Matt Pressman reports that liberal magazines are declining under Obama and conservative magazines are booming. James Joyner adds:
With some notable exceptions, we’ve seen the same trend in the blogosphere and, to a lesser extent, cable news. The right-leaning blogs dominated in the early part of the last decade, spurred on by outrage over Islamist terrorism. By the early stages of the Iraq War, though, the left-leaning blogs had a readership explosion. The top blogs of both sides have continued to do well since then but we’ve certainly seen an upswing in the traffic at InstaPundit, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Hot Air, and other blogs that have capitalized on the Tea Party Movement and anti-Obama sentiments.
This is pretty much standard experience in these things. Journalists are at their best when exposing power rather than defending it. And as consumers, we like a good rake-over as much as the next punter. But I'd like to know where Joyner's stats are for the blogs he mentions. It would be interesting. The Dish kept almost all its traffic in 2009 that it gained in 2008, and 2010 so far is way up on the first two months of 2009. Maybe my non-phony fiscal conservatism has some tea-party fans out there. I was criticizing the spending when Bush was in power, after all.