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Glenn Greenwald points to this Atlantic 50 listing, composed of:
[T]the [50] most influential commentators in the nation, the columnists and bloggers and broadcast pundits who shape the national debates….Our in-house methodology…:
* Influence: A survey of more than 250 Washington insiders…
* Reach: Comprehensive data collection and analysis to measure the total audience of each commentator
* Web Engagement: …the Wire analyzed top commentators on 16 measures of webiness, including mentions on Twitter and performance on popular social media sites like Digg and Delicious
The final list is the result of an algorithm that brings together these three factors.
Seven of the top ten are Reichwing pundits, two liberal, and the last is Andrew Sullivan.
Paul Krugman is 1st, but Glenn Greenwald is 22nd, Josh Marshall is 29th, and Bill Moyers 32nd. In contrast, Limbaugh, Will, Friedman, Brooks, Krauthammer and Beck are 2-7. Rove, Hannity, Broder and Noonan are 10-13. Rachel Maddow and Arianna Huffington are 14 and 15. And so on in each group of ten making up the top fifty.
Unexplained is the weighting among ephemera such as Twitter hits and "performance" on popular social media sites, and substance or how frequently commentators are proven correct/incorrect. The "top 250" Washington insiders surely listed those to whom they owed allegiance, as self-referential a criteria as one could use.
The list is overwhelmingly rightwing to in extremis. The Atlantic could have saved itself a lot of trouble and algorithms by calling these the Village Fifty. It’s what they came up with. So much for "liberal" as a descriptor of today’s media.
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The Simple Explanation
Liberals listen to pundits for information to form their own opinions.
Conservatives listen to pundits to learn what to think.
Great to have you back, Earl. Long time, and I’ve missed the posts.
What’s liberal about the press is how the right wing spin is applied.
The Less Simple Explanation
The Media is an integral part of the Conservative power structure. They dominate the rhetoric in the media. Ask any statistition, the statistacal mean rhetoric of the media coverage MUST move further right due to the volume of stories revolving around Conservative behavior, opinion etc.
The greater media coverage of Conservatives, their actions, opions, behavior; the more conservative conversation around the seminal watercooler gets.
Let’s face it, Conservatives are more entertaining. Liberals are, on a whole as interesting as glisten on piss.
Liberals are doing exactly what Conservatives want…talking about Conservative stuff.
Conservatives like Beck and Limbaugh are entertaining in the way that it’s entertaining to watch scorpions dance with each other inside a circle of flame. They are not entertaining in the way that Jon Stewart or Matt Damon is, or even the way Johnny Carson was. They don’t relieve or inform, the put fear and loathing into your beer, your soup, your salad and your fries.
Major newspapers were often in alignment with the power structures of their day, as were film and distribution and radio companies. Today, they are most often wholly-owned subsidiaries or treat politicians as if they are the ones wholly-owned.
Information for liberals is a nutritious broth; for authoritarians, it is poorly targeted chemo-therapy. Not being informative makes Reichwing media more attractive to authoritarians, while it disgusts liberals. It’s the money and clamor it provides that makes most politicians quail and some salivate. The few with courage look on it like Neo seeing through the Matrix construct directly to its software code.
Entertaining
That’s all the Consertive punditry is. It’s not about fact or truth. It’s entertainment.
It’s JUST like sports. If your team is good or has one or two good players, then you’ll get a good following which then results in good player salaries, more merchandise sold, higher tickets sales, more media coverage, more influence etc etc. It doesn’t matter if your behavior is good or bad, on or off the field as long as you’re…entertaining
So the right will always have more influence as long as they are more entertaining…It doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong or if what they say is true or false.
MOST FANS OF CONSERVATIVE PUNDITS DON’T CARE IF THEY ARE RIGHT OR WRONG AS LONG AS THEY ARE ENTERTAINING
But unlike sports at the end of the day, everyone is affected in a major way. That’s not entertaining.
Seriously, how is your webiness today? Small, medium, or ducky?
Including Tweedledum, Tweedledee, Tweedledumilydee, Tweedledumdum, etc.
The only place the liberal media exists is in the twisted pretzel brains of the republics.
Any list of fifty influencers that, right now, excludes Jane Hamsher (who is single-handedly driving the progressive blogosphere’s attempts to preserve Public Option in health care reform) isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on or the pixels that light it up.
Thoroughly insider-y. I mean, really — George Will, proven wrong over & over on global warming?
My Webiness today is Truthy.
Apologies to Cobert.
Tweedledum, Tweedledumber, and Tweedledumberstill, I’d say.
This list is completely crapola not worth the paper it was printed on… But of course all the Reichwingnuts poll better.. their readers are much more vocal as they can’t stand that man of Color is in the White House… Why else??
Oh yeah their readers are sheeple who must be told what to think!!
How irrelevant. Who’s the last A, B, or C list pundit to lose their job for being wrong?
Who the hell were they asking? Bet Krugman hates being right next to Rush
Ducky? I thought he was a forensic pathologist for a former UCLA star quarterback turned Naval investigator?
I guess that points out FDL’s anachronistic emphasis on being lucid, literate, funny and factually correct, which could also be described as a 4.0 on the Jon Stewart Scale. Washington Willage pundits can get by with a 0.5, so long as they are pushing whatever the Reichwing wants to sell and the Base will swallow.
Main Street America? It needs meat, potatoes, jobs, drugs and education that won’t sicken or kill you or make you more ignorant than when you started.
They won’t get much of the latter, for example, if American film distributors are so flaccid they won’t distribute in America a Victorian period drama about Charles Darwin’s thoughts and letters. How parochial; perhaps the Galapagos finches and turtles lacked the requisite sex appeal, or T.H. Huxley wasn’t charismatic enough with his waistcoat unbuttoned.
Another point…liberals and progressives are not “personality centered”. Most of the blogs I read are not attributed to a single individual, but the result of collective efforts. The right-wingers, and even those attributed to as moderates in the above are all about “me”…not us.
In fact there is no little degree of circularity about this….
[T]the [50] most influential commentators in the nation, the columnists and bloggers and broadcast pundits who shape the national debates….
They’ll primarily get self-inflated, egotistical, selfish, credit-claiming, blowhards.
Oh GOODY!
Let’s highlight the righties in this list and wave it in their faces when they complain about the liberal media in 3…2…1…
Top 10 lists are always pretty silly, but I do love it that Glenn Greenwald is 22 and Joe Klein is 38 just because that must be driving Joe nuts.
Yeah, can’t help but wonder what Joke Line is going to bitch about at the next beach party…
I liked that part best.
Also? Rachel, 14.