To read Ed Driscoll’s “top ten blog moments of 2004,” one would think that there isn’t a left side of the blogosphere at all. Year-end pieces are fun, but if you’re going to claim to be comprehensive, you should at least acknowledge there are people out there who disagree with you. Driscoll sort of assumes that what’s important and beneficial to him, a conservative, is what’s important and newsworthy generally. That’s the exact same sort of hubris he accuses the mainstream media of harboring.

The headline to his piece ought to be, “top ten blog moments of 2004 of import to conservatives.” For every example of alleged Democrat voter fraud uncovered by Bill Hobbs, Kos or Atrios found an example of GOP-perpetrated fraud, suppression, or like shenanigans. The story wasn’t that blogs documented and catalogued nasty things those terrible Democrats were doing. It was that blogs emerged as an extra line of defense against voter fraud on behalf of either party.

And for every stunt, prop, half-truth, or trick pulled by the Kerry campaign that the rightist blogs exposed, I can point you to something dumb, fake, misleading, or false the Bush campaign did that the leftist blogs exposed. I read both throughout the campaign. The most remarkable thing about blogs and the 2004 campaign was just how ready formerly independent voices on both sides were willing to spew out official campaign talking points, eschew criticism of their own guy, and otherwise fell into line in order to get their man elected. Both candidates were deeply flawed. If you ask me, the story of the year with respect to blogs and the campaign was how readily the allegedly-independent blogosphere became an apparatchik — just another campaign tool, really — for either party. Glenn Reynolds is generally a free-thinking libertarian, a guy who ought to have railed against a little more than half of Bush’s campaign platform. Yet other than a few posts on stem-cell research, Reynolds had nary a negative word for his guy. Smart people on the left — Kevin Drum comes to mind — did the same for their own guy.

And though I’m no fan of Michael Moore (and I had no desire to see either movie), conservatives exalted The Passion and bashed Fahrenheit 911 with all the polemicism the left inversely displayed for each movie. The lesson there, methinks, is not that the right side of the blogosphere “uncovered” bias in media reviews — reviews are by definition biased, and it’s never been a secret that arts critics lean left — it’s that rightist blogs proved they can let bias cloud a detached look at a film’s artistic merit just as an ivory-tower left-wing critic can.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2004 at 9:44 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.