Bloggers in the Northwest aren’t content to simply chat in cyberspace about their dream political candidates and how they’ll someday work to solve public policy problems.

They work to get them elected now.

“That’s where the public policy becomes electoral, because you can’t have public policy unless someone’s going to implement it,” said Andrew Villeneuve, director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a liberal blog and online Democratic think tank.

His blog has actively supported Gov. Chris Gregoire and Democratic candidate for Congress Darcy Burner. But Villeneuve said his focus is on Washington state: the presidential race is better left in the hands of national groups like MoveOn.org. He’d rather spend his energy on local issues and races.

At Drinking Liberally, an informal gathering of blogger types and local political aficionados that “promotes democracy one pint at a time,” Michael Hood of the liberal BlatherWatch blog admired Villeneuve’s energy.

“I’m glad he’s on our side,” Hood said.

Villeneuve chatted in the corner with David “Goldy” Goldstein of the outspokenly liberal HorsesAss.org. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Joel Connelly held forth at a long table surrounded by a ragtag bunch of bloggers.

Standing in the darkened bar of the Montlake Ale House, Hood struck a contrast to the boyish Villeneuve with his full white beard, round spectacles and fleece vest pulled over a blue button-down shirt. It didn’t hurt that the pints really do flow liberally.

Hood is a freelance writer whose blog “monitors” local conservative talk radio. He said Villeneuve is an example of an effective blogger. But when it comes to the issue of the blogosphere’s independence from the influence of the mainstream media, he was fairly circumspect.

“It’s hard to know who’s independent and who isn’t,” he said.

The tendency is for the new media to become like the old, a process that’s already underway in the rush by journalists to set up their own blogs and podcasts. Journalists and bloggers have developed a sort of adversarial, quasi-symbiotic relationship, “fraught with dangers of the journalistic kind,” Hood said.

“Some people are undoubtedly paid shills,” said conservative blogger Patrick Bell, who writes for respectfullyrepublican.com. Partisan bloggers on both sides sometimes take talking points verbatim from campaign press releases, he said. “Of course, this is also a very common refrain of bloggers when they get in spats or dustups with ideological foes: ‘You’re just a paid functionary for XYZ.’”

Media consultants or other people with an axe to grind will actively pitch bloggers during the campaign season, he said.

“Then there’s the dirty tricksters and tipsters who anonymously submit content to bloggers.”

He identifies Slog, the blog run by The Stranger, as a repeat offender of this kind of rumor mill blogging.

“Journalism always has had a problem with circular cannibalism, — everybody feeding on each other with a product that comes out all in one pile,” Hood said.

Many blogs don’t do their own reporting and instead interpret what’s reported by newspapers and TV stations, becoming in essence online, written versions of talk radio.

Hood pointed to another hazard as the real danger facing the blogosphere.

Without editorial oversight, facts are secondary to partisan spin, shock value and hyperbole, he said.

“There’s not too many Republicans on this side of the mountains,” Hood continued after downing his pint, admitting that it feels a little one-sided in Seattle.

While Rush Limbaugh made politics entertaining and created the impetus for liberal blogs, he lamented, “The political discourse is driven by what makes people pissed off enough to call a radio station.”

That might be changing, argues Sandeep Kaushik, a former Stranger writer and a local Democratic campaign consultant. The fact that there is a new level of political dialogue on the Internet is a positive. This is especially good in an age of media consolidation, shrinking newspaper staffs and the resulting lack of political news coverage and analysis.

The image of bloggers as pajama-clad, unemployed weirdos is a stereotype, he said. Bloggers of both political orientations are fairly sophisticated when it comes to the finer points of policy, and can influence the thinking of members of local government and journalists.

“I think it’s had a positive effect in terms of jump-starting some serious discussions about some issues,” he said.

Villeneuve said that liberal blogs provide the political left with an alternative media to compete with the dominance of talk radio, but he’s also proud to identify himself as a partisan.

“Our role is to advance an agenda,” he said. “I don’t want to be wrong; I want my opinions to be based on facts. I can totally rely on, let’s say, Democratic sources, and just trash the Republican agenda … and not bother giving them a voice, because I’m subjective.”

There’s still a role for objective media, he said. “Their job is just to report the news” and play the part of referee between the left and right.

He said that the old formula of giving all sides equal airtime does not reflect the real world. The one-quote-at-a-time per side approach is outmoded, he said. If the traditional media — he hesitates to call it “mainstream” — doesn’t move on from this model, Villeneuve will, bypassing the middleman.

He leaned forward, and his voice took on a serious edge.

“Once we have an idea, we’re able to go to an audience and say, ‘Here’s our idea.’ We don’t want to have to go to other people who control the gate and say, ‘Please put our idea out there.’ We want to be in control,” Villeneuve said. “That’s why we have a blog.”

[Reach reporter Will Mari at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]