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Right wing blogs are no better than mass media elites because they fail to provide space for, or promote access to, user-generated content, claims a recently released Harvard study. The work of a trio of researchers, the study—the most detailed to date regarding political blogs—correlated data collected from the top 155 political blogs and concluded that left blogs tended to provide more avenues for non-core contributors to have their voices heard, as well as more egalitarian ways of promoting secondary content to readers.

Until now, most academics found that no significant differences existed across the digital DMZ in the battle of ideas, that the roles left and right blogs perform in our democracy are similar even if their viewpoints are not. The Harvard group, from the onset, set out to shake the ground under those assumptions.

The report published last month by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University contains the quantitative results of a careful and innovative analysis of the top 155 political blogs conducted over a two-week period in August 2008. While previous research in this area has focused on rudimentary link analysis (How many links to others sites are made from a blog? Do links cross partisan lines?) this most recent study gathered a more detailed set of data in order to provide a foundation for discussing what effect, if any, the political blogosphere is having on democracy in practice.

The Harvard group aimed to address attributes of blogs they deemed most important in a thriving democracy: “who is enabled to speak, who can be heard, and to what ends.” These questions are important as we begin to continue to evolve our understanding of Nicholas Negroponte’s vision that automated access to all information would coalesce in what he called the “Daily Me.” Increasingly, our reality is that blogs and other media compete for the right to define the Daily Us and the Daily Them in ways that can have enduring political effect.

With those grand issues present, the researchers evaluated each site not as an entity, but as an organic society in miniature. Characteristics such as the number of primary authors, the accessibility to secondary content, the pathways available for non-core users to contribute to a dialogue, and the style of primary content were cataloged and correlated with the blog’s ideological perspective. Using this new approach, the scholars isolated disparities between left and right blogs.

First, a larger percentage of right blogs were authored by a solo writer. The data also indicated that methods for users to participate beyond submitting comments to posts (for example, user diaries, bulletin boards, or forums) were absent from an almost equal percentage of right and left blogs, 87 percent of blogs on the right were found to use simple publishing platforms (think Blogger, or stripped-down WordPress) compared to only 57 percent of left blogs. The Harvard team appear to have extrapolated from this a conclusion that enhanced platforms were a technological means indicating equalized access to content from both core and non-core users. Their conclusion, if it can be called one, was made without benefit of any supportive data. Gathering that additional level of information might be the basis for further study but would rely on greater participation by blog administrators, a factor that would potentially poison any data gathered.

The new method constructed by the Harvard group produced a more detailed set of statistical data than prior efforts to quantify blogosphere activity and should therefore be regarded as a huge step forward in the study of how blogs are affecting American political communications. How the team used their data to support a cascading set of successively weaker conclusions, however, suggests that using only quantitative analysis may not be a useful in evaluating political communications in any meaningful sociological or political context.

For example, cited frequently in the report as a shining example of democratic participation is the left’s megablog DailyKos.com, which, despite its status as the high diving platform into the shallow end of the left-wing pool, has to be recognized for its monumental success in attracting users and promoting a form of political discourse. Nevertheless, applying the logic in the report’s conclusions, a site like DailyKos, because it gives almost equal status to both primary and secondary content and offers a variety of ways for user to generate content and for users to access same, has greater value as a participatory engine in the free marketplace of ideas than an information fountain like Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit. In this way, the Harvard study comes to some shaky secondary conclusions because it cannot evaluate the quality of the content.

By stretching the argument contained in the study’s conclusions to the extreme, by off-loading a bus of mental patients at the Capitol and giving them the right to engage in floor debate we would have a richer and more valuable dialogue for our democratic society. Although some might cynically argue that the great lunatic surge on Congress has either a) already occurred or b) that the net effect would, in fact, be positive, to most the illogic of thinking that giving all voices equal weight produces a better democracy is self-evident.

The New York Times isn’t going to give Paul Krugman’s inches to a truck driver from Skokie, Illinois. Nor will the Washington Post invite a fry cook to sit in for Charles Krauthammer. That isn’t elitism, it’s common sense, and this principle of providing top-notch, well-written, informed and informative commentary and analysis should be an editorial value of all blogs. Most of the user diaries at right-side sites such as TownHall tend to fall into the same bucket as DailyKos’—heavy on talking points, sloganeering, and personal opinion; light on facts, analysis, and writing ability. The difference is that TownHall makes a clear distinction between content it is willing to stand beside and that which readers should ingest with a spirit of caveat lector, or reader beware.

By adopting corollaries that tend to promote a favorable interpretation of the data as it applies to left blogs, the study has to be viewed as an extremely useful but biased academic exercise. For example, although solo authorship is deemed by the researchers to be a squelching factor on the diversity of conversation, by ignoring the quality of communications it begins by assuming that all posts are equal, a fallacy of which all blog owners are acutely aware. It also ignores the significant disincentives right bloggers have to allow unadulterated and unmoderated posting by users. The sometimes subtle (and often not) implication that speech from the right instigates violent action has been aggressively challenged in public statements from most right-wing bloggers and yet most large sites moderate comments to eliminate speech that crosses the line protected by the First Amendment. The left has never truly been scrutinized regarding its own sins in this area, which could account for the appearance that a lush egalitarian meadow of dialectic freedom flourishes on the left hemisphere of the political blog world.

Why is this study important? Only for the reason that when legislators and bureaucrats want to take action they typically do so by grabbing an ivy-draped academic study that justifies the action they wish to take. In so much as this report could be used to rationalize a form of fairness doctrine regulations upon publishers of online political content in a near future when all such content could fall under the regulatory auspices of the Federal Communications Commission, keeping an eye on what’s happening within our institutions of higher learning is worthwhile.

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Find other articles on this topic:

• Huffington Post | New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online
• The Progressive Pulse | The Progressive Pulse – Harvard study: Left blogs more “participatory”
• techPresident | New Study: Left More Likely to Make Blogging a Group Affair
• The Nation | The Sociology of Political Blogs: An Interview with Yochai Benkler
• Crooked Timber | A fresh look at the left and right political blogospheres

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