Information is affirmation, when you’re right. Its the tiniest bit disingenuous to claim we favor one over the other whem they are essentially identical.
Point taken, I suppose, but when I read Marley23’s post, the striking thing about it is that anyone on the Dope could have legitimately submitted it, with no changes required.
ETA: In fact, just to make the point (and because I agree that its substance has yet to be addressed), I’ll do it right here:
Well, I don’t know about not needing another outlet, but I think this is a key point.
Good one, Sam :p. Ol’ Rush, the solitary voice of virtue, battling the evils of the commie-pinkos by suggesting that outrage over Abu Ghraib is overblown, earthquake aid to Haiti is not morally required, and indulging bottom of the barrel racists. Thank tha Lord, he’s alive and off the Oxy (for now)…
This much is true. A good leading personality can be important to a movement.
Uh-huh. Tell us another. (BTW, why would someone listen to a talk show if it actually talked down to him/her?)
How so? I don’t think anyone could match the hysteria and dishonesty of FNC. Admittedly, Olbermann and Schultz have had their moments of trying (though few and far between), but they couldn’t do it if they tried.
Apparently they didn’t.
Regards,
Shodan
Dang it, I missed the edit window. Let’s try again:
In fact, just to make the point (and because I agree that its substance has yet to be addressed), I’ll do it right here:
You have repeatedly made this assertion. Rather than demanding other people DISprove it, why don’t you back up your own statements?
Well, as I already said: It’s obfuscatory and a rabbit trail at best. It’s just sophistry designed to conflate regulation with “socialism”, which in turn is supposed to stand in for “communism”, which in turn is really supported to be used to mean “totalitarianism” or “Stalinism”.
It’s just a silly talking point. And like most irrational and hateful generalizations about a group, it’s rather contradictory with other of the same set of talking points. For instance, Liberals are for bigger government, and Republicans are for smaller government (so says the talking point). But if that’s true, how does having a massive, inefficient government bureaucracy craft regulatory policies while the industries themselves are not only still intact, but then must hire even more people to craft and regulate compliance, mean that control is now in the hands of fewer people?
To say nothing of the nonsense about how a totally free market that has a monopoly is no longer a free market because… Obama is a Socialist!! Or what have you.
It’s just the same old nonsense we heard during the election. “ZOMG, Socialism!!!”
P.S. Oops, sorry, didn’t preview and missed your update. I’ll still let the above stand as I find the OP’s tactics particularly distasteful.
What’s truly amazing is that a Republican is ever elected considering the stranglehold the liberal media has on politics. It just goes to show how incredibly right the Right is.
Most of them also have to overcome the disadvantage of being white, male and christian.
I can’t understand why anyone would think of opposing them.
I think Air America was doomed from the beginning- NOT because there’s no market for left-leaning commentary, but because Air America was a purely REACTIVE endeavor.
That is, A Franken & Friends didn’t do a survey, figure out “There’s a huge pool of liberal radio buffs who are eager to hear what we have to say,” and then create a format to cater to those listeners. Rather, they ASSUMED the audience must be there, and tried to create left-wing versions of the Limbaugh and Hannity shows.
What they forgot was this: in 1980, if you had offered Al Franken his own AM radio talk show, he’d have scoffed at the idea. “Radio is dead, it’s passe,” he’d have sneered (not without good reason). Rush Limbaugh and others like him were able to take a medium that nobody thought much of and MAKE it successful by appealing to people who THOUGHT their opinions weren’t being heard anywhere else. (It was understandable that many conservatives felt that way in 1980; it’s increasingly silly today.)
Today, there are so many cable channels and so many media outlets and so many political websites that almost NOBODY can plausibly claim, “There’s nowhere that I can hear MY views being expressed.” Left wingers may have liked the IDEA of a radio counterweight to Limbaugh, but hardly any of them were AM radio listeners. Most of them already had their own favorite columnists, their own favorite bloggers, their own favorite magazines and their own favorite TV commentators. They knew where to go to read and hear opinions that matched their own. They didn’t want or need to listen to those ideas on AM radio.
There is nothing in the Left’s agenda that is not coercive. They want to pass more, and more, laws.
And regulations, which put decisions into fewer and fewer hands. As regulations increase in number and scope, they tend more and more toward the socialist, and away from the free market, end of the spectrum.
See Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions.
Not necessarily Sam. One always has to look at the language/methodology in a poll to see what’s really going on. Unless I miss my guess, the poll you’re referring to actually asked people to self-identify as belonging to various political ideologies. That’s quite different, especially since the very word “liberal” has become a dirty word, thanks in large part to Language: a Key Mechanism Of Control.
A much more reliable metric would have been to check, for instance, people’s voting records and/or their responses to specific policy questions, especially since the very labels “conservative” and “liberal” are linguistic fictions and most people’s political ideas tend to fall along a continuum. “I’m for legalization of all drugs but against amnesty for illegal immigration and for abortion rights but against civil unions because I believe in full gay marriage and…”
Simplifying things into little boxes of “liberal” and “conservative” isn’t really that effective a method, especially if your goal is to determine marketing demographics.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, as it usually is.
But that’s the point. Air America had millions of listeners. Why did these people tune in if they didn’t actually like it or were “being talked down to”?
The real, obvious answer is the one **astorian **provided. Liberals wanted their own radio show, but then realized that it wasn’t that useful since they got most of their info from the internet.
Not true WRT television. See post #58.
Not true, either, WRT big-market newspapers, if that apparently dying medium matters.
Fascinating post Sam Stone. Are you planning on backing any of that up with actual data?
Same goes for KLR 650. You’re making an awful lot of assertions and providing no supporting facts.
You’ve posted this analysis many times. I would remind everyone that this was a report commissioned by the Center for American Progress, a ‘progressive’ organization, and was conducted by a liberal analyst. Its findings are significantly different than those of many other major polls. It slices and dices the electorate by asking a long series of questions, then attempts to put together overall political ideology from that. And surprise surprise, we find out that 70-80% of Americans support ‘progressive’ ideas, that progressives are smarter than conservatives, yada yada.
When they discovered that a 55-58% of Americans supported core conservative ideas about markets, taxes, the military, limited government, the family and other issues, they describe it as a ‘cluster’ of Americans who still retain ‘residual support’ for ‘some components’ of the conservative worldview.
And yet, when asked a basic question like, “Do you want a larger government that provides more services, or a smaller government which provides fewer services”, American chose smaller government by a ratio of 58-38. When asked to self-identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative, only 19% of Americans call themselves liberal.
And of course, we have the stark fact that Obama and the Democrat’s policies are polling terribly, and that Obama’s approval ratings are sinking and Democrats are losing elections they should be winning in a landslide.
I believe this means liberals don’t need to be spoon fed with sound bites.
That would explain the disdain for Keith Olbermann and Rachael Maddow on this MB. I’ve been wondering about that oddity for some time now.
I wonder, though, if it’s a class thing. Liberals tend to be working in jobs where it’s not practical to listen to the radio all day, whereas more conservatives are. If I think of the split between liberals and conservative in my circle of friends and business associates, that seems to be pretty accurate. Not 100%, of course.
And there also seems to be a strange fascination that liberals have to tune into conservative radio/TV that I haven’t seen on the other side of the aisle.
BTW Randi Rhodes is not from Air America, she works at Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications.
IMHO Air America suffered from lousy management, as Jones radio, Premiere and Dial Global (Stephanie Miller) demonstrate, there is an audience for left leaning radio hosts
As Sthephanie Miller would say, many statements from the right regarding this issue are BS (there is a famous little song for those statements). AFAICR Air America reported that they dismissed Randy Rhodes because she was disrespectful to Hillary and the management allegedly tried to become more mainstream! Randy was not what they wanted.
So I will not shed a tear if they finally come down, progressive radio is still here.
I’ve noticed also. I think it’s because we already know what we think, and are interested in what the other side actually has to say, as opposed to what commentators interpret them as saying.
It was my personal experience (listened to Rushbo in the past thanks to carpooling) that liberals like to listen to as to then be able to destroy his sorry points later with the dittoheads at the office.