GET THE BELFAST TELEGRAPH NEWSPAPER DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR EVERY DAY

Belfast Telegraph

  • nijobfinder
  • nicarfinder
  • propertynews.com
  • Classified

Andrew Keen: Obama’s landslide will throw up conservative bloggers

Monday, 10 November 2008

For the past few months my pre-breakfast morning ritual has been determined by American opinion polls. As a political junkie, the first thing I’ve done every morning over the last six months has been to check out the latest opinion polls at RealClearPolitics.com.

Then I’ve gone to Politico.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, CNN.com, News.Yahoo.com, and blogs like the HuffingtonPost.com, TheDailyDish.com and DrudgeReport.com that have done such an addictive job commenting on this most remarkable of elections.

So what now? What am I and the tens of millions of other politicos supposed to do before breakfast now that the election is finally over? With Obama’s landslide victory, American politics is supposed to change dramatically. But what about change on the blogosphere? What becomes of online political opinion when, on 20 January of next year, Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America?

The polls might have temporarily shut, but I suspect that the blogosphere is about to get really provocative. The internet is a natural medium of opposition, so expect American conservatives to embrace online media with much more gusto and creativity after 20 January. Whereas the blogosphere has been dominated in George W. Bush’s age by left-liberal blogs such as Arianna Huffington’s HuffingtonPost.com, Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo.com, Andrew Sullivan’s TheDailyDish.com and Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga’s Daily Kos, an Obama presidency will throw up new online conservative opinionators who will radically redefine American political discourse.

Just as the current doyen of conservative muckrakers, Matt Drudge of the DrudgeReport.com, made his name exposing the stain-filled scandals of the Clinton presidency, so a new ecosystem of online Obama-critics are about seize control of the conservative movement in America. On the internet, insurrection leads to insurrection to insurrection. It’s a broadband version of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. These conservative insurrectionists might be yet to be identified, but I’m confident that their online opinion will replace the polls as my not always edifying pre-breakfast nourishment over the next four years.

I was in Frankfurt last week to keynote the annual ZukunftsForum Medien event about the future of media, held at Lufthansa’s Flight Training Center at the airport. After my speech, a panel of four new and old media experts discussed the crisis of declining newspaper readers in Germany. I was particularly struck by a singularly dark comment by Hans-Juergen Jakobs, the online editor-in-chief of the Munich based Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest quality newspaper. Unless self-promoting journalists can make themselves more relevant to a German public more interested in social networking than in serious news analysis, “It will be over,” Jakobs predicted, starkly, about the end of the high-end newspaper business.

Andrew Keen is the author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur’

Post a comment

Limit: 500 characters

View all comments that have been posted about this article

Comment
Your details

* Required field

Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP address logged and may be used to prevent further submissions. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by BelfastTelegraph.co.uk's Terms of Use.

Posts submitted in UPPERCASE letters will be rejected.

Nice work! Why cant we just keep it simple and talk about the superbowl?

Posted by miller bennett | 09.02.10, 05:38 GMT

Post a complaint

Please note Name and E-mail are required.

Contact details

So Come on? Is that really the best that you can do?

Posted by emeliajines | 18.01.10, 02:34 GMT

Post a complaint

Please note Name and E-mail are required.

Contact details

Thats right! Don't be afraid to speak your mind. This is the 21st century, right?

Posted by jamesjonesy | 16.01.10, 23:42 GMT

Post a complaint

Please note Name and E-mail are required.

Contact details

So I think that there is good information here. Thanks for the contribution!

Posted by johnnylawisit | 07.01.10, 00:46 GMT

Post a complaint

Please note Name and E-mail are required.

Contact details

Columnist Comments

robert_mcneill

Brown gets right dunking over his cookie coyness

It is, I think, correct and fair to refer to Gordon Brown as a balloon, a numptie, a phoney, a nutter...

Columnist Comments

eamon_mccann

We do not need to be told the truth. We need truth to be told

Why Bloody Sunday? There have been bigger death tolls. Fifteen Catholics in McGurk’s Bar in the New Lodge in Belfast the previous month. Eighteen Paras at Warrenpoint in 1979.

Columnist Comments

lindy_mcdowell

Why Church must confess all for sake of my abused friend

For evil to succeed it is only necessary that good men either do nothing ? or that they get the victims of evil to sign vows of silence promising never to reveal details of the terrible abuse they suffered.

Columnist Comments

sharon_owens

Little pop tart Lady Gaga fills me full of dread for our daughters

If you go on Lady Gaga’s website you can buy a T-shirt that says ‘I’m A Free Bitch’.

Columnist Comments

gail_walker

Why Christine really is the One

Isn't our own Christine Bleakley turning out to be a really class act? Her Sport Relief Waterski Challenge was a kind of David Walliams/Eddie Izzard moment when the Newtownards woman moved officially into the ranks of minor national treasure.

Columnist Comments

eric_waugh

A lesson in history for Cameron: unionists always do it their way

If I refer to the imbroglio of the UUP as ‘the Hermon mess', I hope Lady Hermon will not take it amiss.

Columnist Comments

laurence_white

Marching into another summer of discontent

The Orange Order has given a qualified welcome to the work done by the DUP/Sinn Fein-packed Stormont body on how to resolve the issue of contentious parades in Northern Ireland.

Columnist Comments

ed_curran

Swashbuckling Sir Reg finally delivers a shot across the bows

No matter how much positive spin is placed on the transfer of policing and justice powers to Stormont, concerns remain. Will what has not worked in the past be any better in the future?

Columnist Comments

jane_graham

Loud, aggressive and mean, Carol’s number’s really up

For years she has been paraded as the ultimate poster girl for attractive, smart, self-sufficient forty-something women, but last week we saw the real face of Carol Vorderman and boy, it ain’t pretty.

Columnist Comments

robert_fisk

Robert Fisk: Democracy doesn't seem to work when countries are occupied by Western troops

In 2005 the Iraqis walked in their tens of thousands through the thunder of suicide bombers, and voted – the Shias on the instructions of their clerics, the Sunnis sulking in a boycott – to prove Iraq was a "democracy".

Columnist Comments

mark_steel

Mark Steel: The moment you think of voting Labour, up pops the unregretful Tony Blair

There are many questions a population asks itself before a General Election, and the one that many people are asking before the one this year is, "Which of these rancid heaps of sewage will be slightly less repulsive than the other?"

Columnist Comments

the_punter

The Trick is to avoid big two

Anyone fancy 5-2 about Kauto Star for the Gold Cup?

Columnist Comments

hamish_mcrae

Cost of pay freezes and high taxes was a culture of duplicity, envy and hypocrisy

The Chancellor was right yesterday to dismiss the idea of a High Pay Commission. His phraseology was characteristically mild: he was "not persuaded" of his merits.

TeleToons

TeleToons: Cartoons by Stevie Lee

 

Click here for audio version