Blogging out ouf the beltway

Kos quotes GW prof Carol Darr:

If you think of these blogs as little online tribes of like-minded people . . . they can feed off each other. So I think the blog activity is going to drive each party more toward its ideological extreme.

For a moment, let's treat the beltway as not so much a physical locality as a state of mind. People living within this metaphorical 495 constitute a tribe of like-minded people as well, and they're bound to see any smattering of dissenters to that viewpoint as a coherent threat to their reality, and thus as extreme. That bloggers are read by beltway folk is a certainty - the Post Express even has a daily section in which blogs are quoted in print. This makes blog dissent visible in ways that ordinary people talking in their dining rooms far away are not. Blogs, which I think are often far more reflective of the conversations most of us are having in private than are the cable talking-point shows, thus appear anomalous and dangerous. Their world-views threatened, people like Darr will lash out, attempting to isolate the blogs from the mainstream press. I expect the joke will be on them eventually, though; as more people read blogs and find that their views are shared by at least somebody out there, the cable shows and op-ed pages will loose their weight and authority, and efforts to marginalize the opinions of bloggers will only serve to marginalize those who make such efforts.