Journalists and bloggers alike, wonder why blogging has a preminence of right-wing blogs. All the analysis I've seen has been wrong.
Steve Richards, in an article on political blogging, writes in the Independant;
"Probably part of the reason for the blogging hyperactivity on the right is the current turmoil in the Conservative Party. When a party seeks a new sense of direction after three election defeats there is scope for endless debate, heightened by fleeting moments of fuming anger and joyful euphoria.
Presumably in the late Seventies and and early Eighties, there would have been addictive blogs putting the case for Tony Benn. They would have been countered perhaps by must-read sites from those heading for the SDP. I guess left-of-centre bloggers would have flourished when Labour was overwhelmed by civil war. Now Labour is more settled and will be thrown into blog paradise/crisis only if it loses the next election."
This is nonsense. The reason so many people come to conclusions like the one above, is because they have come to regard the MSM - the mainstream media, as the norm; a balanced status quo by which the Blogosphere is judged.
But the MSM is heavily weighted by two factors, both in favour of the Left. Firstly, Britain's - and the world's - biggest news media, the BBC, are wholly Left Wing. Nearly all its output is flavoured by its entrenched Liberal worldview. Many BBC employees have never worked anywhere else since they were recruited from the pages of the Guardian after having graduated. Secondly, the MSM is paralysed by the zeitgeist of fear concerning "offence" which pervades all print and speech media. We live in a Victim Culture and its effects are not always apparent, but reading the pages of Britain's newspapers after a Muslim bombing is salutary. Any criticism of a racial group is littered with clumsy legal safeguards, taking the form of praising certain sections of a group whose members have just blown a bus up, or wandering off-topic to enable throwing in some abstract criticism of certain indigenous Britons - in order to appear "balanced". It's is almost as if MSM journalists have to write in a codified English to get over a message which is then made somewhat ambiguous due to that coding.
The blogosphere is free (for now) of all that clutter. Here you can get your views raw, without the dissembling that political correctness inflicts. So, I would say to Steve Richards and all others who share his views, that the Blogsphere represents the natural order of opinion when you take away the statist financial leg-up and legal/social repression that buoys the Left in the MSM. Without these artificial aids, the Leftwing view sinks to its natural position.
