Blog Bias

The liberal blogger Kevin Drum has a list of who he thinks are interesting conservatives. And the conservative writer Daniel Drezner posts his pick of interesting liberals.
Matt Yglesias points out that the people on Kevin’s list aren’t really conservatives. They’re libertarians. They’re centrists, moderates, social liberals. And Matt notes that left-wing bloggers don’t represent the left very well; they are more likely to be white and male.
I’ll add that bloggers are more likely to be well-educated on both sides of the political spectrum. At least we’re all news junkies, which is part of the reason we write about current events in the first place.
I find the right side of the blogosphere a lot more agreeable than conservatives generally. The Religious Right appears to be absent. If it has a blog presence, I haven’t found it. Who in blogdom supports Pat Robertson? Are there any Jerry Falwell fans with Web sites that don’t have yellow backgrounds and screaming exclamation points at the end of every sentence? A big chunk of right-wing America just hasn’t discovered this yet. Maybe they’re all still stuck in talk-radio land.
But left-wing America is all over the blogs. Maybe not demographically, as Matt Yglesias notes, but ideologically. The ultra-left is bogged down in the Indymedia quagmire, but it’s a miniscule fraction of America, much smaller than the Christian Right. Maybe they do have blogs but no one links to them because they can’t find Shift on the keyboard.
Libertarians are over-represented on the Internet. That’s not a new observation. But we can make the same point in a different way: the blogosphere is more left-wing than America by an order of magnitude.