Brian Anderson is the managing editor of City Journal magazine, the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Instititute, and the author of the new book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.

In the first part of the interview yesterday, Brian discussed the phenomenon of liberal media bias, the rise of conservative talk radio, and the impact of FOX News. Here we conclude the interview with Brian's discussion of the blogosphere, the emergence of the "South Park conservatives" who give the book its title, the rise of conservative publishing and campus conservatives, and the prospects for the future.

PL: What role does the blogosphere play in the revolt?

BA: I needn’t remind Power Line readers of the influence blogs have accumulated in an amazingly short time.

In my chapter on the Internet, I analyze the specific ways that the medium has helped the Right. First, it has vastly increased the range and amount of information and opinion reflecting or expressing right-of-center concerns at everyone’s fingertips. Everyday, there’s a new blogger out there unpacking the latest New York Times poll for hidden distortions. And the blogosphere has allowed a highbrow politics and culture magazine like City Journal, which makes its articles available online, to reach hundreds of thousands of readers, dramatically increasing our influence. Second, it has given the Right the opportunity to respond swiftly to breaking news before elite opinion forms, taking advantage of what Dan Drezner calls the Web’s “first-mover” advantage. Third, it can collect and make readily available enormous amounts of decentralized local knowledge and expertise, sometimes superior to the reporting of mainstream outlets, as we saw with Rathergate and even with the coverage of election returns in 2004. Fourth, it reaches an influential readership, including just about everybody who works in the broader mediasphere, and a young one too: I believe the emergence of the blogosphere is one reason many college students have rejected the doctrinaire leftism of their professors. About 12 percent of Americans are now reading political blogs—26 million people using a medium that didn’t really exist five years ago. It’s an amazing information mutation. The blogosphere may be helping the Right indirectly, too, in that the rise of a left-wing presence on the Web is pushing the Democratic Party to the Left, hurting its electoral chances nationally.

The blogosphere has helped shape our national politics since 9/11. The cancellation of the CBS documentary "The Reagans"; Howell Raines’s downfall at the Times; Eason Jordan’s departure from CNN; the Swifties; Trent Lott stepping down as Senate majority leader; Richard Clarke’s attempted takedown of the Bush administration; of course Rathergate—the list of national controversies is long and growing in which the blogosphere has played a key role. The liberal media has been the big loser to date, since it has seen its metanarratives for events rewritten again and again, but the long-term influence of blogs will keep all news sources on their toes. Some critics, like Cass Sunstein, fear that the rise of new media is leading us to a situation in which everyone just hears what “news” they want to hear, not the true news they should hear (which, for a liberal prof like him, presumably means from unbiased sources like the New York Times). I think, on the contrary, that over time we could see an improvement in reporting and argument. Imagine being at Fox in 2005, with so many on the left trying to bring you crashing down. You’re going to make damn sure you don’t air something seriously wrong, or if you do, correct it quick.

PL: Do you think that the Empire will strike back against those of us exploiting the freedom of the Internet? What threats are there on the horizon?

BA: I am very worried about the extension of onerous FEC rules to cover blogs, as obviously are bloggers themselves. And John Kerry just a few weeks back was lamenting the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. A New York congressman, Maurice Hinchey, wants to restore it. Doing so would obliterate talk radio. A key theme of my book is that the Right has benefited from the extension of a free media, and so should fight any efforts to impose new regulations on it—and that includes placing broadcast content restrictions on cable and satellite transmissions, I’ll add.

PL: Who are the South Park conservatives?

BA: As I use the term loosely—the coinage “South Park Republican” is Andrew Sullivan’s, and had been written about by a web writer Stephen Stanton on Tech Central Station—it refers to an anti-liberal: someone who may not be traditionally conservative, especially concerning popular culture and censorship, but who looks at today’s Nancy Pelosi Left and is repulsed by it. In the book, I describe the rise of this anti-liberal, anti-PC attitude in a current of contemporary topical humor—South Park itself leading the way, Dennis Miller, the stand-ups Nick Di Paolo, Colin Quinn, and Julia Gorin, websites like Scrappleface, and so on. I found this attitude also characterized many of the college students I interviewed for SPC. Cranking Eminem on the I-pod while working on a GOP get-out-the vote effort, so to speak.

South Park is as funny as anything we’ve seen in popular culture. Conservatives take their lumps too on it, but there’s nothing new in that—topical comedy has regularly taken aim at conservatives and traditional values for decades. What’s weird and subversive about South Park is its mix of libertarianism and middle-American common sense. It has satirized hate-crime legislation, multiculturalism, abortion rights, radical environmentalism, anti-smoking campaigns, and scores of liberal celebrities.

Some South Park fans argue that the show is libertarian, but it’s more complex than that.

There’s a populist streak too. I quote the show’s co-creator Trey Parker, interviewed by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner in their excellent recent book Hollywood Interrupted: “People in the entertainment industry are by and large whore-chasing drug-addict fuckups,” he said. “But they still believe they’re better than the guy in Wyoming who really loves his wife and takes care of his kids and is a good, outstanding, wholesome person. Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they’re the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.” I love that very true observation and I think it captures the spirit of anti-elite revolt you see in South Park, and in many of things I talk about in South Park Conservatives.

PL: Mainstream book publishers seem only recently to have discovered that conservatives buy books, and have even begun to cater to them. Is that right? Which development is more surprising?

BA: It’s an amazing, happy development. Just several days back Simon & Schuster announced it was going to start publishing right-of-center books, with a new imprint headed by Mary Matalin. That new enterprise joins Penguin’s Sentinel and Doubleday’s Crown Forum as recently launched right-of-center imprints.

The publishing industry finally woke up and realized that there’s a huge market for right-of-center books. That Regnery (my publisher) has had a steady stream of conservative bestsellers over the last five or years made it hard for the big New York publishing houses to continue to ignore this market. New York’s publishing scene tends to be reflexively liberal, but here, as Adam Bellow puts it, “business rationality has trumped ideological aversion.”

What’s encouraging is that the New York houses have launched relatively autonomous right-of-center imprints, with their own editorial teams, made up of conservatives. This cuts down on the chances for liberal editors to water down or derail good right-of-center projects. It’s a great time—the greatest time ever—to be a conservative author.

PL: Your final chapter is devoted to campus conservatives. What is your assessment of the college campus? What advice do you have for conservative students taking non-science classes taught by doctrinaire liberals?

BA: Several recent studies have confirmed again what everybody already knows: professors are overwhelmingly on the Left, not just politically but in their anti-Western, trendy approaches to scholarship. Many will be perfectly open to discussion and balanced in their presentation of the subject matter. Sadly, though, some will use their classrooms as left-wing agitprop sessions. I had a few in my time. My advice would be to steer clear of such courses. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute publishes a helpful college guide that can direct students away from the PC profs. If you’re stuck in such a class, or can’t find any good professors in a subject you’re interested in, use the Internet to find out what books and magazines and blogs to read to get what you’re missing. It’s never been easier or less expensive to educate yourself.

Academe will be the last institution where the Left’s power will remain mostly intact. In SPC, I show how that power is showing its first signs of weakening, but the change is coming primarily from the students and outside groups like David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, the Young America’s Foundation, and ISI, not from professors or administrators. Until tenure rules change and more upholders of the Western ideal of liberal education go into academe, the schools will remain a bastion of the Left.

Nevertheless, a majority of students does not consider itself liberal these days—53 percent of college students identifies itself with the center or the right according to a brand new Harvard Institute of Politics study, for example. That’s striking: you’ve got to figure that if students are starting out on the center or right or anti-Left, they’re only going to move further right as they graduate, get married, start paying taxes.

The prevalence of the PC police on campus and in classrooms and in the media mainstream, I argue in the book, has a lot to do with the Left’s diminishing sway with America’s youth. My book could have been subtitled “The Death of Political Correctness.” One of the reasons the show South Park is so popular with young adults is its withering contempt for all forms of PC.

PL: The tone of your book is upbeat and optimistic, and your prognosis is guardedly optimistic. Is that fair?

BA: Yes, I’m celebrating in SPC the shattering of a liberal cultural monopoly, and that’s one of the most exhilarating, important stories of our time. I remember what it was like when I first came to the American Enterprise Institute back in 1994. It really was still a liberal monoculture, just ten years ago, though the talk radio revolution was starting to have a real impact. If you were a conservative like me, you felt a constant sense of frustration that right-of-center ideas and arguments had to fight through a kind of media force field before they reached the broader public. You had influential conservative magazines, of course—I can’t tell you what Commentary, First Things, National Review, and other journals meant to my intellectual development. But every morning you woke up and felt the weight of the New York Times.

Now I get up, and before I come to my City Journal office I read the latest Times front page piece trying to drag down the Bush administration and realize I can turn on my computer and read you guys dissecting the article I just read or Instapundit or RealClearPolitics or any number of exciting, informative sites and know that the liberal press doesn’t have the last word. Jeff Jarvis has a wonderful formulation: news is becoming a conversation, not something handed down from on high by our betters. That nails it.

I’m not arguing, however, that the Right has won the battle—and this is especially important to emphasize when it comes to the entertainment industry—only that it is no longer losing and that some of the most interesting and consequential debates are now playing out on the Right. I think, too, that you’ll start to see more films and television programming that isn’t knee-jerk liberal in sensibility. I note this season of "24" portrayed an Amnesty International lawyer as a repugnant abettor of terror. That was close to unthinkable on television until quite recently. The market is on the side of creators who want to break with the liberal mindset of the entertainment industry. With technology making available so many channels now, opportunity awaits.

PL: Have we failed to ask anything you'd like our readers to know
about the book?

Only that there’s a free chapter available at southparkconservativesbook.com. It’s my riff on anti-liberal humor and it’s hilarious. Not because I am--Laura Ingraham, who was kind enough to have me on her radio show and made SPC a “must read,” ribbed me a bit, saying I sounded on the phone more like a “Russell Kirk Conservative” than a South Park one, which isn’t right but isn’t completely wrong either—but because the people I’m writing about are so funny. Your readers will get a few laughs, and if they like what they find in the chapter they’ll probably like the rest of the book too.