Centerfield

The Weekly Standard spins this poll as liberal media types cleverly identifying themselves as moderates even though they are liberals.

I bet with more investigation paying attention to the idea of moderates/centrists/independents, a poll like pews could show how much the anti-left-right ideological middle is growing. Like has been cited here before, there's a middle america that is fiscally conservative and socially leans laissez-faire.

And I know that both Sullivan and Reynolds are strongly pro-Bush on the Iraq war, but have both been hard on his social policies. I think these guys are the leading edge of the independent elite-upscale, tech-savvy, upper middle class, fiscally conservative, anti-entitlement, skeptical of big government, very pro-equal opportunity, pretty liberal socially, sanguine about the future, sees success in Iraq as crucial.

Demographically, I doubt the blogosphere is very characteristic of the middle, but philosophically, I think they are much closer than either party.

I was heartened by this news, as it shows that the blogosphere is at least being heeded by many in the mainstream media, and that the preference seems to be for centrist bloggers. Whether that really reflects a "moderate" consensus or whether it's primarily liberal journalists keeping current with the movers and shakers of blogdom, it at least shows that the viewpoints and analysis of people like Sullivan, Reynolds and Kaus are appreciated by some segment of the media.

Jay Rosen (Pressthink) was recently interviewed on my local NPR affiliate. The interviewer took the usual attitudes towards blogs, i.e. that they were a questionable source of information, and likely to be biased. Rosen gave a stellar defense, explaining that blogging is more akin to punditry than straight journalism, and then went on to question why so-called "responsible news sources" didn't cite source documents in their own editorials and news items, as bloggers routinely do.

Maybe we are seeing a realization on the part of mainstream journalists that blogs are a complementary medium, not a competitive one. Blogs rely on big media for reporting and editorial judgment; big media rely on bloggers to see how their reporting is peceived and what the rest of the people who are not journalists think is newsworthy.