Blogging’s Impact on Politics: Don’t Hold Your Breath

By Richard Sincere

The blogging phenomenon that has media observers and political pundits so exercised and excited may be overblown – for now.

The Washington Times reported on Sunday, March 13, that a new Gallup poll had found that “most Americans are clueless about blogs, bloggers and blogging.”

The story continued:

“Blogs are ‘not yet in the media big leagues,’ Gallup announced Friday. The poll found that while 76 percent of Americans regularly use the Internet, only 7 percent said they were ‘very familiar’ with blogs. The poll of 1,008 adults was conducted Feb. 25-27.”

The Times added that the “poll also found that only 3 percent of Americans consult blogs on a daily basis. The figure was pared down to 2 percent for political-themed blogs, which tend to resonate most in the mainstream press. CNN, for example, now hosts a daily ‘blog watch,’ highlighting piquant fare from a number of sites.”

The term "blog" is very much a neologism; my word processor’s embedded dictionary does not recognize the word. So the Gallup poll’s findings should not be too terribly surprising.

Here are some salient results from the Gallup poll on blog readers, as displayed on Gallup’s own web site:

* “Blog readers are younger than the population at large. Although 17% of the public is aged 18 to 29, a quarter of all blog readers (those who read even occasionally) are in this age bracket. At the older extreme, 17% of Americans are 65 and older, but only 6% of blog readers are this old.”

* “Said differently, monthly-plus readership of blogs is 21% among 18- to 29-year olds, 16% among those 30 to 49, 14% among those 50 to 64 and just 7% among those 65 and older.”

* “The age gap in blog reading is particularly noteworthy because it is a complete reversal of the typical age pattern gap for news consumption. Gallup finds Americans' use of all traditional news media to be positively correlated with age. (For instance, only 32% of 18- to 29-year-olds read a local paper every day, versus 61% of those 65 and older.)”

By way of comparison, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press report released in June 2004 noted:

“Americans' news habits have changed little over the past two years. Network and local TV news viewership has been largely stable since 2002. Daily newspaper readership remains at 42% (it was 41% two years ago). And the percentage of Americans who listen to news on the radio on a typical day is virtually unchanged since the last Pew Research Center media consumption survey (40% now, 41% in 2002).”

And, in what might be viewed as a negative- or mirror-image of the recent Gallup poll on blog readership (and largely confirming Gallup's findings), the Pew Research Center reported:

“Newspaper readership among young people continues to be relatively limited. Among those under age 30, just 23% report having read a newspaper yesterday. This is down slightly from 26% in 2002 and stands in marked contrast to the 60% of older Americans who say they read a newspaper yesterday. Young people are more apt to read a magazine or a book for pleasure on a daily basis than they are to pick up a newspaper.”

This is not news, of course. Young people are generally disengaged from public affairs, as shown by their lower likelihood to register to vote or to vote even when registered. As people grow older, form families, contract mortgages, and pay taxes, their interest in their communities and current issues grows stronger.

Considering how much blogs have been in the news lately -- especially during the 2004 presidential campaign -- it's something of a mystery as to how so many Americans remain ignorant of their existence. One explanation that makes sense to me was offered by David Hauslaib of Jossip (an entertainment/gossip blog), who told the Washington Times:

"It's not so surprising that mainstream America doesn't know what a blog is. But they might come upon a blog and not even realize it's a blog. So they could still be influenced by it nevertheless. It works that way, too."

Will the greater interest of young people and political liberals in blogs will be maintained in reference to other types of media? Can blogs be used to entice otherwise-disengaged readers to engage in the political process?

Blogging is a highly personalized form of communication. Millions of blogs are still little more than on-line diaries of interest only to friends and family of their creators. The effect of blogs focused on political or social commentary will not be measurable for a long time to come – and certainly not until blog readership is almost as large as newspaper circulation or TV audiences.

Richard Sincere. entertainment editor for The Metro Herald, a weekly newspaper published in Alexandria, Virginia, blogs on political and cultural topics at www.RickSincere.com.