Attack of the Clones

Many people wonder why there aren't any good local blogs from the Left. By that I mean smart, well written, and regularly updated blogs featuring commentary on politics and culture in general. Any examination of the local scene will show, by far, the weight of quality amateur Internet editorializing on these subjects falls on the Right.

I think the primary reason for this disparity is that the mainstream media already adequatley presents the perspective of the Left on these matters, every single day, over and over again. Numerous media outlets employing hundreds of professional, highly educated journalists to articulate their exact feelings on politics and life. So, there is no motivation for amateurs to take up the cause.

On the other hand, conservatives who have come of age in this town over the past 15-20 years have been universally frustrated by the monopoly on news coverage enjoyed by the Left. And pre-Internet, there was no efficient means of countering the biased media. You read what they wrote, complained about it to your friends and family, wrote letters to the editor which may or may not be published, and in the end, you had to helplessly live with it.

But, with the advent of the Internet came the potential to counter the mainstream media and to have the chance to share these unedited and unfiltered views with a mass audience (whether that's 50 people or 50,000). My original blogging impulses were exclusively motivated by being fed up with the absolute nonsense that regularly goes on within the news coverage of both the Pioneer Press and Star Tribune, to say nothing of the "hopelessly imbalanced, increasingly shrill and often just simply inaccurate or incomplete information" on the editorial pages. (The latter description courtesy of Governor Tim Pawlenty.) And since no one else was doing it in the mainstream media, it seemed like a good way to invest my time. (And it still does.)

Until there is more balance evident in the mainstream media, I'd expect the serious blogosphere to continue to have a decidedly right wing tilt.

However, there is a source that continues to spawn dozen of blogs, nearly all of them liberal in orientation. Not coincidentally, that source is the mainstream media itself. Locally, there is the City Pages (the local free alternative weekly), which has its 30 or so Babelogue blogs, nearly all of which are extreme left wing in perspective. Both the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press have started getting in the act too. From their pathetic attempts to do news cycle linking to their dating blog, all are written by liberals who also happen to be newspaper employees.

Today I ran across the latest attempt by the mainstream media to blog, the Pioneer Press's Webb Blog. It's written by their Washington correspondent,Tom Webb, and this week he's at the Democratic National Convention. Like any newspaper reporter, he's officially non-partisan, just reporting the straight facts ma'am. But never fear, he does revert to typical media form. This is his commentary today, describing the appearances of 6th District DFL candidate Patty Wetterling and Republican Senator Norm Coleman at the convention:

Wetterling spoke at the Minnesota delegation breakfast, delivering a calm and quiet speech that was decidedly low on partisan bombast. "I do believe together we can carry this forward and restore hope in our lives," she said.

The partisan blasts will today come from U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who will be roving from TV camera to TV camera to undermine the Democrats. You won't have to tune into C-SPAN to catch Norm. No matter what station you're following, he's likely to turn up.

There hasn't been a successful mainstream media sponsored blog in the Twin Cities yet. I find it hard to believe that condescending, sniffing elite Tom Webb is going to be the first. Those needing their sniffing condescension fix already read Nick Coleman.