The New Blue Media by Theodore Hamm

Author:Theodore Hamm [Hamm, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Political Science, Political Process, Media & Internet, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism, Performing Arts, Comedy
ISBN: 9781595587381
Google: TrswwvmqBQAC
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-01-12T05:46:43+00:00

Now a Democratic political consultant, Jerome Armstrong is credited for his pioneering work in building the blogosphere. Born in Los Angeles in 1964, Armstrong in the 1980s and 1990s was a Peace Corps volunteer and radical environmental activist arrested several times at both Earth First! and Greenpeace protests. In 2001, he started the Web site MyDD.com, which originally stood for the rather vague term “my due diligence”; in 2006, that was officially changed to its more common association, “my direct democracy.” Beginning in the summer of 2001, the site provided a forum for interactive political discussion via “Web logs,” or what would soon be known simply as blogs. The early MyDD bloggers’ politics swung distinctly to the left, and it’s no surprise that the first Web site supporting Howard Dean for president started at MyDD in April 2002. In December of that year, Armstrong’s posting on the site, “Netroots for Howard Dean,” not only provided an early sign of Dean’s Internet-based campaign strength, but is also credited for initiating the term “netroots” (Armstrong, no doubt aware that his readers were other Web-based political activists, saw no need to define the term).11 Armstrong would soon go to work for Howard Dean as a paid consultant, and he temporarily shut down MyDD in 2003. Meanwhile, Markos Moulitsas, one of the other bloggers who had first appeared on Armstrong’s site, had already become the torchbearer of the new media.

Born to an ethnically Greek, middle-class family from El Salvador in Chicago in 1971, Moulitsas moved to El Salvador at age four and lived there until 1980, when the escalating civil war forced his family to return to the United States. After graduating high school in suburban Chicago, Moulitsas joined the U.S. Army, and from 1989 to 1992 he was stationed mainly in Germany; that experience would later shape his support for Democratic candidates with backgrounds in the military. After the army, Moulitsas did his undergraduate work at Northern Illinois and then earned a law degree from Boston University, before moving to the Bay Area in the late nineties in order to try his luck in the Silicon Valley. Arriving a bit late for the boom, Moulitsas was an unemployed Web developer when he began blogging for MyDD in 2002. His postings received a good response, prompting him to launch his own site, dailykos.net (now dailykos.com), in late May 2002. The name came from his army moniker, Kos, which rhymes with rose. The site’s steady stream of left-leaning commentary quickly gained a large readership, and within one year, the Daily Kos could claim more than 1.6 million unique visits per month. By 2007, according to his own calculations, the number had grown to nearly 20 million; in terms of actual daily readers, the number translated to around 100,000.12

Like MoveOn, Kos operated from the Berkeley Hills, the obvious seeding ground of the netroots. In the 1960s, the Bay Area had wielded its influence over national politics as the home of both the New and radical Left;

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