Markos Moulitsas

Founder of The Daily Kos

• Born: September 11, 1971
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Primary Company/Organization:The Daily Kos

Introduction

Markos Moulitsas is one of the most influential voices on the Internet, with a community blog, The Daily Kos, that reached more than 14 million monthly readers as of 2024. The blog is a leading site for left-central readers as well as regular columns for traditional media. The Daily Kos has become such an important part of progressive politics that Moulitsas has become incorporated, informally, into the Democratic Party's intelligentsia, and his opinion on potential candidates a valued one. As a proponent of grassroots activism and bottom-up self-organization as a means of effecting political change, Moulitsas aims to promote The Daily Kos as a seamless link between mainstream journalism and citizen journalism. He balances his activities there with work for the mainstream media and his other commercial interests, which include a network of sports blogs.

Early Life

Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga was born on September 11, 1971, in Chicago, Illinois, to a mother who was Salvadoran and a father who was Greek. Moulitsas subsequently spent several years (1976–80) in El Salvador during the time when the civil war between a U.S.-backed military junta and communist insurgents was under way. The family returned to the United States as a result of the fighting and fear of violence.

As a young man, Moulitsas exhibited a right-wing sensibility. On finishing high school, he joined the U.S. Army. He spent a period at a U.S. base and the bulk of his three years in Germany as part of a missile launch team. His experiences in the military persuaded him that he had been pursuing the wrong course: The use of paid and unaccountable mercenaries (for example, the private security contractor Blackwater in Iraq), the general management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the role of corporate interests in dictating foreign policy all seemed to have been influential in effecting this transition.

When he left the military, therefore, Moulitsas resolved to get more education and then chart a new course for his career. He pursued undergraduate degrees in philosophy, journalism, and politics at Northern Illinois University and then a postgraduate law degree at Boston University. In 1999, he decided to move to California to embark on a new career in proximity to the emerging Internet industry, although it was not immediately apparent what the course of that career would be.

Life's Work

To a certain extent, Moulitsas has followed the same route into Internet success as many of the other members of the network of investors, entrepreneurs, and engineers in that field. That is, he has found a successful business model after being at first discouraged by attempts at political consultancy and other ventures relying principally on his own efforts.

His success came when he adopted a network model of entrepreneurism, which means identifying a technological platform that important other stakeholders wish to share. In contrast to some other ventures (for example, Facebook and Google), the important stakeholders in this case were members of the public—or at least people and organizations motivated to get their message across on a larger connected network than they could achieve based on their own efforts. Both The Daily Kos and the SN Nation of sports blogs rely on positive externalities: that is, the willingness of other people to contribute their physical and mental labor to a venture without being initially compensated for it. Contributors provide content and assistance in the hope that their opinions will become better known, perhaps because they have a personal ideology they would like to see advanced at a broader social level or because their partiality to a sports team or sporting league also represents something of an evangelical aspiration that requires them to tell other people their opinions. This approach minimizes, within reason, capital asset investment and maximizes external input from network connections in a set of self-extending networks. That is, people who become part of the network by reading and contributing to the community blogs have a powerful incentive to increase the number of people also reading and contributing to them. This is both a positive externality (that is, it provides additional benefits to the community and stakeholders at large above and beyond what is intended by the creator) and a network externality (that is, the more people that log onto, read, and then comment on Daily Kos posts, then the more that contributors and everyone else will obtain value from the process).

There have of course been controversies along the way. These have arisen from two principal causes. First, since The Daily Kos was read (depending on estimates) by editors at more than the top ten political magazines in the United States combined, it aroused the interest of its ideological opponents and, given the nature of political discourse in contemporary America, any questionable statement or misstatement by a member of the public or regular contributor can be seized upon as a means of obtaining political leverage. Second, the contributors themselves are indeed occasionally prone to overstatement, hysteria, or paranoia. These phenomena seem endemic to online contributions, which can be effected at great speed and without the period of reflection and checking that traditional journalistic principles require to be incorporated into the process (although these have also eroded in the face of today's cost reductions).

The extent to which Daily Kos content has become recognized as an important part of the media landscape in the United States is demonstrated by the fact that content analysis is now being performed on it for publication in academic journals. For example, the occasion on which Virginia senator George Allen made racist comments during his 2006 Senate campaign (although disputed, they were caught clearly on tape) and the subsequent exchange of comments became an important case study measuring the nature and extent of public political discourse. One research question in this case is the extent to which comments received are genuine representations of grassroots mobilization or are responses from large-scale organizations masquerading as the genuine voice of the people.

It remains to be seen whether online communities such as those surrounding The Daily Kos can provide the kind of citizen journalism that has been forecast and whether such communities will genuinely function as partnerships with mainstream journalism.

Moulitsas also cofounded Vox Media in 2004 and served on its board of directors until 2015. He went on to write a regular column for The Hill political newspaper from 2008 to 2017.

Personal Life

Moulitsas married in 2000 and lives in California with wife and two children, son Artistotle and daughter Elisandra. They are described as living a healthy and happy Californian lifestyle featuring sports and music. Moulitsas is said to be an enthusiastic composer.

He has been included in a variety of “most important” lists in the media, including lists of important Hispanics, important Internet personalities, and so forth. These are subjective judgments, but their accumulation suggests that a level of significance in the industry does exist. The Zúniga portion of Moulitsas's name only occasionally appears in print, presumably in part because it interferes with the Kos brand name.

Bibliography

“About Daily Kos.” n.d. Daily Kos. Web. 20 July 2012.

Armstrong, Jerome, and Markos Moulitsas. Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2006. Print.

“Dailykos.com” Similarweb, 2024, www.similarweb.com/website/dailykos.com/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Karpf, David. “Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization?” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 17.2–3 (2010): 143–62. Print.

Moulitsas, Markos. American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. San Francisco: Polipoint, 2010. Print.

Moulitsas, Markos. Taking on the System: Rules for Change in a Digital Era. New York: Celebra, 2009. Print.

Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “Kos Call.” Washington Monthly Jan./Feb. 2006. Web. 20 July 2012.