Les Jones

Blogging > Right vs. Left Media Sensations

Mike Gebert, commenting in a Tim Blair discussion of Arianna Huffington's new celebrity group blog:

How a right-leaning media sensation starts:

In the middle of nowhere (the Internet, the University of Tennessee, 10 in the morning on AM radio, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire) a right-leaning commentator practices his craft, getting better and better at it largely under the radar of the mainstream media until one day it wakes up and notices that a Drudge, a Limbaugh, an Instapundit, a Fox News is kicking its butt and reaching an audience of millions.

How a left-leaning media sensation starts:

Already-famous showbiz/politics people announce that they’re going to start something to combat the dominance of rightwing viewpoints. This gets a huge amount of ink from the leftwing press, and sets them up for a huge failure when their amateurism and low initial numbers are revealed to the whole world in Week 1. This failure is the focus of every news story about them for the next, well, forever.