As a continuation to the discussion of the format change at WROC 950 AM or the Bill Press video, I’m going to be writing a series of posts about progressive media, what it means, how it differs from conservative media, and what the advantages and disadvantages of those differences are.

The first and most important point about progressive media is that it should not and cannot be simply a progressive version of conservative media. Progressives and conservatives view the world differently. There have been numerous studies about this. This one strikes me as particularly apt:

The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.

[....]

Conservatives don’t feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. “They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm,” Glaser said.

Because of these differences (and I realize that I’m generalizing a bit here), I think it’s inevitable that progressive media will tend to be more investigative and less rhetorical than conservative media. While that may make it more difficult for progressives to be successful in the talk radio medium, it also has distinct political advantages. The Politico’s Jonathan Martin had a good piece a few days ago on the power of news-based progressive blogs like TalkingPointsMemo and Huffington Post and how they have no analog in the conservative blogosphere:

While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.

While online Republicans chase the allure of punditry and commentary, Democrats and progressives are pursuing old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting….

[....]

Deploying writers with backgrounds grounded in journalism rather than politics, The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, in particular, have already become a persistent problem for McCain’s campaign, regularly posting negative opposition research and embarrassing videos in addition to advancing damaging story lines against the GOP nominee.

There is simply no equivalent on the right to these two liberal-leaning websites.

There is little doubt that the national mainstream media landscape favors Republicans heavily. The progressive/conservative debate will always — or at least for the near future — tend to pit fact-driven progressive arguments against rhetoric-based conservative ones, and there’s little doubt that the pundit-driven political coverage we see on television tends more towards rhetoric than fact. But it’s a mistake to think that there aren’t areas where progressives have advantages.