Yesterday, John Cole showed the way fake right wing talking points gain legitimacy. It’s a function of a stenographic and, in the case of Fox News, overtly partisan press corp. Read the whole thing, watch the video, and make your own call. The example he uses is the new theme that Obama needs a teleprompter to be as good an orator as he is. This is patently false (see Cole’s post for the details). However, here’s how the story has progressed:

1. Republican hack in overtly partisan magazine (The Weekly Standard, in this case) writes a patently false story aimed at one of his opponents strengths. He simply decided on a conclusion and then made up evidence about it. (you can watch the video at Cole’s or here to judge for yourself)
2. Jake Tapper, of ABC News, no stranger to carrying water for Republicans, repeats the story at ABC.
3. Right wing blog machine (Instapundit, etc.) repeats the article and atta boys the Weekly Standard author who made up the story.
4. Limbaugh picks it up and blasts it to his large radio audience.

Because they all cite the original Weekly Standard piece, each step in the process ignores the basic fact checking responsibility. It’s in print (online), after all, right?

Anyway, you can judge for yourself if Obama is a “halting” speaker. Here’s the video of the Obama speech that the Standard uses as cause for criticism:

Halting? Unsure?? … or, as John Cole says:

I repeat, have any of you seen Bush speak?

More here.

There’s a greater point here that about the almost uniform echo chamber that the right wing has created. I sometimes wonder that the reason the right wing Republicans struggle creating grass roots organizations online is because their big Internet sites are incorporated into the Republican power structure. They have a role to fulfill and in exchange, they get access.

On the Democratic side, there’s less integration (though it’s changing, certainly). The left blogs still operate outside of the power structure of the Democratic party, so there’s a greater need to have these structures and organizations. For example, ActBlue powers candidates outside of the Democratic mainstream. I think Edwards was the leading money recipient from ActBlue donors. He was NOT the establishment candidate.

Same with DailyKos, Atrios, and MyDD (and the rest of the big ones) all challenge the hierarchy regularly. The Republican blogs rarely do that. The only example of the right wing blogs challenging the party power centers I can think of is when Bush nominated Harriet Myers, and I’m not convinced that those blogs were actually operating against the Republican party (did anyone aside from Bush like that choice?).

There are other theories, of course. Erick Erickson, editor of RedState.com, has this theory:

Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative megablog RedState, conceded that progressives currently enjoy an advantage over conservatives online—though he attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives “have families because we don’t abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism.”

Damn, and here I thought I was helping build a company in a capitalistic endeavor. Silly me. (and yes, this is the guy that complained he couldn’t get programmers because liberals were conspiring against him or something)

I was working on some tweaks to a small research project here and made this handy little chart of blog posts that link to content at ESPN.com. It’s not a perfect tool, as it only captures links to stories on our major properties, but it gives a rough idea of the size of the sports blog universe as captured by Technorati. The data was captured using their developer API.

As you can see, there was a gap in data processing recently (hence the fact that I’m looking at this). I’m planning on exposing some of this data on the site. I think it’s a curiosity, more than anything else, but I’ve found some good blogs this way.