Bloggers won’t match Limbaugh

This article from (Doctor) David Hill gives us the following assessment of the Limbaugh advantage over bloggers:

______"Last week, Rush Limbaugh was celebrating his 15th year of hosting a daily talk-radio show. That brings us to the potential “next big thing” in political communications, blogging. With some journalists and politicians starting to take the phenomenon seriously, should Rush and other talkers start to worry about competition from the “Blogosphere?” There is no doubt blogging is something to think about. Blogcount has estimated that there are more than 2 million blogs, though many never touch on politics. Although estimates are that just 4 percent of the online community reads blogs, they are followed by a better-educated and more upscale, influential audience than that for talk radio. I doubt that blogging or any specific bloggers will match Limbaugh’s record-setting pace for gathering influence in the political process. Blogging lacks four key elements in Limbaugh’s formula for success.
_____First, bloggers don’t match what Rush calls “show prep.” Rush is almost always armed for his shows with reams of data and analysis from a wide variety of news and information sources. His commentaries indicate that he has actually read his sources, thought about their meaning, and prepared his own in-depth analyses before trying to persuade audience members during his three on-air hours each day. By comparison, many bloggers’ preparations for their stream-of-consciousness commentaries seem limited to reading the ruminations of other bloggers and scanning Internet news. Because some bloggers, even prominent ones, spend so much time writing throughout the entire day, they don’t research their own ideas well enough to be persuasive."________

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There is more if you click on the link by the pigture but I was struck by the Research question. I currently peruse 30 to 50 blogs a day plus the WaPo, NYT, Reuters, BBC, MoveOn, Truthout, Buzzflash, Counterpunch, LA Times, Boston Globe, etc and then I Google or Fazzle specific topics for data to plug into my blog. The very idea that Rush Limbaugh is well informed or accurate about his babblings is hysterical. Rush's hired monkeys bang away on their Selectrix Typewriters after reading Newsmax, the Drudge Report, WSJ Opinion Journal, The Right Wing News, and the Washington Times. Rush watches Faux News while he dines and they throw whatever sounds the most outrageous up for grabs on the EIB program. If that is research my cat is a PhD.
Here is a nice specific via Seb at Sadly NO.

_____"Nikita Dean responded with a tirade against all who voted to liberate the Iraqi people. He said that President Bush's statements that Saddam had tried to buy uranium "from Africa," that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were linked, that Iraq was on the verge of getting nukes, and that the secretary of defense knew where they were "wasn't true."
____"The facts? Saddam tried to buy nukes from three African countries other than Niger, and the British still stand by their intel on the Niger story. Plus, Saddam bought uranium from Niger in the 80s. We also have volumes of facts on Saddam's ties to Al-Qaeda. Dean grumped, "I will never send American troops abroad without telling the people the truth about why they're going there. That's why I think I'm electable." Keep thinking that. Keep dreaming." Rushbo Limbo Mumbo Jumbo

And this is the print stuff online not some slip of the tongue on the air. Name 3 countries that have "nukes" in Africa Rush and how about a modicum of documentation yourself - since volumes are available. Hell even Annthrax uses footnotes even if they are 95% bogus. These examples of RushResearch are available sentence by sentence but these happen to be well documented and in our view.
I don't have any idea about the next 15 years. The way things are going we may not see next year. But Rush and radio are dinosaurs. The web is the information source of the future and the dittoheads are not all that data friendly.