The media is the only business where the customer is always wrong.
Ah, yes, the famous Daily Beast/Newsweek gambit.
Actually, the widely used commenting system Disqus is the one that changed the down arrow policy in the last couple of days. I assume NRO uses Disqus, but I suspect they had little to do with the change, although they might have had input into the decision I suppose.
I would think they would like the libertarians, the GOPe seems to want to move left on the social issues and true conservatism, while retaining a right leaning economic message.
Having spent over a decade in the media I assure you that editorial departments and reporters think they are far smarter than you. In fact, they think you (readers) are a moron.
When you find yourself attacking Thomas Sowell as a RINO and demanding (insinuating ) that he not be published for us to read, that is when you know you have gone wrong, real wrong.
If you go back long before the Sowell comments, long before Mark Steyn's very public knock-down-dragout with the homosexual NRO managing editor a few weeks ago, even long before Derb was fired for what NRO deemed were some "racially insensitive" [but IMHO true] remarks, NRO's comment sections have been savagely troll-bombed by Leftists for a long time now.
A lot of us who comment there have been complaining how the comments section looks a lot more like one for The Nation than one for NRO for a very long time, and asking when the site was going to bring the obvious agents provocateur to heel.
I don't know if the change is really about the Tea Party, or finally a response to Enemy Posters. [Which JRob would throw summarily out of here with a nice juicy Zot at the first sign of the kind of raving leftwing lunacy I've been seeing in the comments at NRO.]
I give Thomas Sowell a pass; he's not often wrong, but occasionally even Homer nods. Mona Charen? Meh. Who cares? But I do agree with you about the overall drift of the publication, which has now become quite alarming.
Has National Review finally succumbed to O'Sullivan's Law? We shall see...
Lowry has basically scuttled National Review.
Some insight into why they may have hidden the down arrow ratings.
http://www.redstate.com/2012/09/01/our-failing-disqus-experiment/
National Review (and NRO) are simply decaying as many institutions do. As the stink from the decay increases, they are simply trying to hide the truth of that decay and how much they are diverging from the American conservative population.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Just like we opined and supsected. It is a concerted effort to slam Senator Cruz and our TEA Patriots.
Well, divide and conquer, has backfired.
When people post stupid conspiracy crap like this it makes all of us who hold similar political views look bad.
The change was to and by disqus and applies to all websites that use their commenting program (cf. http://www.theatlantic.com/ )
Do a little research before posting stupid crap.
A little off topic, but related to comments.
Does anyone here read “Commentary”?
For a long time they never had comments and then they did for a while and the comments were pretty good (hey, esp. including mine!) but now they’ve gotten rid of them.
I googled a bit and even emailed them asking when and why they had done this, but they never answered and I never could find anything.
Anybody know anything about this?
Thanks if you do!
We need a leader. Do we expect John Boehner to weep us back into power?
That said, betting that Sowell is wrong about anything is risky.
Conservative comments attacking “Commentary” bloggers Jonathan Tobin and Peter Wehner became so numerous, and so vicious, that “Commentary” has completely blocked ALL comments.
bookmark for later
This is an excellent, very well written article, Bob. Thanks. It demonstrates the difference between NRO and FR, and again highlights the wisdom of Jim Robinson in refusing to accept outside and/or advertising money to fund this site.
Whoever funds you influences you, and in some case, they own you.
They've been showing up on FR as well.
Thanks to Rush I discovered American Thinker. I haven’t looked back since.
How is that different from what it was when Buckley was alive? Fewer ex-communists, I'd suppose, but where did Buckley come from anyway? And where did Buckley end up politically in his last years.
There have been bigger changes going on in conservatism and the country over the past two generations, and they're harder to explain so simply.