Dan Rather is Retiring: Is the Blogosphere the New Media Establishment? [Heritage panel transcript]

The following is a transcript of a panel discussion held at the Heritage Foundation, Friday, January 28, 2005. It featured Wizbang's Kevin Alyward, RatherBiased.com's Matthew Sheffield, and Power Line's Paul Mirengoff.

The topic of the discussion was "Dan Rather is Retiring: Is the Blogosphere the New Media Establishment?" Alyward focused his comments on how many blogs are more popular than establishment media publications. Sheffield spoke on the origins of the scandal through FreeRepublic.com and blogs. Mirengoff focused on what will happen in the future.

JOHN HILBOLDT (Director, Lectures and Seminars): [Video difficulties prevent transcription prior to this point] Join us routinely via the Heritage.org web site and remind all of our web site viewers in this day of electronic communication that questions can be submitted to speaker@heritage.org, speaker@heritage.org, during our question and answer session.

And two, since I know this is a very techy audience, it's especially important to remind you to please turn off cellphones and pagers.

At the Heritage Foundation, we believe in the fundamental principles of individual freedom and limited government. An open and transparent exchange of news and information assures that our citizens can become and remain knowledgeable participants in the public policy debates of the day, better able to ensure the success and survival of our liberties.

Hosting our panel today is Mark Tapscott. Mr. Tapscott is director of Heritage's Center for Media and Public Policy and the Marilyn and Fred Guardabassi Fellow. Mr. Tapscott has been recognized by the National Press Foundation for his contributions to the Paul Miller Washington Fellowships Program for journalists, and he serves on the high-technology committee for the National Press Club.

As a veteran Washington journalist, his career includes service as managing editor of the Journal Newspapers in the Washington, D.C. area, assistant director of the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan Administration, and as an assistant managing editor for night news at The Washington Times, where he also served as national editor, business editor, and investigative reporter among other positions.

His Capitol Hill experience includes serving as communications director for Senator Orrin Hatch as well as a senior aide to two House Republicans. It is my pleasure to turn the program over to my colleague, Mark Tapscott. Mark?

MARK TAPSCOTT: Thank you, John. John, I thought we had agreed that you wouldn't use all those lies about me in the introduction. [Laughter]

It's good to see you all here today. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and welcome to the Center for Media and Public Policy. I'm especially excited about this program today because I'm a recent convert, if you will, to blogging and the proprietor of Tapscott's Copydesk. Feel free to link liberally.

And I'm especially excited about the three folks that we have here today to talk about their experiences and their insights and perceptions. I have to tell you, before I tell you a little about Kevin Alyward and Paul Mirengoff, that our panelist, Matt Sheffield is caught in traffic and I was especially relieved to hear that because we had heard a rumor that he had last been seen with a couple of guys with Texas accents putting a big bag over his head and throwing him into a van marked "CBS." [Laughter]

But he's on his way.

We're going to go ahead and begin our program today with Kevin. Let me tell you just a little bit about Kevin. Kevin is the genius behind Wizbang blog.

He claims on his blog site that he had no particular reason for starting it. I think he knew from the very beginning that he was going to create one of the blogs that I find especially interesting because he has such a tremendously stimulating combination of commentary on politics, on culture, and a lot of other things.

He's been in the blogging business for a good long while. He's a networking engineer by trade and he's going to be talking about his own experiences.

Before you come up Kevin, let me tell folks also just a little bit about Paul Mirengoff.

I had the pleasure of meeting Paul for the first time at lunch about a week ago. He is one of the proprietors of Power Line blog. I'm sure as well as with Wizbang, you're all familiar with Power Line.

Both of these guys, and RatherBiased, I must say as well, I can't make it to 10:00 in the morning without reading their blogs. It's really great to have all three of you hear. Especially when we get the third one of you here...

With that said, after we've had 10 or 12 minute presentations from these gentlemen, we're going to open it up to you. Feel free. I hope you brought your most obnoxious and probing questions, they're ready for them. And with that word, Kevin, I'm going to turn it over to you.

KEVIN ALYWARD: Thank you. Give me just a minute here to switch this on.

Now, I thought that I would be presenting after Matthew who was going to be presenting the Rathergate scandal, so I'm looking past that into the topics of the day.

[Sets up laptop computer and projector display]

There's sort of two parts to the title. What was the first part? Dan Rather is retired, colon, is the blogosphere the new media establishment? So I sort of wanted to talk about the second part of that question as opposed to the first, cause Paul and Matthew can handle the first part.

We were definitely involved in the—how many months was this?—it was like three or four months of work just on the CBS memo scandal.

The funny thing is, I was talking to a reporter one day, and we were talking about Power Line, and the work Power Line had done on the story. I said, 'You know, they did great work, don't want to take anything away from them. But if I'd woke up maybe a half-an-hour earlier that morning, I would've been on the cover of Time. [Laughter]

And that's how it goes, really. It's a distributed medium and there's no one focal point. There was a guy—tsunami videos were a case in point recently where at Wizbang, we started posting the tsunami videos because people started sending them to me and we got up and the demand to see those was outrageous. Another guy saw what I was doing and created an archive, and next thing you know, 6 million people had been through his Blogspot site in a matter of a week.

Hopefully none of you have read Wizbang today so this will be new to you because I posted some of this last night. I was trying it out on the comment section last night.

So, blogging is maybe a five-year-old sort of industry, if you want to call it an industry. Political blogging a little less than that. The zenith has been the 2004 campaign as far as traffic.

Recently a guy named John Hawkins [ph] who runs a site called Right Wing News, he's been looking up the traffic rankings of political sites. He did sort of a study on Alexa which is a traffic measurement site run by Amazon. He did like the top 125 political sites on the internet. He ranked them by their traffic ranking. And included in those were blogs.

Some interesting findings in there, one of the things was, who's getting more traffic these days, Daily Kos is one of the top, is the top trafficked weblog, it's actually more of a community. That's a blog, Instapundit, Power Line, Talking Points Memo, Joshua Marshall's old, maybe four-year old blog which maybe qualifies as a veteran.

And this is a comparison of web traffic. Who gets more? In all cases, the bloggers beat these old media establishments, some of them new media. Rush Limbaugh's site's been up for several years.

I actually went one step further than that and said, OK there's been a lot of debate as to where blogs fit in in the media establishment these days. So I took this list that he had—this is his list on the left of the top traffic sites. Where it says No. 26, that's 26 on all the internet. So of all the sites on the internet, CNN is the 26th most popular site on the internet. I'm sure 1 through 25 are porn. [Laughter]

So the top traffic--circulation daily is, obviously, USA Today, anywhere from 2.2 million to 2.6 million copies a day circulated. On the internet, they rank 281 and if you go down the list of top 50 circulations for dailies, I actually interspersed some of those, not all of them, some of them in this list. And you'll see in this list, Daily Kos and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, their [Kos's] web site, it's pretty close. And I've actually done, it's kind of hard to see, there's stars here, for sites I consider to be true web logs.

So as I go down this list, you'll see 50th ranked newspaper by circulation, LGF is close in traffic to the Des Moines Register. So the question isn't when blogs are going to arrive in terms of traffic and volume, it's 'Now that they have arrived, what next?'

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