Conservative Media

Jim Geraghty writes at National Review Online:

There's an outdated complaint that the Right has too many commentators and columnists and not enough reporters. Perhaps that was once true, but the ranks of those doing original reporting have expanded greatly once you add up everybody at NR/NRO, The Weekly Standard, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Free Beacon, Townhall, Reason, James O'Keefe's videos, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and a host of others I'm forgetting. We're getting better at amplification and linking and promoting and tweeting each others' work.

But for some reason, there are a lot of days it feels like we're not quite there in terms of actual real-world impact. I know everybody's had at least one story that they feel like was nitroglycerin, and should have made a big, lasting impact, that just hit the web or print pages and . . . pppppht. Nothing. The world reads it, shakes their head and goes tsk-tsk, and goes on. We have a surplus of things to be outraged about and a dearth of attention and energy to focus upon it, and the public's attention span seems to be shrinking every year. Obamacare's messes, ludicrous contracts, Benghazi, embarrassing wastes of money, embarrassing wastes of space in Congress . . . they all just pile up without much of a consequence.

At one of our last gatherings, we noted how quickly everyone was able to turn a Post reporter's dismissal of the horrific abortionist/ghoul Kermit Gosnell as a "local crime story" into a rallying cry; the media was dragged, kicking and screaming, into covering Gosnell nationally. We scrappy little Pajamahadeen can really get a story out to a wider audience when we're all pulling in the same direction. Of course, it's tough to get us all pulling in the same direction, and it's got to be organic.

The Left has Journo-List; we have our mailing lists where a grassroots activist will dismiss all congressional staffers as useless selfish parasites sucking on the public teat . . . the congressional staffers for conservative lawmakers will take offense at the comment and call the activist an ill-informed rabble-rouser, and before we know it, it's turned into a flame war. It's fascinating to see how often the liberals describe the "right-wing noise machine" as a well-oiled, engine-revving, unified, self-reinforcing powerful megaphone, a drone-clone army, snapping to attention and coordinating its messages, activism, and actions for maximum effectiveness.

To paraphrase Will Rogers, I'm not a member of an organized political movement; I'm a conservative.