http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/20/fox-tba-bloggers‘Fox News All Stars’ Bash Progressive Bloggers: They Make It ‘Difficult To Get Any Problem Solved’Last night on Special Edition, the “Fox News All-Stars,” used this week’s Take Back America conference as an oppurtunity to bash progressive bloggers. Describing bloggers as “a pox,” Roll Call editor Mort Kondracke compared them to right-wing talk radio, charging that they are preventing “American problems” from being solved:
KONDRAKE: And They are the leftward pressure on the Democratic Party that the right-wing talk show hosts are on the Republican party. And between the two of them they manage to polarize even further an already polarized politics, making it increasingly difficult to get any American problems solved, like health care, or the war in Iraq, or sensible terrorism policy.
NPR’s Mara Liasson also compared bloggers to the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth because “that was on the internet too.”
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer added that conservative blogs are “more analytical and restrained” while “the more liberal blogs are a lot more pungent and profane.” Watch the entire segment:
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Transcript:LIASSON: I would say the Democratic Party is most influenced by its bloggers.
I think that the liberal blogosphere has become an important constituency group in the Democratic party, just like the labor unions, or the civil rights groups, the way that Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader meets with them like he would any other constituency group in the Democratic party.
I think that they have, as Mort said, have been responsible for making the Democrats more partisan, more confrontational, and pushing the party to the left.
HUME: And the sources of their influence, is it their readership or is it something else?
LIASSON: I think it’s both. They have both been able to raise a lot of money.
HUME: The bloggers?
LIASSON: Yes, the bloggers and the internet–
HUME: Are you talking about the bloggers or the activists websites?
LIASSON: Well, I’m talking about both. The activist websites like Moveon.org– Moveon.org along raised $27 million in the last cycle. And Moveon.org members, there are three million of them, every cycle give about $100 million on their own to candidates, all of them, presumably, Democrats.
So they raise a lot of money, and they also create a kind of echo chamber, and they do keep stories alive that would otherwise die. And, look, we saw this on the right, the swift boat veterans, that was on the internet, too.
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