Horowitz back on track

I had given him up to the forces of far-right, Birchite insanity, but David Horowitz can still make an erudite, undebunkable point when he needs to. His lengthy letter to Salon today is essential reading for anyone who’s ever bought into the Alterman thesis.

The absurdity is Alterman’s comment that Matt Drudge rules the Internet. No one rules the Internet. The idea is laughable on its face, even more so coming from a pundit whose employer, Microsoft, is the digital Standard Oil of its day, with tentacles spreading liberal influence throughout the media universe. (For those who like hard statistics, MSNBC.com, where Alterman writes a media column, is rated 42 in traffic volume on the Web, while the Drudge Report is rated 346. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — opinionjournal.com — is rated 3,583.) Drudge does not editorialize on his site but posts other media outlets’ news — a point Alterman seems to have overlooked. Moreover, Drudge’s sensational news items often skewer Republican hides.

This is irefutably true. I read something yesterday – it might have been in the Nation – that claimed that the Trent Lott scandal was followed through by left-wing bloggers, and that the right-wing only haltingly followed along when it looked like they could benefit from it. If you can find some cached Drudge pages, you can see how wrong this is.

Nation publisher and editorial director Victor Navasky is a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, left-wing syndicated columnist Robert Scheer is a professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC. I recently had lunch with the dean of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the same institution and he conceded that he could not identify a single member of his faculty who was not on the political left. My friend Christopher Hitchens, only recently departed from the Nation (and still a progressive at heart), is a professor at the New School and currently the I.F. Stone fellow at the Berkeley School of Journalism, whose dean is a well-known left-wing journalist (and sometime Nation contributor), Orville Schell. Other Nation writers with faculty posts include Adolph Reed (New School), columnist Patricia Williams (Columbia), Philip Klinkner (Hamilton), Jon Wiener (UC-Irvine) Stephen Cohen (Princeton), Eric Foner (Columbia), Michael Klare (professor of peace studies at the Five Colleges) — and that’s just off the top of my head. I don’t know of a single conservative magazine with such a university-subsidized editorial board and staff.

I beg – BEG – an Altermanite to rebut this.

The rest of the article is similarly solid.