Ah, smug satisfaction.  Is there nothing you can't accomplish?

The study clearly states that most liberals, of course, only read left wing blogs.  Your decision to interpret the majority of "those few people" who read both wings of blogs as constituting "liberals" as a whole is simply inaccurate.  Impressively egotistical, yes, but just plain wrong.

Don't be silly, Jon. They don't read blogs from the other side. :)

Wallow on!

Can I borrow some smug when you're done wallowing? I've got plenty of self-satisfaction, but I think this calls for more smug than I can muster.

Actually, bigm, the article clearly states "Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves;..."

More "smug" please!

Um, sorry, butI read both, and I 'm fairly conservative.  Hell, it's the only way to learn anything.

Is it because on a very basic level everybody, including Liberals, need a smokin' hot dose of The Truth now and again?  And Conservatives never have any use for LIES?

...No?

Yeah, I think liberals are (in general) more open-minded too.  Pass me the smug when you're done with it, GSpinks.

But - do liberals read right wing blogs with an open mind - listening to opposing points of view -   or is the purpose a little less altruisic - to either see what the enemy's up to, or as a source of comic relief?  For me, one of life's cheap pleasures is clicking on whatever link is provided on these pages to the latest Coulter outrage, for instance.  I visted Michelle Malkin's blog several times in response to the beyond idiotic Dunkin' Donuts/Rachel Ray/paisley scarf or kaffiyeh contretemps.  The smug satisfaction I received is in Malkin's resurrecting that cold war chestnut, Lenin's observation on "useful idiots".    The purpose was not, I assure you, to listen to the opposing point of view.

...as do I, butchie, and I'm a Democrat.  I would spend more time reading NRO if there was the ability to comment, though.

This is a pretty soft analysis.  How conservative do the sites need to be before I can pat myself on the back?  I avoid the Corner, Michelle Malkin, the Coulter insect, etc like the plague, but I read and enjoy Ross Douthat, Charles Krauthammer, George Will and David Brooks.  Does this buy me a share of smug?

I have a different explanation: liberals read right-wing blogs because the country has been run by right-wingers for as long as blogs have been popular, and they're a useful insight (or at least perceived as such) into the psychology of people that most liberals wouldn't normally encounter and certainly don't understand.

I'll skip the issue of liberal open-mindedness for now (in my experience, it has nothing to do with ideology, and most people are just ignorant and pigheaded regardless of viewpoint).  The important point is that reading right-wing blogs is generally only useful as amateur anthropology.  I'd compare TNR with NRO, or TPM with Powerline.  Y'all occasionally talk about healthcare and energy policy and such, which is usually enlightening even if I disagree.  Most of your target audience thinks I'm a jerk because I want lefty policy to be tempered by civil liberties concerns (it doesn't take much to set some so-called "liberals" off).  But at least there's some substance that we could debate, if anyone was actually interested in debating. Whenever I visit the conservative sites, the only thing I learn is that I'm anti-American because I don't believe that a moral nation tortures people to death.  To the extent that any of them have actual ideas, these almost always focus on opposing liberals, not on the actual work involved in governing the country.  (To be fair, most liberal blogs are nearly as awful.)  So reading them becomes a pointless exercise in anger management.  There's nothing to debate; we don't even inhabit the same plane of reality.  But to the extent that they provide an insight into the minds of our lords and masters in Washington, it's still important to listen to them, if only as a reminder that a large segment of our society is absolutely nuts.  My own political views have certainly been clarified by this - they've swung very far in the opposite direction.

I'm a Social Democrat (or Marxist in American) and I read all types of sites.

You're right Jonathan, absolutely right. Apart from our very own affirmative action Tories, I doubt that any Conservatives read anything else but their own propaganda. Liberals are by definition more prone to self doubt and reflection than Conservatives. Conservatives see that as introspection, as a weakness, but after the last 8 years, we know different and the results of ideological blinkers are there for all to see.

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

I don't know about the blog issue -- I read a range at times, other times not, depending on mood -- but I do spend some of my leisure time looking at conferences and readings/discussions of different kinds broadcast on C-SPAN.  Some are interesting and indeed illuminating, and some are pedestrian, and one or two are downright weird.

What strikes me often, however, is that the liberal or left of center conferences and readings often have at least one or two conservative voices in the audience, and sometimes the speaker or speakers are confronted with a question that comes from outside the comfort zone of liberal opinion.  Indeed, now and then a question comes from, say, an extreme identity politics corner that requires the speaker to more or less bluntly inform a fellow liberal/lefty that they disagree, or that the assumptions aren't tenable.

What I notice about conservative events (and again, it may be a skewed sample) is that there never seems to be a stray liberal in the audience the way one finds stray conservatives in the other kind of audience.  That is not necessarily the fault of conservatives, of course, but one other thing is more noticeable:  the unwllingness on the part of conservative panel speakers to shoot down nonsense from audience members when it appears.  In contrast to the left, where there is some genuine debate and often a willingness to face down extreme or provocative positions, I find the conservative camp seemingly willing to tolerate and even pander to the worst (or at least the most narrow-minded) of its own side.

I check TNR about every 10 minutes during the day, but I make daily pilgrimages to townhall.com too.

I used to read National Review more, but no comment section is a huge turnoff. I do miss the old "What's your problem" feature on TNR.

By the way, what is Slate categorized as? Liberal, middle of the road, all over the road?

Agreed with blackton, if NRO had a comments section, I'd read it more too (I read it often, but not frequently, whatever those too mean).  But kind of like their politics, they're afraid that when people take the time to comment publicly, they might find that their ideas fall apart.  Jonah "in the name of free speech" Goldberg for example, has used the excuse that NRO, by allowing allowing only mail-in comments, gives NRO the right to edit said comments (or, rather sneer at most of them as being drivel, while posting one once in a great while).

Slate:  I'd put them center-lefty too, but taking that position on a much wider range of topics, and then maybe just a tad more left than TNR.

TNR TV: Who watched (I did), but isn't it a duplicate of bloggingheads tv?  Why not let someone else pay for the bandwidth and storage space.

Ah, but did you go over to Counterpunch for a rebuttal.  They're a bit more left that you are, smugboy.  

This right wing fanatic perceives a far more substantial contingent of conservatives among the TNR commenters than among TNR's feature writers.  Kudos to drdannyu for his discriminating taste in conservative commentary.  

what a silly topic. I would venture to say that most "hard" libs and conservs primarily read mind-alike blogs. tnr is not a representative sample because the magazine does draw a fairly interesting mix along the continuum. Some people hate this about tnr, but others, like me, enjoy it. Like drdan, I do read some conservative blogs, like that Ross D dude on the Atlantic, I check out Andrew Sullivan once in a while, and I do check FOXGOP every day. But as for getting into the deep right wing muck, forgot that shit. Life is too short.

Besides, reading the Spine, the periodic piles from kirchick, and enjoying the fascinating epistles from folks like O'Channy and jwl keep me on the cutting edge of right wing nuttiness...

I read them, but only on days after conservatives have been handed a defeat of some kind. The hysterical postmortem is good for laughs. It's sort of why I like to look at angry blogs or photos of fans of college football or basketball team I hate after they lose a title game or a national championship. I don't think that makes me open-minded. I think it makes me a jerk. In fact, it's probably a good thing that NRO doesn't allow comments.

And I don't think I'm the only one who enjoys the schadenfreude.

I read the NRO stuff, including the Corner, and I'd really like a talkback feature.  There, I could be the house liberal.

I had the impression, engaging in some online debate after the 2004 election, that many conservatives, instead of being pleased, were even snappier and more unpleasant than ever.  It's like they want to win, but they don't really want to enact the bit of generosity and the broader view that winning entails.  You get the impression that if politics were really a sport, they would be structurally incapable of being gracious in victory.

There has been a lot of self-congratulatory commentary by the left-wing blog on a draft paper purporting to analyze blog reading behaviors by political affiliation. Jonathan Chait of the New Republic leaps to a conclusion. I'm going to go ahead...