google’s ability to selectively focus our attention affects us all. Even if your personal motives are benign, I can’t trust you. In the future, you may be replaced by someone who hates me, and he will have all the means of communication in a vice.
In short, the Left has first-mover advantage. The Right is still clueless about that concept. The Right, with its appreciation of the traditional virtues, is stuck in the last century, not even aware of the magnitude of the current attack–not even aware an attack is in progress. At the speed of current technological development, I’d guess we have about 2 years to work with to assure an even playing field. I’m serious. While the Right is busy patting itself on the back for its civility, the Left is sealing the exits.
Unless those at the helm wake up–and wake up very soon–we will find the Left’s lock on political reality assured and discover that the unlimited freedom of speech we enjoyed through technology was only a valediction before silence descended.
Update:
This is what you get when the means of communication are controlled by those with an agenda.
Yesterday the Brussels newspaper Le Soir ran a front page article about the problems in the important Brussels borough of Schaarbeek. The paper says it had been widely known for three months that a member of the Turkish Grey Wolves was a Socialist candidate there. (It should be noted, however, that Le Soir, the largest paper in Brussels, failed to disclose this to its readers until yesterday, well after the elections.) The election of Murat Denizli, Le Soir says, has led to “open warfare and an identity crisis†within the PS because the Grey Wolves are know to be “ultra-nationalist, racist, anti-European.â€Â
Do we get guns?
That’s very interesting, Ahem. I wrote Malkin a week ago about this:
What we need, as a first step, is an in-depth determination of who owns what, what their political affiliations are, etc. Second, we need a rating system administered by a third-party auditor.
I would suggest a third step. Once the listings are compiled with some sort of rating number, they should be setup in presentable form so every site that cares to can advertise same. Otherwise if you have just one or a “few” posting sites, you can bet they’d be under DOS attack from the Left, 24/7/365. We all know how the Proggs really feel about free speech.
Of course, Hewitt might be a bit blind to that trend because of the state of the TTLB Ecosystem, in which the top 30 looks like this (dextrosphere in bold):
Higher Beings
1.Instapundit.com (4512)
2.Michelle Malkin (4292)
3.Daily Kos: State of the Nation (3487)
4.lgf: a sane moral compass (3275)
5.Captain’s Quarters (2838)
6.Power Line (2775)
7.Stop The ACLU (2669)
8.Talking Points Memo(2247)
9.Boing Boing (2062)
10.Stock Picks, Stock Market Investing (2013)
Mortal Humans
11.The Volokh Conspiracy (1993)
12.Mudville Gazette (1883)
13.Eschaton (1837)
14.RealClearPolitics (1834)
15.Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish (1823)
16.Hugh Hewitt (1788)
17.Wizbang: Explosively Unique… (1688)
18.Hot Air (1634)
19.The Washington Monthly (1617)
20.The Huffington Post (1546)
21.BLACKFIVE (1455)
22.Crooks and Liars (1442)
23.Think Progress (1365)
24.http://imao.us/ (1323)
25.the evangelical outpost (1310)
26.La Shawn Barber’s Corner (1284)
27.ScrappleFace (1279)
28.Dean’s World (1245)
29.Cox & Forkum Editorial Cartoons (1222)
30.Winds of Change.NET (1198)
Add up the numbers and it’s
41497 dextrosphere
15364 sinistrosphere
Not even close.
dicentra: Good point, I concede.
But.
The blog rankings of the TTLB Ecosystem reflect–however imperfectly–the state of things as they are at this very moment in time. TTLB is a right-wing blog; its objectivity relative to any other source of data is anyone’s guess, but let’s assume for the moment that it is accurate: Right blogs are significantly more popular right now than Left blogs.
One reason for this might be that citizens sympathetic to the Right have ‘gone underground’ to obtain information they can not find elsewhere and, thus, constitute the preponderance of those who support blogs. You probably realize that mainstream media has served Americans–even those from the Left–very poorly in the last few decades by presenting a one-sided view of reality inimical to intellectual freedom. This disparity is the main reason for the recent ascendance of talk radio on the right: it fills an intellectual void.
Intellectual deprivation is also one of the main sources of energy in the blogosphere. Conservatives and libertarians thirst for intellectual freedom, for the airing of opposing views. So they support blogs.
Blogs are less important to liberals than they are to conservatives because a blog is inconsequential if you have the whole weight of the traditional media behind you. A liberal or progressive can take for granted the daily airing and acceptance of certain ideas to which they are sympathetic. Conservatives can’t.
Therefore, the prospect of a technologically-driven agenda intent on enforcing an intellectual status quo is alarming.
Lets look at that attack. Maybe he should have hired a decent liberal webmaster, and gotten a dedicated server.
Thats 1.6 billion in stock. How much did google’s market cap rise as the deal was announced? I heard something like 4-5 billion. This was a freebie.
But why this fascination with putting google in ‘the left’ ?
The sinistrosphere, and the leftist memefactories have always been keen at over-representing themselves and their importance. It is a strategy to make up for lack of real power.
TW: Respect the fist of justice!
It has largely to do with what they choose to consider valid news and commentary, which appears to us as quite biased.
COuld you explain? because this is the first time the word ‘valid’ appears in this thread or the linked article. I’m missing in your shared assumptions.
Understatement of the fucking year.
B Moe
Well, for starters, even though I respect cultural differences, eating people is wrong.
I’m at work and can’t engage in debate, but this link explains a lot of it:
http://newsbusters.org/node/5477
dicentra,
In analyzing the TTLB ecosystem list you might have a point if (a) NZ Bear ever UPDATED the damn list; (b) you had also considered the TRAFFIC ecosystem not just the LINKS ecosystem; (c) that you had not picked the biggest outlier – NZ is the only conservative I know who owns what might be called an important “node”.
There is a more accurate, more frequently updated list that is far more widely used by blog readers and by media organizations to make their “Top 10” lists.
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/
Even if you take out the blogs that are not overtly political yet owned by liberals (like some of the tech and pop culture blogs) the math does not look quite as good.
Bob Cox
Dan, you know I’m a fan of your posts and comments, so I feel compelled to remind you that you are on the verge of wasting your time trying to have a rational argument with a dissembling, sewer-dwelling weasel.
And for folks just stopping by —
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
Why do the regulars at PW ignore actus above all others?
Good question. The short answer is that he is to be ignored because he is a chronic dissembler, a sewer-dwelling weasel, utterly lacking in common decency. But perhaps some backstory is in order.
This is the guy who was excusing Jeff Goldstein’s blog-stalker. Let’s review the history. When Paterrico blogged the topic, the loathesome Liberal Avenger’s response was:
Patterico responded:
Then actus jumped in:
Keep in mind, actus has been to law school and knows that mental illness does not excuse criminal conduct unless the person does not know right from wrong, as Frisch admits she does. But what did he write?
actus tries to pretend he didn’t write that, claiming that what he said was that “she was so wrong as to appear crazy!†That’s dissembling, because he knows mental illness generally does not excuse sociopatic conduct, let alone the appearance of mental illness. Other lefties, like criminal defense attorney Jerilyn Merritt were able to simply condemn this sociopathy without excuse; actus was not, which speaks volumes.
The other reason you know it’s dissembling is because it fits the actus modus operandi. Regular PW readers and regular Patterico readers know that actus goes to both places to snark in order to pick ridiculous fights. It’s what he does. For that matter, note that he did so at Patterico, not here at PW, where it might well have gotten him banned in the heat of the moment. He knew exactly what he was doing, and so does every regular reader at both blogs.
The actus modus operandi is also on display in a later thread at Patterico, in which he defends GiGi’s fabricated garbage about Rush Limbaugh and underage prostitutes.
Everyone should visit the thread where I confronted actus with his vile garbage to enjoy the spectacle of the loathsome little creep melting down into a puddle of laughable dissembling, profanity and otherwise childish behavior.
This bit is nice also, in which actus tries to pretend he’s not comfy defending GiGi’s fabricated filth, only to be confronted with what he actually wrote, which, for the record, was:
Mind you, he has no sort of direct evidence about teenage prostitutes, but maintains it’s not baseless. And that he does not condemn the admitted sleaze.
Above the entertainment value to regular PW visitors, the linked threads should inform any new visitors that the odds of having a reasonable discussion with this mope are slim to none, with slim already on the train, heading out of town.
This is why the PW regulars deal with actus as they do. It’s really not even ignoring so much as shunning him due to his chronic bad-faith dissembling, his apparent comfort defending the indefensible, his (as RiverCocytus put it) “spittle, splutter and spindoctoring.â€Â
Or, as Christoph susccintly put it at Patterico:
Regular PW readers and regular Patterico readers know it. And now folks just stopping by know it.
Bob Cox:
I posted not to refute ahem’s point but to show why Hewitt may be dismissive of the alarm going out.
I agree, the fact that Google, YouTube, Technorati, and other big referrers, compilers, search engines, and aggregators are in the hands of libs is distressing to say the least. Most of YouTube’s patrons wouldn’t care about the dextrosphere’s cries of “Unfair!” as long as they can post whatever inanity strikes their fancy.
This morning, Bill Bennett responded to a caller who was fed up with BB’s complaints about the Alien Media Nation, saying that since the Right has radio, all’s fair.
Bill forgot to point out that the radio consists of PUNDITS who comment on news items, but that the NYT, WaPo, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC are huge information-gathering machines that have the budgets and connections to send out reporters into the world and find whatever they’re going to find. If a reporter hears about something that s/he doesn’t think is relevant, it doesn’t make it into the MSM bloodstream and therefore the Right-side punditry never gets to comment on it.
Same with bloggers. Charles Johnson can’t post anything that a reporter hasn’t posted somewhere else. With the exception of a few citizen-reporter items (zombie’s adventures in SF come to mind), Charles’s reach is limited by what someone else decides to post. He can’t pop through a monitor in Afghanistan or the Oval Office to see what the real situation is.
All blogs have the same problem, including the lefties, but they have the benefit of the MSM, which shares their biases and therefore are more liable to report stuff that interestes them.
While Robert Cox may be right to sound the alarm, instinctively I thought of two words: Fox News.
At a time of liberal / left television media monopoly, Rupert Murdoch saw a void and filled it.
Are there no right / patriot search engines and video file sharing services? No matter how small they are, shouldn’t we aggressively use and promote them?