Open Left (OL)

Open Left (OL)

Overview

* Prominent progressive blog from 2007-2010
* Helped craft Democratic legislation for net neutrality
* Shut down its operations in February 2011


Established in July 2007, OpenLeft (OL) was a popular blog “committed to building a strong and progressive movement and an enduring progressive (not just Democratic) majority.” As part of the Netroots nation, OL sought to strengthen the progressive movement in the Democratic Party by criticizing moderate Democrats, particularly those in the Democratic Leadership Council and the New Democrat Coalition.

Chris Bowers, Mike Lux, and Matt Stoller were OL’s founding partners. Like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, all three OL founders wrote for MyDD.com, considered to be the father of the progressive blogosphere, before starting their own blog.

From its inception, OL helped lead the progressive charge for net neutrality, a concept whose objective is to empower the federal government to ration and apportion Internet bandwidth as it sees fit, and to thereby control the Internet’s content. In 2007, OL teamed up with Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) to help write legislation for net neutrality. During the 2008 election season, Matt Stoller and OL succeeded in getting every Democratic challenger for the Senate to support the concept.

OL was a member of BlogPac, a political action committee that includes a number of prominent blogs – among them, Daily Kos, MyDD, Atrios, Talk Left, BOP News, AmericaBlog, Pandagon, and Annatopia – which fundraise through ActBlue “to wage progressive politics online.” BlogPac aims to build a new progressive infrastructure, and to fund local blogs in all 50 states.

The BlogPac coalition utilizes online strategies like googlebombing to influence the ranking of political information on search engines. During the 2008 presidential campaigns, OL targeted John McCain in an effort to raise the page-ranking of negative stories associated with the Republican candidate. In 2009, BlogPac teamed up with ACORN, Color of Change, and MoveOn.org “to hold Blue Dogs, conservodems, and other center-right Democrats accountable for supporting Wall Street and conservative groups instead of supporting their own constituents.”

Open Left shut down its operations in February 2011.

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