Bloggers out-number national reporters at NRA Annual Meetings press box

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that bloggers outnumbered national reporters by a good margin in the NRA Annual Meetings press box last weekend in Phoenix.

From the story:

Experts say that ratio at a major national news event featuring a panoply of GOP stars — including John McCain and Mitt Romney — presents a stunning affirmation of the rise of a mix of both partisan and fiercely independent and sometimes downright cranky "New Media," marking its growing power to not only cover breaking news, but set the tone for political policy — and, in the case of Second Amendment rights, even the direction of the NRA itself.

"Mass media has an audience where news goes in one ear and out the other," says Brian Anse Patrick, professor of communications at the University of Toledo in Ohio, and author of the upcoming book, "Rise of the Anti-Media." For gun-bloggers, "this is an identity issue, a behavioral thing, instead of mere attitude and a piece of news," he says. "You have these communities all over the places that's essentially gun culture: autonomous, but coordinated, very powerful and very effective."

The story goes on to say that while bloggers are making their presence felt from all sides of the political spectrum, "in few places is the keyboard jockey scene as fast-growing or as influential as the world of firearms and Second Amendment rights."

While their standard battle stance is from an underdog position, the pro-gun forces are, for now at least, winning the battle for hearts and minds, even gun control advocates concede.

"If you compare the pro-gun activity in the blogosphere versus the pro-gun-control activity, the scales have just tipped tremendously in their favor," says Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, which advocates for more gun control in the US. "There's much more engagement, more involvement, and they clearly have more free time than people on our side of the issue do."

In the process, gun bloggers are taking on issues like gun control preemption laws in Philadelphia and putting pressure on firearms firms for their choice of spokesmen. And while their reach can be argued, their rise appears to mirror polling data showing that Americans, sometimes by double-digit gains, increasingly favor more gun freedoms, not gun control.

Gun control groups have roughly 150,000 members in the US while gun rights advocates number closer to 12 million, with perhaps as many as 80 million Americans owning some 200 million firearms.

Mr. Patrick, the University of Toledo professor, told the CSM that the Internet presence of gun rights advocates actually began in the early 1990s, making them early adopters of the Web as a social and information tool. They took the lead on issues like concealed carry laws which have now spread to nearly 40 states.

"If you'd asked a policy expert in 1987, 'Twenty-five years from now, are we going to have liberation of concealed carry laws or more control?' they would have said that we'd have more restrictions — and they'd be wrong," says Patrick. "The question is: How did they succeed? How do you succeed in the face of conventional wisdom, common sense and elite opinion?"

The answer, Patrick says, lies partly in the "horizontal interpretive communities" otherwise known as blogs. Largely ignored, criticized, and even ridiculed by mainstream media, gun owners started their own listservs and bulletin boards, often putting out releases with titles like "Gun news the media didn't report today."

The report says critics are troubled, claiming that the NRA is pushing to supplant traditional media with their own Internet TV network and industry blogs, fueling what they say is an increasingly under-informed and misinformed public that reacts within an echo chamber. But others say the bloggers are anything BUT NRA puppets, often pulling the NRA into fights or stances — not the other way around.

"It's an interesting phenomenon in a political science sense," says Dave Kopel, research director at the conservative Independence Institute in Golden, Colo. "You wouldn't know it from reading the New York Times, but the communicative message of the pro-gun side is not nearly as much something that is under NRA control as it used to be."

Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, sums it up by nothing the Phoenix blog bash may have been all about the Second Amendment, but that the First Amendment figures just as much into their growing firepower.