Sunday, June 25, 2006

Talk Radio Marries Blogosphere: Hugh Hewitt Ascendant

Hmmmm.... In the same mag issue that sort of damns Kosputin with faint praise as a paranoid belligerent cover-up czarovitch Move-On.org wannabe, Newsweek has a purely positive piece on Conservative Multi-tasking Genius Hugh Hewitt. What does the Slate/WaPo/Newsweek/MSNBC cabal have against the diminuitive Kos besides the Kosola scam? Or is the media combine just hedging its bets?

Townhall.com is certainly in need of refurbishment, and Hewitt is great on TV [I haven't heard him on radio] as well as a splendid writer/blogger. He has a cold brilliance that outstrips the hot-headed rants of the leftosphere spew-sheets online.

Early July the rollout occurs:
On July 4, Salem Communications, one of the country's largest radio-station owners, will relaunch an old Web war horse called Townhall.com as a hub for its stable of stars (including Bill Bennett, Michael Medved and Hewitt himself). The hope? That "Web 2.0" wherewithal can transform what was once an op-ed clearinghouse into a single nerve center serving the separate conservative communities of talk radio and the Internet. To Hewitt, a valuable White House ally, the math is simple: add 6 million Salem fans to Townhall's 1.4 million unique monthly visitors and you've got an audience six or seven times the size of liberal site Daily Kos, the Web's biggest political blog. "We will overwhelm them," he says.

Given that Kos is a one-trick pony, good online, but less good on-air, HH should rock and roll all over the national political arena. And Newsweek's articles fail to mention Kos's plummeting number of hits per day. Maybe Kos is moving on to the MoveOn.org Pet Sematery?

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