Study: Liberal Blogs Ten Times More Foul-Mouthed than Conservative Blogs

I always hate these articles.

Dividing the number of instances of profanity by the number of pages of the sites on which they appear, then multiplying the result by 100 yields what might be called a "profanity quotient."

The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.

The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne.com, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.

(CORRECTED PARAGRAPH:) That's quite a disparity. Liberals are more than 12 times likely to use profanity than conservatives on the Web.

One thing that is interesting to note is that the profanity ratio of a particular site seems somewhat related to the writing style of the bloggers who run it.

For instance, the Ace of Spades blog has the highest profanity quotient on the right. This is likely due to the fact that "Ace," the anonymous proprietor of the site, regularly uses profanity in his own writings and therefore is much less inclined to want to crack down on readers who respond using it.

I guess we (including you motherfuckers) are letting the team down.

Matthew Sheffield speculates about the reasons for this -- a combination of social stigma about profanity on the right and utterly missing on the left, and "anger" on the left.

The left is much concerned about "authenticity," which itself is evidenced by an outpouring of emotion (both real and feigned, to indicate how "authentic" the author's make-pretend outrage is), and the left has decided there's really no better way to demonstrate their often-feigned authentic emotion than by dropping the f-bomb around here and there.

I really wish I weren't so compromised on this issue, because it seems like the sort of thing I'd really like to rip the fucking left about. Alas.

Whoops: Ninjaed again.

posted by Ace at 04:28 PM

| Access Comments