In 2002, Andrew Sullivan, the neocon blogger behind
The Daily Dish, declared blogging a media revolution, "more profound than anything since the printing press." Two years later, with over a million bloggers on the Net, political blogging is giving presidential campaigning an extreme makeover.
Beyond the candidates' self-promoting weblogs lies a universe ("blogosphere," in Netslang) of unabashed, irreverent opinion blogs, where bloggers say whatever they damn well want to. Don't believe us? Check out Wonkette's pornographic visions of John Ashcroft or the cheeky pundit's tongue-in-cheek Honorary Homo Award, bestowed on George W. Bush. But do journalists flush their journalistic ethics down the toilet when they take up blogging, where writers are their own editors and publishers? In issue 4.4's "In Depth" package of campaign '04-related articles, ReadMe talks with the blasphemers behind some of the most iconoclastic political blogs.