Guardian and Markos Moulitsas

First column by Daily Kos in the Guardian

It was the year 2000, and Democrats were running on a record of peace and prosperity stewarded by the capable, if morally imperfect, Bill Clinton. It was a race that should have been won by their candidate, Al Gore. In fact, it was won by Al Gore, but the Rightwing Noise Machine kept it close enough to be stolen by the Republicans and their allies at the supreme court.

What is the Rightwing Noise Machine? Conservatives in the United States have spent the last 30 years building a vast infrastructure designed to create ideas, distribute them, and sell them to the American public. It spans multiple think tanks and a well-oiled message machine that has a stranglehold on American discourse. From the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Wall Street Journal, Drudge Report and Murdoch's Fox News, to (more recently) the mindless drones in the rightwing blogosphere, the right enjoys the ability to control entire news cycles, holding them hostage for entire elections.

Gore learned this the hard way, as he faced a campaign of character assassination pushed by the right and abetted by a lazy-to-hostile press corps: Gore said he was the inspiration for Love Story. Gore invented the Internet. Gore exaggerated. Gore was boring. Of course, all of this criticism was flat-out wrong or grossly out of proportion to the alleged infraction, but it didn't matter: the media landscape offered no respite. In the US, talk radio was and remains a bastion of rightwing lunacy. Television coverage had become an extension of the Republican party, not just because of the influence of Fox News, but because conservatives had "worked the refs" so diligently that mainstream media outlets piled on their conservative "pundits" lest they be accused of "liberal bias". The political internet was dominated by the virulently rightwing Free Republic - still the largest political site to this day.

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There was no way for Gore to get out his message, or launch a counteroffensive. Given the circumstances, it was a wonder he won the race, even if our nation's Republican-dominated supreme court handed the keys to the White House to George Bush.

The year 2000 was a wake-up call to many partisans like myself. Surveying the landscape, we could sense the flexing of the Rightwing Noise Machine's muscles, even if we were ignorant of its ultimate size and reach. We had witnessed the goring of Gore, yet sat by, helplessly unable to fight back. We saw the Democratic party get outmanoeuvred in Florida, legally and rhetorically. We looked around for a "liberal media", yet found nothing of the sort.

It would be really sexy and dramatic to claim that a few brave blogger souls set out to build an alternative media structure, but that's not really true. We set out to write for ourselves, to provide an outlet for the angst we felt in a politically hostile environment - where criticising the president on domestic policy was somehow unpatriotic. And we weren't alone: there was a huge audience out there hungry for this content. And suddenly, the seeds of a liberal media blossomed online.

And the blogs had company. While bloggers rode the Howard Dean campaign to greater prominence, more staid, institutional, and moneyed, liberals were also surveying the political landscape. They didn't like what they saw and they began to act.

Liberal thinktanks sprung up to challenge their conservative counterparts. A new liberal talk radio network was launched. MoveOn.org, created to help Bill Clinton stave off impeachment, went from being a grassroots email list to a multimillion dollar media operation. Americans Coming Together will spend nearly $100m (£55m) to register and turn out Democratic voters this November. Berkeley linguist George Lakoff founded the Rockridge Institute and is making waves in Democratic circles by showing how Republicans have hijacked the language ("tax relief", "partial-birth abortion", "pro-life"), and how Democrats can take it back.

In 2000, Bush outspent Gore $193m to $132m. While Republicans still have a slight advantage in 2004, Democrats won't lose the White House because of money. But Republicans still control the White House, the Senate, the House, the supreme court and a majority of state governorships and legislatures, meaning they can control the agenda, while their Noise Machine can dominate the message and delivery of it.

Liberal groups are fighting back, working to build a parallel infrastructure. My blog DailyKos.com receives 350-400,000 visits every day - double that of FoxNews.com and comparable to the Guardian's print run. Daily Kos and other bloggers like Atrios, MyDD, TalkLeft, and Juan Cole have become a liberal counterweight to the mainstream media and the Rightwing Noise Machine. We don't have parity, but we're working on it.

We all hope to have an impact in 2004, but there's reality: conservatives have spent 30 years building their infrastructure. We can't be expected to counter that in one year. We do things with an eye to the future, all the while doing our best to spare our country (and the world) four more years of a Bush administration.