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John Leo on the end of the leftist media near monopoly:

The [leftist] worldview still dominates the news business, the arts, the entertainment world, publishing, the campuses, and all levels of schooling. It’s the media and educational status quo. But five years ago, CBS probably could have gotten away with a cheap-shot miniseries on the Reagans. Now it can’t ..

[One] reason for the ditching of the Reagan miniseries is that the conservative media world is now good at gang tackling. From Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report (which framed the issue of the miniseries) to Fox, the bloggers, talk radio hosts, and the columnists, everybody piled on. New York Times columnist David Brooks touched on this point some time ago, writing that the new conservative media have “cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps [leftist] efforts to get their ideas out.” For liberals, this is an ominous development ...

I once asked a thoughtful [leftist] friend: “Why does the message of the left seem to penetrate the whole of pop culture?” His answer -- “We make the culture; you don’t” -- doesn’t seem so obvious now.

The showpiece of [antileftist] humor is one that appalls a good many conservatives: South Park, Comedy Central’s wildly popular cartoon saga of four crude and incredibly foul-mouthed little boys. The show mocks mindless lefty celebrities and takes swipes at the gay lobby and the abortion lobby. Some examples: Getting Gay With Kids is a homosexual choir that descends on the school. And the mother of one South Parker decides she wants to abort him (“It’s my body”), despite the fact that he’s 8 years old. The weekly disclaimer on the show says it is so offensive “it should not be viewed by anyone.” This is a new paradigm in pop culture: conventional [leftist thinking] is the old, rigid establishment. The [antileftists] are brash, funny, and cool ...

Some of the new conservative success is due to the rise of a large crop of commentators the left has not been able to match. Mostly young and often very funny, they include Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, and Jeff Jacoby. But most of the conservative gains have been in new media. Fox News’s large audience skews young, and half its viewers are either [leftist] or centrist. So Fox isn’t just preaching to the choir. It’s exposing nonconservatives to conservative ideas.

As mentioned here several times, the “blogosphere” -- the world of Internet commentators -- tilts strongly to the right. Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, and Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit have a heavy impact. No excess of the [leftist] media seems to escape their attention. Among other things, they have mercilessly attacked Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and idol of America’s angriest [leftists]. It has been an amazing and, I think, largely successful campaign of informed detraction.

It was obvious that the democratization of the media would bring new voices into the field, but who knew that so many of those voices would be conservative, libertarian, or just cantankerously opposed to entrenched [leftist] doctrine? The conservative side is far from winning the culture wars, but the debate is broader and fairer now. The near monopoly is over.