This is great for the Right as after the Obama election the progressive use of the medium seemed somewhat lacking. Progressives do not have a channel like Fox News at our behest and cannot allow the Right to contaminate this form with the misinformation distribution that characterizes their operating procedures.
In November, the morning after Election Day, a conservative blogger in Georgia blasted an e-mail to 65,000 people.
Erick Erickson’s 5 a.m. "Morning Briefing" seemed counterintuitive — the election of a Democrat to a U.S. House seat in Upstate New York held by Republicans for more than a century, he wrote, was "a huge win for conservatives."
Yet the missive immediately was posted online by the conservative publication Human Events, a corporate sibling of Erickson’s blog, RedState. It next reached the Web site of the American Spectator magazine, whose publisher, Alfred S. Regnery, sits on the board of the conservative publishing house that owns RedState and Human Events.
Ricocheting inside the Beltway, Erickson’s analysis fueled discussion later that morning at two influential weekly meetings of D.C. conservatives. Next, it was endorsed by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, considered by many conservatives the ultimate authority. "We kept a horrible Republican from possibly winning," Limbaugh said.
The ability of a single e-mail to shape a message illustrates the power of the conservative network — loosely affiliated blogs, radio hosts, "tea-party" organizers and D.C. institutions that are binding together to fuel opposition to President Obama and, sometimes, to Republicans.
With the Democratic defeat in the recent special senatorial election in Massachusetts, engineered in part by tea-party activists working with several Beltway-based groups, the conservative movement is more energized than it has been in years.
It is also more unified. Disputes festered between economic and social conservatives during the Bush years, but they have eased amid what all sides decry as Obama’s liberal agenda. "Nothing unites like a common enemy," said Colin Hanna, president of the conservative group Let Freedom Ring.
The movement that many date to the 1955 founding of William F. Buckley’s venerable National Review now spreads through new media. Learning from the Democratic "Net roots," conservatives use Twitter and Facebook to plan such events as the recent demonstrations against health-care reform at the Capitol. CONTINUED
New media help conservatives get their anti-Obama message out – washingtonpost.com
