Why don’t they get it?

Month after month Andrew Bolt’s blog receives over one million "hits". But the MSM remains frigidly Left. None of the established media seems interested in giving a growing audience conservative news analysis or offering a different point of view from that of the Left establishment.

Left blogs attract Left readers. Conservative blogs attract Right and Left. The comments pages on the blogs of Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman etc are lively places. Phillip Adams’ blog is a cemetery with dull contributions from the typing dead.

Did anyone read or take any notice of Australian media commentary about the recent US elections? Certainly the Left may have but, I’m guessing, most of us with a dissident frame of mind ignored the chatter and went straight to US internet sources or watched Fox News. If anyone glanced at the newspaper “news” they only saw stuff that had appeared in Left blogs the day before.

It is noticeable that when Bolt’s readers refer to books they often make reference to works by conservative US authors. They are referring to books which, probably, they did not find or buy in Australian bookshops but purchased through the net. They may be relatively small in numbers but they do suggest that a base exists for the promotion and marketing of Australian conservative books. With the dollar backtracking from its earlier highs, US books look awfully expensive and Amazon is beginning to seem like a luxury from another era. This could be a good time to create an Australian conservative publishing network.

Conservative books cannot be sold through reviews in Fairfax sheets, Left literary reviews or the ABC. These belong to the Left. A sizable number of Australians share conservative values. We face the challenge of finding this audience and talking to them. Until we do so we will continue to suffer from the cultural tyranny of the Left. How we do so is a vitally important topic which deserves to be taken up by an ideas think tank interested in finding realistic ways for Australia’s conservative writers to connect with their audience.