No offence, but TCS is a bit of a right-wing Republican mouth organ. Some people call it a "journo-lobbying." Mr. Glassman has "aligned his views with those of the business interests that dominate K Street and support the Republican Party." As well, you would laugh at me if I argued citing a professor from the University of Tasmania as you have done.
The founder of TCS, James Glassman, says "TCS would be "a cross between a journal of Internet opinion and a cyber think tank open to the public," as Glassman described it in a press release accompanying the site's New York launch party, held in Grand Central Station. TCS would be part Slate, part Red Herring, articulating "a high-tech agenda of freedom and opportunity" with a libertarian conservative bent.
...But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.
...journo-lobbying is an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now."
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