Right-wing blecchosphere acting as a conduit for anti-Obama memes

You probably wouldn't be surprised to hear someone suggest that the right wing of the blogosphere is little more than a vehicle for pushing hateful memes against prominent Democrats and liberals into the public discourse, but one brave blogger has actually compiled data showing this to be true, at least in the case of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama (yes, that's right, I said presumptive nominee.  It's all over but the cryin', Taylor Marsh!).

Over at Bloggasm, Simon Owens took a look at four prominent right-wing blogs and lived to write about it: Michelle Malkin's blog, Power Line, Redstate, and Little Green Fuhrers Footballs.  He found that for all 4 blogs combined, more than three-quarters of their posts featuring Barack Obama focused on non-policy issues:

Policy issues the blogs covered include Obama’s views on Iraq, the economic slowdown, the housing crisis, the gas tax, immigration, and the war on terror.

Non-policy issues the blogs covered include Rev.Jeremiah Wright, Weathermen founder Bill Ayers, “bitter” comments about rural voters, his decision to wear a flag pin, and his alleged elitism.

Redstate fared the best in Simon's study, and their numbers may have upped the curve a little bit: a little over a third of their posts focused on policy.  Redstate's numbers constitute nearly half of the data used, and after removing them from the data pool, the remaining three blogs come out looking much, much worse: only 13% of their posts featuring Obama dealt with policy.

Malkin, Power Line and LGF are the worst of the worst as far as the right-wing bloggers are concerned, and my guess is that most conservative blogs - or at least the mainsteam ones - skew more toward Redstate than toward the other three as far as their coverage of Obama is concerned.  I'd be interested to see what the data looks like for, say, Instapundit, or The Corner.  But I think that Simon has already gone above and beyond the call of duty in having to sift through the Republican muck that he has so far, so perhaps I'm asking too much.  He's certainly made of much stronger stuff than I am, and I tip my ten-gallon hat to him.

Comments

[oneken]

mozey over to snopes.com and see the horseshit re obama floating around the internet these days. and there's surely more to come..

[Big Tex]

Ugh, I just did as you suggested, and some of that stuff is ugly even by contemporary standards. And it's early, too - the right-wing attack machine hasn't even really gotten started in earnest.