Jonah Goldberg writes in today's Townhall.com that the entity known as the "blog" (short for web log) got it's start many years ago through the beginning of a conservative revolution. Mr. Goldberg writes:
In many ways, the real story of the bloggers' triumph is the story of a right-wing (though not always conservative) populist uprising that started half a century ago. The story begins with National Review's founding in 1955 and extends through five decades of steady, heavy and difficult work. In the 1970s it was Spiro Agnew's denunciation of liberal media bias that ultimately resulted in William Safire getting a job at the New York Times. In the Wall Street Journal, the late Robert Bartley's op-ed page opened a new front in the heart of elite daily journalism.
Don't let the word "conservative" fool you. Rebels on the right were pioneers in the political exploitation of new and alternative technologies long before anyone knew what blogs were. Led by Rush Limbaugh, conservatives even revived AM radio, making it a major source of a populist backlash against liberal-controlled institutions. Cable profoundly transformed politics. C-Span alone did more to demystify government than a generation of muckrakers - or bloggers - ever could. CNN pioneered the steady erosion of the Big Three Networks' stranglehold on information. Later, Fox News soon destroyed CNN's stranglehold on 24-hour news.
Jonah Goldberg also answers liberals that think they are part of this Blog Revolution:
Left-wing bloggers believe they are part of the same "revolution" as right-wing bloggers are. They're not. The conservative blogs are the shock troops of a decades-long battle to seize back the culture. Conservatives have always had to rely on "alternative media" - magazines, AM radio, blogs - because the Mainstream Media barred the door to conservatives. And even when they let a few token ones in, they had to be labeled "conservative" first and journalists a distant second. The lefty blogs are something else entirely. They represent - much like the still lame liberal talk radio and the new liberal think tanks - an attempt to copycat conservative successes. Their fight is not with the monolithic mainstream media (or academia) but with the usurpers. Politics is not a battle of technology. It is a battle of ideas, and therein lies all the difference.
UPDATE: Just because the left-blogs are not part of this particular revolution does not mean they are not purveyors of ideas. As The Weekly Standard's Dan Barnett points out, the left-blogs can go from wacko conspiracy theories to sophisticated political observervations in a single hour:
...in perhaps the clearest sign to date of the Kos community's growing strength, this past weekend Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey echoed Regeneration Man's suspicion, saying: "They set up Dan Rather. Now, I mean, I have my own beliefs about how that happened: it originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House."
NOT ALL of the commentary on Daily Kos is ridiculous conspiracy mongering. Many of the commenters are sophisticated political observers who offer keen insights. The discussion that followed a recent Moulitsas post disparaging the Democrats' professional "strategists" is instructive in this regard. Moulitsas's item was thought provoking and worthwhile--he posited that the Democratic party's strengths are in its grassroots (as personified by his website) and that the establishment strategists' efforts to move away from those grass roots have been disastrous. The conversation that followed the "strategists" post was similarly mature.
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