Republicans have no lack of would-be George F. Wills.

But what they really need are some more Robert D. Novaks.

The distinction between the two prominent conservative journalists
isn't always obvious, but it's nevertheless important to understand:
One almost exclusively writes opinion pieces, while the other offers
reporting with a point of view.

The same might be said of the emerging differences between the
conservative presence on the Internet and the liberal one: The right
is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites
that offer a more reportorial model.

At first glance, these divergent approaches might not seem
consequential. But as the 2008 campaign progresses, it’s becoming
increasingly clear that the absence of any websites on the right
devoted to reporting — as opposed to just commenting on the news — is
proving politically costly to Republicans.

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, in a fashion reminiscent of 2004. Back then, the Drudge
Report and other lesser-known conservative portals played a key role
in defining John Kerry and pushing back against criticism of George W.
Bush, such as when conservative bloggers debunked documents
purportedly related to the president’s Air National Guard service.

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Just as Drudge and critics of the now-infamous “60 Minutes” report on
Bush were able to push stories damaging to Kerry or beneficial to Bush
into the mainstream media, liberal online organs are now doing the
same, to the detriment of GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

This week, for example, a young liberal writer named Spencer Ackerman
heard that McCain committed a gaffe on Iraq in an unaired portion of
an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric. Ackerman, a former reporter
for The New Republic and The American Prospect who now blogs at the
liberal Firedoglake site, posted the transcript and pointed out the
relevant portion just after 5:00 p.m. Tuesday night.

It was picked up by the Huffington Post two hours later, discussed on
Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, moved onto The Associated Press wire
overnight and by Wednesday afternoon McCain was forced to respond.

“We amplify its effect and then stay on it,” explains Arianna
Huffington, namesake of the popular liberal news and entertainment
hub.

But the left isn’t simply promoting its own version of the news — it’s
also breaking it.

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.

The challenge these sites present have become so apparent that McCain
was forced to hire his own in-house blogger to ensure dissemination of
a steady stream of anti-Barack Obama material, much of it culled from
the campaign’s extensive research file.

Michael Goldfarb, a former reporter at the Weekly Standard, almost
exclusively uses his blog on McCain’s website to target the Democratic
nominee in the hopes mainstream reporters will link to or pick up the
oppo he’s posting.

To be sure, neither of the two liberal-leaning sites — referred to
online as TPM and HuffPo — have yet to break the next Watergate story
this campaign.

But every day, there comes a steady drip.

It ranges from the amusing (reporting that McCain’s campaign lifted
recipes from the Food Network while he’s giving a major economic
speech) to the strategic (popping up research on McCain’s opposition
to a bill that included wind energy incentives when he’s about to give
a speech at a turbine facility) to the eyebrow-raising (disclosing
that Mitt Romney said at a private meeting that he would not likely
appoint a Muslim Cabinet member).

In some cases, the stories incrementally move the anti-McCain message
forward (by flagging an off-message Iraq statement by a McCain
surrogate, for example). In others, the reporting scores broadside
hits that inflict notable damage (such as posting controversial audio
of the Rev. John Hagee that would prompt McCain to finally renounce
the pastor).

Add in the increasingly aggressive online efforts of liberal think
tanks such as the Center for American Progress, and it leaves the
right at a severe disadvantage in the high-stakes business of
distributing information about favored candidates and the opposition.

“It’s something we have to get in gear on,” says Patrick Ruffini, the
Bush campaign’s webmaster in 2004 and former RNC ecampaign director.
“What drives discussion in the blogosphere is original information.”

The lack of any meaningful right-wing entities today is partly because
of how left and right media outlets sprung up, he says.

“Liberal media has traditionally been upstream media, generating
information and putting it into circulation. Conservative media is
downstream; it’s the second bite at the apple.”

For years, says New York Times columnist David Brooks, the model for
conservatives who developed a passion for writing (or vice-versa) was
not a reporter but a commentator: National Review founder William F.
Buckley Jr.

Besides being attracted to his elegant language and compelling
arguments, up-and-coming conservatives saw something else in Buckley:
job stability.

“In the past 60 years, only one employee of the National Review,
Weekly Standard or any conservative magazine has actually been hired
as a reporter for a newspaper,” says Brooks, who researched the
question a few years ago.

At the same time, scores of young reporters from liberal-leaning
journals such as The New Republic or The Washington Monthly have been
called up to the journalistic big leagues by general interest
newspapers and magazines.

“There is just no career line for a conservative reporter,” observes
Brooks.

Further, prominent conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Michelle
Malkin have prospered by seizing upon the sense of grievance
conservatives have felt toward the mainstream media.

Liberals, on the other hand, responded to their own disenchantment
with the media and the Bush era by channeling their anger into the
creation of parallel reporting outlets geared toward doing what old-
line news outlets purportedly weren’t doing.

This development just happened to take place right when the mood
matched empowering new technologies, enabling new players who would
have found it impossible to break through under the old media model.

“It’s fair to say that the mainstream media…was increasingly either
neutral or effectively browbeaten by the right,” says Josh Marshall,
the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo.

The powerful presence of Limbaugh on the radio airwaves and the
ascendance of Fox News on cable television energized liberals,
Marshall says.

“People on the center-left, especially in the lead-up to the Iraq war
and after the 2000 recount, realized that there was nothing on that
side of equation,” he adds.

The result was the emergence of TPM and HuffPo, along with the
opinion- and organizing-centered Daily Kos.

“Republicans haven’t developed a lot of that infrastructure because
they haven’t been forced to,” says Michael Turk, a former ecampaign
director at the RNC.

But Turk and others say that must change — and the GOP might soon find
the impetus.

“If Republicans are out of power, they’ll start to realize this is one
of the things we need to do to rebuild,” he says.

A writer for TPM puts it more bluntly.

“If Obama gets in, we'll see a lot of this stuff spring up, probably
following the same initial pattern as the lefty Netroots,” predicts
Eric Kleefield. “First it's a bunch of nobodies with dingy websites
doing the equivalent of writing profanity on bathroom walls. And then
it will evolve into some kind of real organization and discourse, and
with its own journalism.”

While there is no real national site, Erick Erickson, founder of the
popular RedState, points out that there is some reporting taking place
on conservative blogs in Minnesota and Colorado.

“The next major wave of conservative funding will be toward
journalistic institutions,” he says hopefully.

But for now, Erickson concedes that most potential angel funders are
hesitant to bankroll a start-up, still gun-shy after many websites
have flopped and skeptical that a right-wing version of HuffPo or TPM
would be taken seriously by established media organs.

Conservatives have not been able to obtain the sort of financing that
has powered the two sites — for HuffPo, it’s venture capital; for TPM,
initially it was reader contributions but is increasingly
advertisements.

Amidst the inertia on the right, HuffPo and TPM are not only
prospering but growing.

Both major liberal sites have added new elements for this election,
and the proprietors for each are already thinking past 2008.

Huffington said in the site's next round of financing, to take place
later this year, she’ll hire more reporters.

Each promises that, even if Obama wins in November, they’ll keep up
the scrutiny.

“If you want to break stories or report the news, you cannot do it
only from your political views,” says Huffington, citing the ironic
case of their most significant splash to date: Obama's comments,
reported by an Obama donor, concerning the presumptive nominee’s
assessment of the psyche of rural America.

“I think if Obama wins, people will see that we’re fundamentally a
news organization,” adds Marshall. “We’d cover an Obama administration
equally as aggressively. People will believe it when they see it, but
that’s what we plan to do.”

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-C-