Does This Surprise Anyone?

In an article in today's Washington Times, Matthew Sheffield writes about the profane difference between conservative and liberal bloggers.

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.

In the interest of full disclosure, we'll point out that Sheffield is our boss. However, haters, this isn't brown nosing because we're 99% sure he doesn't read this blog.


If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.