Netroots

Netroots, appears in the subtitle of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas's 2006 book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. According to the authors, Armstrong coined the term. In the book they write, "it was Jerome who coined the term 'netroots' in 2002 to describe this online grassroots community that has grown dramatically in the past five years. MoveOn, launched in 1998 to combat the right-wing effort to destroy then president Bill Clinton, has grown to 3.3 million members. By late November, 2005, the top seventy or so liberal blogs, led by Daily Kos, garnered about 60 million page-views every month.... The netroots activist, much like the new generation of grassroots activist, is fiercely partisan, fiercely multi-issue, and focused on building a broader movement. It's not an ideological movement -- there is actually very little, issue-wise, that unites most modern party activists except, perhaps opposition to the Iraq war...." (This long quote appears on page 146 of their book.)

Related SourceWatch Resources

• ActBlue
• Ari Melber
• Astroturf blogging
• blogging
• blogosphere
• blogs
• Jerome Armstrong
• internet activism
• Netroots Nation
• Obama for America
• Organizing for America
• Matt Stoller
• Joe Trippi
• MoveOn
• pro-war in Iraq bloggers
• Townhouse listserv

External Resources

• John Stauber, The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats, March 15, 2013, CounterPunch.
• Conor Kenny, Hello, I’m a Democrat: Meet the netroots activists who have moved online and into political office, In These Times, May 21, 2007
• Daniel Shulman, Meet the New Bosses: After crashing the gate of the political establishment, bloggers are looking more like the next gatekeepers, Mother Jones magazine, June 20, 2007
• John Stauber, "Coffee with the Troops" at Yearly Kos Fuels Debate About the Netroots and the War, PRWatch.org, August 6, 2007.
• Jon Wiener, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, a review of the book by Matt Bai, August 12, 2007, Los Angeles Times.
• John Stauber, Iraq: The "Gift" That Keeps on Bleeding, PRWatch.org, August 20, 2007.
• Eric Alterman and Danielle Ivory, "Think Again, Blogosphere to Mainstream Media: Get Off the Bus," Center for American Progress, May 21, 2009.

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