Here's Joshua Greenman of the NY Daily News on the current state of the political lexicon:
It's hard to know where to begin in dismantling the Republican canard that Democrats control the media. Fox News is the most popular 24-hour news network by a whoosh and a cachung. Rush Limbaugh is the most powerful radio host, and lots of little Limbaughs line up behind him. Sarah Palin is the biggest media-political crossover star. And in an increasingly fragmented Internet, the Drudge Report continues to drive more political traffic than any other website. In italics and bold, to boot.
I don't begrudge conservatives this success. It speaks to message discipline and to feeding tasty food to a hungry audience. An audience that is right of center, which left-wingers far too often fail to acknowledge.
So, the left does not control the media anymore? Perhaps. Greenman credits terms like "ObamaCare", "death panels", "porkulus"* and "main stream media", inventions of the right, for steering the narrative in the political arena. Point taken, but we can't help detect, in the article, a whiff of the tiresome lament that counter-productive statist policies enacted by the Democrats (and certainly some by Bush-era Republicans) suffer a lack of public good will because of, wait for it... poor messaging.
It never fails: Buried not too far below the surface in these thought pieces resides the whine that a dumbed-down American electorate has not been sufficiently grateful for the wondrous and benevolent acts of tax payer-funded largesse bestowed upon them by the ruling class.
But let's give our liberal friends some credit here. The bumper sticker slogan seen during the Bush years "Clinton lied, nobody died", in four words summed up brilliantly the two central themes of two presidencies spanning 16 years as seen from their perspective. How it is then that "It takes a village" never really got off the ground will remain one of life's great mysteries.
*
Greenman doesn't mention "porkulus" by name as use of this pejorative for the $800 billion American Recovery Act (the stimulus package) never went mainstream and was proof only of being a hopeless recovery denier in the right-leaning fever swamps of the blogosphere.
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1 comment:
So... The media isn't lefty, because Fox News (the center-right guys who do clear labeling) is really popular, and Rush (who only got started when the grip on radio loosened, and stays popular because he says things that folks don't get to hear elsewhere) is uber-big in radio!(That place where libs put a huge, well-funded, lefty station... that died a miserable death because it didn't say anything you couldn't get elsewhere.)
This guy DOES realize there are "progressive" radio guys, right?
Does he actually thing that everyone BUT Fox is totally middle of the road?
Argh.... I know a lot of libs don't get supply and demand, but if you look at a market, and the single biggest sellers you can pick out are pretty uniformly in one small area, that means that demand is high in that area. That means either nation is REALLY far right(if you believe the talk that Fox is "far right") or the balance of the media is left of various degrees.
Radio, as much as I hate to admit it, is a secondary market. Folks go there to get what they can't get in the normal market-- like explicitly right based programming, and far left programming. (like calling Obama a sell out that's worse than Bush for the 'half-@ssed' health care bill-- apparently anything short of a fully gov't organized system wasn't enough; heard that in Portland, trying to find a good station.)
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