Michael White at the Guardian broods on the what the headline over his piece terms "… the rightwing dominance of political blogosphere".

Thus:

If I understand the situation correctly, McBride got mixed up with Labour blogger and psychotherapist, Derek Draper – not always a wise move – in trying to create a leftwing counterweight to the right’s dominance of the political blogosphere.

Political addicts and anoraks love this frenzied world of attack and counter-attack, gossip and exposé, usually keener on malice and outraged opinion than the finer dilemmas of policy-making.

Most sensible citizens ignore it, concentrating on their own online interests (which can be just as vehement). Political bloggers such as Guido Fawkes, instigator of McBride’s doom, tend to be rightwing, free market or libertarian Tories, the kind of people who want to blame governments rather than bankers for the global economic crisis.

Actually, both are at fault, but the blogosphere does not do shades of grey. The medium lends itself easily to shoot-from-the-hip outrage. That is why many enthusiasts love it.

And this curious thought:

The trouble comes when such fierce dogs bite the wrong person – invariably it is the wrong person – and has to be put down. That is what has just happened to Damian McBride.

He shouldn’t have been dabbling in what sounds like squalid stuff, but it helps to understand why people like him do what they do. They do it to protect their boss and undermine opponents whom they think enjoy an unfair advantage in a corrupted media environment.

Hang on a minute.

What does the word ‘dominate’ mean when put in the same phrase as Blogosphere?

And is he suggesting that the blogosphere, an e-space where supposedly free citizens in a supposedly free country bang on about myriad issues as they see fit, is a corrupted media environment? Or, at least, that that is how the political flunkies round the Prime Minister see it?

Strewth. It really is very bad.

It’s not easy to measure this sort of thing, but let’s take the Total Politics Political Blog list, pulled together by Iain Dale with an eye on boldly creating a community space for British political blogs of all shapes and sizes. It has nearly 2000 blogs listed.

On this list the blogs which might be called ‘Right Wing’ (Conservative, Libertarian, Right Wing, UKIP and English Democrat) number some 579 in all.

Those which might be called ‘Left Wing’ (Labour, Lib Dem, Green, Left Wing) number some 665 in all.

So no sign of Right Wing Dominance if the sheer numbers of blogs on one side or other are anything to go by. On the contrary, Left Wing blogs are ahead. Nearly 500 blogs are said to be ‘non-aligned’.

In terms of popularity at the top end, Conservative/Libertarian blogs are in a strong position if the TP 2008 Survey (itself not very scientific is anything to go by), with Guido and Iain Dale himself way out in front in terms of unique visitors as far as one can tell. But the fact that they have significant readership does not mean that all those readers are Right Wing or great fans of their views.

Moreover, the total readership of the UK political blogosphere can not be more than a few million people. So even if one tendency ‘dominates’ this space (which it doesn’t), it has nothing remotely like the true domination enjoyed by the Centre-Left BBC which gets into almost every home in the country every day and which can use its huge publicly funded position in the media market to drive out competition.

So what in fact is striking about the Labour/McBride fiasco is that it was based on seriously incompetent analysis combined with vanity – an attempt in a crass top-down way to set up and control some sort of Leftist Guido lookalike, merely because Guido had been rooting out some painful stories about Labour machinations which otherwise might have been kept away from public scrutiny.

Why on earth did they think that this was necessary/desirable – and could work?

The point of the Guido phenomenon is that it is a sort of Internet-based one-man Private Eye – an outlet for the sort of credible stories and accusations sloshing around Westminster which the mainstream media outlets are loath to run with.

There is nothing really new in this, other than the speed and verve of Guido himself. But the very personal spontaneity and often vulgar style of Guido’s site give it a quirkiness and credibility which no clunky Left-wing version cooked up by smirking senior Labourites in Downing Street was ever going to be able to emulate.

Hence the current debacle.

Tom Harris MP (Labour) gets it, even if the Guardian does not:

But this isn’t about positioning or spinning or misdirection or whatever. This is about standards of political activity, standards which have fallen far, far below what is remotely acceptable, especially for someone working at the very heart of government. 

We screwed up, big time. We have no-one — absolutely no-one at all — to blame for this but ourselves. The damage the Labour Party and the government have sustained this last 24 hours has been entirely self-inflicted.

And the people behind this sordid little mess owe everyone named in these emails a very public apology.

Alas for Labour, the self-inflicted opening of this squalid can of worms allows all sorts of new problems to buzz around: FOI requests, questions about the money McBride will get now he has left office, countless demands for apologies, maybe even a defamation lawsuit.

And then there is YouTube…

Many of the sort of things the blogosphere is good at promoting and publicising or both.

Ha.