I’ve been asked by some of the readers of my diaries which liberal websites besides Daily Kos I read. Here’s the answer. (This diary has been updated to correct omissions and make clarifications thanks to input from those who commented.)
More about Daily Kos (which you all know) — and other online liberal publications, with help from Wikipedia:
“Daily Kos was founded by Markos Moulitsas (Kos from the last syllable of his first name, his nickname while in the military) in 2002. About a dozen contributing editors provide content for the site, with three to four new editors being chosen from the Daily Kos community every year.” The so-called Daily Kos community consists of thousands of writers like myself who publish essays, what Kos calls diaries, there. The diaries go online without any formal approval process. Self-policing enables site administrators to issues warnings or outright ban people submitting inappropriate content.
“As of September 2014, Daily Kos had an average weekday traffic of hundreds of thousands of visits. It is financially sustained by advertising, many from activist causes, media, and political candidates.”
“In 2009, Time magazine listed Daily Kos in its "Most Overrated Blogs" section. Despite the listing, Time magazine readers named Daily Kos the second best (political) blog.”
The website is designed unlike any of the others in that you have to scroll down the page from article to article. I assume this is done because it forces readers to look at the community posts which extend far down the page in the right sidebar.
The other liberal websites I look at every day
Salon was started in 1997 and has a group of regular writers, some like Heather “Digby” Parton and Amanda Marcotte are fairly well known. In addition to opinion about politics, it covers arts and entertainment. Recently some some Daily Kos regular readers have been highly critical of the website because they thought some of the articles were biased against — I can’t recall — was it Bernie or Hillary? In truth, some of them are. But it is, after all an opinion website.
At the risk of being called a shill for Salon (some here suggest I’m a troll for Trump), let me suggest a good read if you’re a Dilbert fan. Amanda Marcotte accuses Dilbert creator Scott Adams with being a secret Trump fanboy in “Dilbert has gone fascist.”
The Huffington Post (founded by the very interesting former conservative who was called “a Republican Spice Girl" in a 1998 New Yorker profile, Arianna Huffington in 2005). HuffPo, as it’s called, combines news aggregation and opinion pieces, and also has some regular presumably salaried writers as well as other paid staff. It also has a live streaming show online and on cable.
HuffPo has many “name” writers and far many more of the 1,200 plus listed here, unfortunately not alphabetically but by number of stories published, which you’ve never heard of. On the first page, I know of Sam Stein because he’s often a panelist on television. I think I recall seeing Stephen King articles. Any most everyone has hear of Deepak Chopra, MD, who published “American’s shadow: The real secret of Donald Trump” a couple of days ago. Leave it to this new age guru to remind us of what Karl Jung meant by the shadow. “The shadow compounds all the dark impulses—hatred, aggression, sadism, selfishness, jealousy, resentment, sexual transgression—that are hidden out of sight. ”
Huffington Post was acquired in 2011 by AOL for $315 million, and Arianna was kept on as president and editor-in-chief.
How about them apples, Markos? Do you have a price?
Slate was founded in 2004 by Michael Kinsley, former editor of the liberal New Republic. It covers politics and culture. There are frequent articles by Jamelle Bouie, their chief political correspondent, whose article today “The Process Worked” makes a case that the Democratic primary was’t rigged.
The Daily Beast, covering politics and pop culture, was founded in 2008 by Tina Brown, who everyone reading this probably has heard of. She was formerly a rather controversial editor at Vanity Fair and especially at The New Yorker. Today’s Beast features the rapes at Stanford, Joe Scarborough’s war with Trump, Putin meddling in Britain’s vote, and how Hillary’s next mission is to bury Trump.
Politico, which focuses as the name suggests, on politics. It is unique in several ways. It has a free print edition distributed in Washington DC and New York. It send reporters to cover political events. It is partnered with CBS News and several smaller media outlets. It has on staff a number of established journalists including Mike Allen and Roger Simon. Most importantly, it actually engages in journalism, as their controversial (at least on my diary) reporting about bitterness inside the Bernie Sanders camp and on Bernie as being bitter himself story was an example of.
Updated thanks to a comment posted today:
In a 2007 opinion piece, progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America accused The Politico of having a "Republican tilt". In a letter from Editor in Chief John F. Harris to Executive Editor Jim VandeHei, Senior Political Writer Ben Smith and Chief Political Correspondent Mike Allen, Harris reminded his colleagues that they had left the more "traditional news organizations" where they had worked previously, starting The Politicowith the intent to be more transparent. To that end, he asked his colleagues for an honest assessment of the claims set forth in the letter from Media Matters. Ben Smith answered: "Media Matters has a point: ...that Bush's public endorsement made us seem too close to the White House. That was clearly a favor from the president to us (albeit a small one), and felt to me like one of those clubby Beltway moments that make the insiders feel important and the outsiders feel (accurately) like outsiders." The other primary editors disagreed with the general accusation for a variety of reasons, and some pointed to accusations of a liberal bias from the other side of the political spectrum.In 2011 and 2012, The Daily Caller and Breitbart.com', each published stories saying that Politico.com has a liberal bias. Wikipedia
Today they have a good article about the 11 states that will determine the 2016 election.
I just received a comment which reminded me I neglected to include Talking Points Memo (TPM). It has a group of regular writes of opinion pieces, and commentaries on the news. There’s a frequently (seven so far today and the day isn’t yet over) updated “Editor’s Blog” by Josh Marshall, who founded the site in 2000. According to Wikipedia “guest bloggers have included Matthew Yglesias, Robert Reich, Dean Baker, Michael Crowley, and, briefly, Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards.”
Buzzfeed News is a subsection of the very different Buzzfeed.com . The former is a little scattered, covering everything from politics to science; but it sometimes has some insightful or interesting political writing. I don’t know what to make of the later since it seems to be all over the place.
I also check in to see what Democratic Underground, Vox and Think Progress are covering, but rarely end up reading articles there.
In this new age of Internet punditry it is interesting that previously unknown writers on both the liberal and the conservative websites can end up scoring gigs on television cable news and opinion shows.
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