Why the GOP Lost the Web Race

Getty Images Republicans are rethinking their strategy at the RNC this week. In an excerpt from his new book, Eric Boehlert examines how they can seize Internet dominance—and possibly the next election.

What a difference four years made.

In September 2004, A-list conservative bloggers, like the ones at Power Line and Little Green Footballs, were basking in the glow of their most famous campaign achievement: taking down CBS’s Dan Rather for using questionable documents in a 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s leaky service record in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. Convinced that they had uncovered forgeries, the bloggers hatched Memogate and watched CBS clumsily try to answer questions that piled up about the 60 Minutes report.

When the conservative blogosphere matured, it did so within the framework of the established, GOP-friendly alternative media system.

But rather than using the CBS story as a stepping stone to launch serious online investigative work and to grow the right side of the blogosphere into an alternative and insightful newsgathering source or a netroots-like hotbed for political activism, the bloggers let their credibility slip away and embraced a kind of strategic mendacity.

By 2008 liberal bloggers had completely lapped their conservative counterparts in terms of influence and impact. Going into the White House campaign season, conservatives already trailed badly online. "For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000," a former Republican aide turned blogger complained to The Washington Post in 2007. The conservative writer Dean Barrett noted in The Weekly Standard that year, “The right-wing blogosphere doesn't hold conventions, doesn't win the attention of candidates, and more important, doesn't move voters the way the progressive blogosphere does.”

By November 2008, Republicans were losing the Web race by even wider margins. At the campaign’s conclusion, one GOP operative conceded online that “most [Republican] campaigns know absolutely nothing about blogs and do nothing with them.”

Rather than raising money for hand-picked candidates or launching policy initiatives the way the netroots did, right-wing blogs effectively marched themselves into a corner by routinely chasing thin conspiracy theories that led nowhere, except occasionally through the looking glass. (Some are still searching for Barack Obama’s real birth certificate.)

Conservative bloggers struggled online in part because they were permanently tied to, and spent untold hours, trying to defend Republican policies that were universally unpopular. But that explained just a small part of the conservative blogosphere’s failures as compared to the new heights liberals reached in 2008.

In truth, the two blogospheres had distinctly different DNA because they were born in different political environments. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, conservatives had already established their own alternative, movement-based media: the Republican Noise Machine. Built around talk radio, Fox News, and partisan print outlets, they were part of a political movement first and part of the media landscape second. They had a clear allegiance to the GOP and they eagerly embraced propaganda, endlessly repeating ideas, phrases, and images.

Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. By Eric Boehlert. 304 Pages. Free Press. $26. So when the Internet began to emerge as a political force at the turn of the decade, it wasn’t as if a vacuum existed among conservatives when it came to political discourse. They already had an abundance of established outlets where their voices could be heard and promoted. That’s one reason they were slower to embrace the Internet.

Consequently, when the conservative blogosphere matured, it did so within the framework of the established, GOP-friendly alternative media system. Right-wing bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt simply joined in the same conversations that were already being heard on talk radio and Fox News and in the pages of The Weekly Standard. Bloggers brought another microphone to an already crowded GOP media table and became an appendage of talk radio. They also adopted the same deficient editorial standards in the style of Rush Limbaugh. They embraced the old-fashioned model of experts dispensing wisdom to their loyal readers. For years, many of the major conservative blogs didn’t even allow readers to post comments, which meant that the conversation flowed from the blogger, that is, the pundit, to the reader.