Political Blogs and the Bloggers Who Blog Them: Is the Political Blogosphere and Echo Chamber?

Most studies of political blogging have focused exclusively on the so-called “A-list” political blogs. While these studies have provided important insights into the content of A-list political blogs (Adamic and Glance, 2005), how A-list political blogs influence media coverage (Drezner and Farrell, 2004) and who A-list political bloggers are (McKenna and Pole, 2004), they have largely ignored the thousands of less read political blogs that are written by average citizens every day. As a result, relatively little is known about political blogging “by the rest of us” (Schiano et al., 2004). Perhaps most surprising in this regard is the fact that while there has been much debate over whether political blogging is a form of political participation (McKenna and Pole, 2004), there has been no systematic research into how ordinary people are using blogs as a form of political expression. In this paper, I will address this oversight by using a computer assisted, quantitative content analysis of 25 randomly selected, non-A-list political blogs over the six month period from July to November 2004 in order to determine the relationship between mainstream media coverage and political blog discussion. The results of this study will help shed light on whether the political blogosphere is a merely an “echo chamber” for the messages of political elites as reported in the mainstream media.