What Are The Best Political Blogs?

Posted by Mitch Wagner on June 12, 2008 05:43 PM

As part of preparing to work on our new Political Tech blog, I've been putting together a reading list of the best political blogs, newspapers, and magazines across the political spectrum. And now I'm coming to you, to share the list for your benefit and to find out if you have any recommendations.

I've divided the list into three groups, in order of priority: The A-list consists of blogs I'll try to read every day, the B-list is blogs I'll try to read most days, and the C-list is blogs I'll try to get to often.

Just for the heck of it, I'm color-coding these titles red for conservative and blue for liberal. I'll leave the title black where I can't figure out which way the editors lean. In many cases, I'll be wrong and in other cases even when I'm right, the owners of the blog will disagree with me. But that's fine; those kinds of binary classifications are crude tools at best, and inherently error-prone.

The list has a lot more blue in it than red. I'm not entirely comfortable with that. On the other hand, it's not like the conservative blogs on this list are weak; in particular, InstaPundit and Little Green Footballs are muscular blogs that can stand up to multiple enemies. I'm not going to add conservative blogs just for the stake of balancing the color mix. However, if you've got a strong blog to recommend and it happens to be conservative, so much the better.

Blogs and news sites are considered for this list based on having a substantial amount of political technology coverage, but not necessarily exclusive poli-tech coverage. For example, most of InformationWeek's content is nonpolitical, as is Boing Boing's. Mashable is a Web 2.0 blog, and Charlie's Diary is the blog of science-fiction writer Charles Stross, who just happens to frequently comment trenchantly on politics and technology.

I'd really like to add more poli-tech blogs to the list. The only blogs with a strong focus on poli-tech, as opposed to just politics, are Boing Boing, Charlie's Diary, Freedom to Tinker, maybe Instapundit, and Techdirt.

I Can Has Cheezburger is not a political blog. However, wouldn't it be a better world if everyone read I Can Has Cheezburger every day?

And now the list:

The A-List
Ars Techica
Boing Boing
Charlie's Diary
InformationWeek
Making Light
Mashable
The New York Times
The Washington Post

The B-List
Eschaton
Ezra Klein
Freedom to Tinker
Hugh Hewitt
Instapundit
Lawyers, Guns and Money
LiberalOasis
Little Green Footballs
CNET News.com
Political Animal
Power Line
Slate Magazine
Talking Points Memo
Techdirt

The C-List
Beat the Press
Crooked Timber
Firedoglake
Huffington Post
Lessig Blog
MichelleMalkin.com
Orcinus
Pharyngula
The Carpetbagger Report
The Sideshow