Matthew Hindman

 John McCain on our (supposedly) fragmenting media environment:

Two comments:

 First, the contemporary American media environment certainly looks more fragmented than it did in the 1960s, when national television networks were the only game in town.  But it should be noted that "the cables" deserve far more of the blame for subsequent fragmentation than the Internet does (on this point see Markus Prior's Post-Broadcast Democracy).  Roughly three quarters of Americans still rely on television as a main source of political news, according to Pew Center survey data--a figure that is basically unchanged from 1991 levels.  By contrast, only about a quarter of Americans now rely on the Internet as a primary news source (see Althaus 2007). Several lines of evidence suggest that Internet new is stealing audience mostly from newspapers and print outlets.  But (as the book shows) online audiences are far more concentrated on the top 20 news sites than newspaper readers are on the top 20 newspapers, so a shift from print to pixels doesn't necessarily promote greater fragmentation.

Second, progressive- and Democratic-leaning sites have a roughly two to one advantage in readership compared to conservative- and Republican-leaning sites--something that shows up clearly in traffic maps.  So it's not too surprising that bloggers would draw McCain's ire.  But this  partisan gap is unlikely to change unless large numbers of Republicans start to see blogging and blog readership as a key part of political activism. Having the Republican presidential candidate playfully disparage bloggers en masse seems unlikely to help him shift the blogosphere in a more ideologically favorable direction.