| Revision as of 01:13, 7 January 2005 editJamesMLane (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users, Pending changes reviewers, Rollbackers23,097 edits rv to last version by Spiritu to remove POV -- but if someone familiar with Daily Kos can confirm that it's open to posts from right-wingers, that would be worth including← Previous edit | Revision as of 07:17, 7 January 2005 edit undo68.100.115.168 (talk)No edit summaryNext edit → | ||
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| Kos is often the darling of the mass media - he attended the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, and has carried on a long flame war with the commentators at the ] website over many issues, most notably the 'screw them' comment. Some have compared the view on Daily Kos to the posts on ], a left wing conspiracy site. | |||
Revision as of 07:17, 7 January 2005
Daily Kos is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and progressives. It is arguably the most influential liberal weblog.
Daily Kos is run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a young U.S. Army veteran, as part of his political consulting firm. It has daily traffic of 450,000 or more, and often reaches over 2,500,000 unique visits in one week. Daily Kos readers gave approximately $500,000 in user donations to Democratic candidates in the 2004 elections. All of these candidates lost, but in many cases their opponents were forced to spend much larger amounts of GOP money defending their seats.
The main difference between Daily Kos and other liberal political blogs, such as Atrios or Talking Points Memo, is the sheer volume of content on the site. Daily Kos is not a standard blog, but an interactive site powered by the collaborative media application Scoop, by which user comments are privileged similarly to blog entries. Thus, while Moulitsas and several others post entries directly to the front page, the site also features "diaries," user entries that flow into the site at a speed of up to several per minute. These are identical in format to the main posts, and can advance to 'recommended diary' status by user vote, and at Moulitsas's discretion can be promoted to the front page.
Daily Kos also contains permanent articles, glossaries, and other content, including dKosopedia, a collaborative information clearinghouse available for open editing as a Wiki, with its contents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is sustained by advertising, mostly for political candidates and timely political books.
Daily Kos is the largest Scoop site, having surpassed Kuro5hin. The creator of Scoop, Rusty Foster, is a technology consultant for Zuniga's company.
Controversy
In addition to its staunchly leftist point of view that has earned the site many detractors on the right, the Daily Kos has become embroiled in controversy over its content. Daily Kos attracted some controversy in April 2004 by publishing comments about workers who were executed in Fallujah, Iraq that many considered to be insensitive and offensive. In an article entitled "Corpses on the Cover" Zúniga remarked
- I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.
The comment was widely publicized and criticized by other bloggers, particularly conservatives. The original post was quickly removed from the Kos website but preserved by conservative bloggers. Zúniga responded to the criticism with something of a retraction, or rationalization as his critics called it , in which he attributed his remarks to anger over childhood memories of warfare in El Salvador. The incident continues to be cited by Kos critics on the right such as Little Green Footballs as what they say is evidence of the site's extremist political views.
External links
Kos is often the darling of the mass media - he attended the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, and has carried on a long flame war with the commentators at the Little Green Footballs website over many issues, most notably the 'screw them' comment. Some have compared the view on Daily Kos to the posts on Democratic Underground, a left wing conspiracy site.
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