Bloggasm

Simon Owens: Which conservative bloggers do you think create the most spin? And if you had to pick a conservative blogger to label a worthy adversary, which blogger would that be?

Elton Beard:I don’t read too much from the other side any more because of a severe aversion to the word “kerfuffle” but my impression from watching CNN is that the PowerLine crew and Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine are big these days. Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg are still of course the dominant intellectual luminaries on the right, and I hear that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame is as reliable as ever.

For my conservative interlocutor of choice I’ll have to nominate Marc Danziger (AKA Armed Liberal but don’t let that fool you) from Winds of Change who I’ve enjoyed debating in the flesh.

SO: Do you think the media hinders the political process at all? What aspects of the media are good for politics and which ones are bad?

EB: I wouldn’t say the present-day media hinders the political process. What it does is much worse – it corrupts the political process. It does this through mechanisms ranging from unwitting acceptance of conservative and particularly neoconservative assumptions through unidirectional bend-over-backwards fairness all the way to false reporting and dishonest editorializing, the latter often intermixed and indistinguishable. Examples range from Judith Miller’s pre-war writing in the New York Times to the whole of Fox News, with many points in between.

The news media can facilitate democratic politics by reporting honestly and factually on events – including the identification of falsehoods and unsubstantiated assertions as such, even when uttered by respected administration officials. When the news media converts itself into a visual-soused entertainment medium with a newsy, truthy theme in order to never offend and frequently cover up for the powers that be who return the favor through legislation then Houston, we have a problem.

SO: Is there any other emerging forms of media other than blogs that seem to be affecting politics today?

EB: Not that I can tell. But I don’t exactly see blogs having a huge impact on national politics either right now. On the right they’ve mostly been assimilated into the Republican daily meme machine and the Democratic establishment already seems to get all the advice it needs from the likes of David Broder and Lanny Davis.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

EB: That’s easy. Eschaton, The SideShow, Hullabaloo, firedoglake and uggabugga. I’d like to add one more name, though, so can I substitute alicublog or Needlenose or Norbizness or Sadly, No! or Sisyphus Shrugged or skippy or Talking Dog or TBOGG or Whiskey Bar instead of mine?

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