Markos Moulitsas Zúniga

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga -- a.k.a. kos -- founded, edits, and runs the left-wing blog The Daily Kos. He is a fellow at the New Politics Institute begun by Simon Rosenberg and Andy and Deborah Rappaport.

Profiles
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is an NPI Fellow at the New Politics Institute. A biographical note from the institute's website in 2006 stated that Zúniga "served in the U.S. Army and was involved in the technology community in San Francisco before founding Daily Kos on May 26, 2002 (rhymes with 'prose') and becoming a leader in the modern progressive movement and blogger community. He maintains the site from Berkeley, California. In its first year, Daily Kos attracted over 1.6 million unique visits and about 3 million page views. Currently, it receives about 12 million unique visits per month and is the most highly trafficked political website in the country."

Criticisms
"The Truth About Kos," an anti-DailyKos blog by Francis L. Holland, reported on a 1993 college essay in which Moulitsas Zúniga (then a freshman) opined that gays should not be permitted to serve in the military under any circumstances. He wrote in the column, signed "Markos C.A. Moulitsas," that for non-gay military men, "There is something inherently uncomfortable about it."

In a June 6, 2006 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Zúniga stated that he had spent between six months and two years training at the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, DC. In this speech Kos said began in 2001, before he started DailyKos, and continued until the beginning of his involvement with the Howard Dean presidential campaign (late 2003/early 2004), which would mean that Zúniga was in training with the US CIA for as much as two years.

Published works

 * Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, with Jerome Armstrong and Simon Rosenberg, Hardback, March 2006, ISBN 1931498997; Paperback, September 2006, ISBN 193339241X.

Contact information

 * Weblog: http://www.dailykos.com/
 * Web diary: http://kos.dailykos.com/

Related SourceWatch articles

 * ActBlue
 * blogging
 * blogosphere
 * blogs
 * internet activism
 * Matt Stoller
 * Townhouse listserv
 * U.S. congressional elections in 2006
 * U.S. congressional elections in 2008
 * U.S. presidential election, 2004
 * U.S. presidential election, 2008
 * Working For Us PAC

External resources

 * Profile: Markos Moulitsas Zúniga," The Daily Kos.
 * Markos Moulitsas Zúniga in the dKosopedia.
 * Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Daily Kos in the Wikipedia.
 * Contributing Writer: Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, The Gadflyer.
 * Political Donations: Markos Moulitsas, NewsMeat.
 * Episode Number 79: "Markos Moulitsas", The Colbert Report, April 6, 2006.
 * "The Indictment of Markos C.A. Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA by Justice and History," The Truth About Kos blog, August 19, 2007.

External articles

 * "Divide and rule ... for now," The Guardian (UK), November 3, 2004: "Bush may have steamrollered his way back into the White House, but his re-election will further galvanise the resurgence of progressive opposition, writes US blogger Markos Moulitsas."
 * Chris Suellentrop, "Blogging for Dollars. Hang Daily Kos, but not for taking money from Howard Dean," Slate, January 14, 2005.
 * Dean Barnett, "Taking Kos Seriously. The Daily Kos is the most popular and important force in the blogosphere; it's a fact with which Democrats are just now coming to grips," The Weekly Standard, February 2, 2005.
 * Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "Kos Call. For America's number one liberal blogger politics is like sports: It's all about winning," Washington Monthly, January/February 2006.
 * Conor Clarke, "Kos: The Internet Is Not Enough," TomPaine.com, January 18, 2006.
 * Ana Marie Cox, "Inside the Cult of Kos," TIME Magazine/CNN, June 5, 2006.
 * Jonathan Darman, "The War's Left Front. The Daily Kos thinks the politics of Iraq will help him shape the Democratic Party," Newsweek/MSNBC, July 3, 2006.
 * "WHO IS MARKOS MOULITSAS ZUNIGA? A Partisan 'Nutroot' Who Turned His Hate-Filled Blog Daily Kos Into A Leadership Post In The Democrat Party," GOP.com, August 23, 2006.
 * "In Pictures: The Web Celeb 25," Forbes, January 23, 2007.
 * Dean Barnett, "Still Taking Kos Seriously," Hugh Hewitt / Townhall.com, March 11, 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
 * 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.