On Line

But you seem to have an instinct for the well-timed rhetorical bomb, at least on Power Line. And you never equivocate—you’re forcefully advocating a certain ideological point of view.
Oh, absolutely. We are unapologetic. There are various ways you can describe us, one is “conservative activists.” And that’s a description that I wouldn’t at all shy away from, and that’s one of the things that guides what we write about and what we say. But we’re independent. It wouldn’t be fair to say that we’re members of a team—we disagree and say what we think. The minute you stop saying what you think is the minute you start wasting your time. With a hobby like ours, if you’re not going to say what you think, then what the hell are you doing it for?

No offense, but you’re fifty-seven years old. Why did you decide to write a blog?
I’m not crazy about the term blogger. I never call myself that, and my guess is that in ten years we will not be hearing that word. Anyway—by 2002, Scott and I had been writing together for ten years. And we’d grown sort of frustrated with the media, with the 750-word space, and the fact that you need to wrestle with the deadline every time you write a piece and then by the time it runs a week later no one cares anymore. And by 2001, I had become an Internet junkie and thought that it was a pretty cool thing.

Did you have any role models starting out?
Andrew Sullivan was an inspiration, of course, and Stephen den Beste’s USS Clueless blog came in at about exactly the same time as ours, but he’s not around anymore. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that this could be a good medium for Scott and me to work in because you can just do it when you have time. If you’ve got something to say and it takes only a hundred words—fine, there it is. I really like the flexibility of the medium and the speed.

How much time do you spend on your blog?
People ask us how we find time to do this and there are lots of different answers to that question, but one of the answers is, we can write really fast. One of the things a lawyer has to be able to do is bang stuff out relatively quickly and have it be careful and accurate. We spend probably an average of two hours apiece on the website.

Two hours apiece writing?
Two hours apiece total—six hours total between the three of us. I average an hour and a half a day just reading stuff.

Online?
Oh, 100 percent online. Usually, I’ll start doing some reading early in the morning while I’m getting ready for work. I’ve got the laptop next to my sink and I’ll be shaving and reading the newspapers. Then during the day, it just depends on what I’m doing. If I’m taking a deposition or something, I can’t do it, but if I’m in the office, I might look at the highlights, check out the new headlines to see what’s going on, and if there’s something I think I could try to comment on, I’ll post something.

I want to get back to the idea of “conservative activism.” Isn’t there a risk of Power Line becoming an echo chamber, a place where like-minded people seek out what they want to hear?
That risk is there, but it’s not only there on the Web. In fact, I’ve seen studies—I’m not sure they’re right—that purport to show that on the Web people are more likely to be reading opposing points of view than they are in newspapers or magazines. The guy who subscribes to National Review doesn’t subscribe to The Nation. Online, it’s easier to click back and forth between different points of view.