I want to talk about my experience as a listener to conservative talk radio and Fox programming and as an avid reader of pundit-erature.
When I was in my 20s, I was trying to find out more about myself in terms of religion and politics. I bought bibles, the Koran, Taoist and Buddist literature, etc. But I didn’t stop at only religious books, I also read philosophers like Bertrand Russel, and I read up on Plato. After a college course on ethics, I read as many different books on ethics as I could, to see who I thought had the best arguments.
Similarly, when it came to politics, I read them all. From Al Franken’s books to Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly’s books, Sean Hannity’s books, Michael Savage’s books, Rush Limbaugh, Al Gore, Joe Scarborough, and so on.
Something you might notice about that list is the massive number of conservative opinion books. Where are all the liberal ones? I see Al Franken on there, and Al Gore. Can’t even get a different first name. What’s up with that, liberals? 
TL;DR: I’ve read a ton of political pundit’s books.
I spent a lot of time delivering pizzas and the only entertainment I had at work was radio, but I hated the poor selection that didn’t stimulate me intellectually.
So instead of FM radio, which was dominated by music, mostly southern music and gangsta rap which I wasn’t interested in, and commercials, I listened to AM radio. For years. Many of those conservative pundits are selling books because they have a built-in audience of readership, because they have a devoted audience of listeners. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, and Al Franken a little bit before I went off to college, since Air America was new. I was familiar with Joe Scarborough and Ann Coulter from TV. Plus, I figured even in conservative circles, there would be differences of opinion. Wasn’t a ton of liberal talk radio shows.
TL;DR: I listened to their radio programs for many years, and watched them talk on TV for many years as well.
I began with the assumption that there was a right way, or, even, two right ways, to solve every problem. I wanted to hear from as many diverse viewpoints as possible. On conservative talk stations, the opinions were notably the same. I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised. If you were to tune in to a gospel radio show, you’d hear all about Jesus. I’m not expecting a wealth of diversity of opinion on there. There were either zero or one liberal viewpoints represented on the radio in my area, and I wasn’t familiar with a ton of liberal pundits either.
When first finding my place, I felt like conservative talk radio’s presentation was sloppy, and there were certainly parts that I disagreed with. But they were talking politics, and I assumed they were reporting bits of the news to me as well, and I’m a total news junkie. They were hitting my news and politics sweet spots regardless of what they were saying. I felt like I was getting at least part of the story from them, and I felt that was very important. I also felt it was important to get to the other side, like the proverbial chicken on the road of political thought.
Since talk radio programs have bunches of call-in sessions where listeners can provide feedback, I made some assumptions about the format, that eventually I’d hear a good counterpoint made by a liberal caller. Instead, the few liberals that would call in every now and again made horrendously weak arguments. Given that they also struggled to produce a listening audience, I felt like it was pretty clear, in the marketplace of ideas, conservative thought dominated.
So if there’s a liberal angel on one shoulder and a conservative angel on the other, the liberal angel kept looking more and more like the devil, and conservatives were winning that particular tug of war. So I watched and listened and read up on conservative thought for years. After a while, I stopped trying to find liberal thought, since apparently, it didn’t exist. Only a few fringe people out there seemed to believe in it long enough to provide material for the market. And of those people, several of them seemed to be Alan Colmes-ian weak liberals who only made their conservative counterparts look better.
An observation made by the one liberal pundit I felt like had his ducks in a row, Al Franken, was the dynamic between (then) Hannity and Colmes, a show on Fox News. The show was really about Sean’s opinions and Colmes was there to provide the appearance of both sides. He would barely talk, most of the talking would be done by Hannity, and when he did talk, many of his comments were intended to move the show along or to report neutral information like breaking news. Only every once in a while did he provide an uncontested liberal opinion. People would talk over him, interrupt him, and generally, everyone was aware that he was Hannity’s rag doll comfort object. I noticed the same.
But I figured, this is the only show on TV that actually provides two opinions instead of one. I guess this is the closest I’m going to get to hearing these two different viewpoints actually square off against one another outside of political raging on the internet by the least informed.
TL;DR- There was a very weak representation of any thought or viewpoint that wasn’t conservative.
I noticed that usually, the two viewpoints actually stuck to their own corners, and would refuse to actually talk to one another. Instead, they both seemed to create their own echo chambers. And they seemed to operate on two different sets of facts.
As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
So I get that people can have different political orthodoxies and priorities. If getting rid of abortion and protecting guns is your thing, you’ll naturally gravitate to settings where they advocate for and talk about those things, and feed you with news that appeals to that viewpoint.
What you end up missing out on is what the opposing side is saying.
And you tune in or read up, and it seems like the opposing side isn’t talking about any of that at all. They seem to have their own sets of priorities, own talking points, own pet political causes, so they’re not even discussing the issues that matter to you. And they even seem to be reading a different set of news stories, and they also get their information from different universities, researchers, and think tanks.
Bottom line: In the marketplace of political ideas, 99% of it is talking over, or talking past, the opposition. And they seem to present only one set of facts largely contradicted by the other side.
So the conclusion I drew from this is that either one or both sides are lying to me. Or, to put it in a nicer way- one or both sides is more interested in getting people to agree with their agenda than in presenting an impartial viewpoint.
Which also makes sense. If you’re politically conservative or politically liberal, and strongly enough so that your job is talking about it, how impartial are you going to be? Your job is advocacy, not journalism. But, it’s also entertainment. You’ve got to keep things interesting and glib.
What you’ll notice about conservative talk radio, talk tv, and books, is that they like to touch on a ton of different issues and stories that are important to their audience. But they quickly move on to a different topic. For listeners who are busy doing other things during the day (like working in an office, delivering a pizza, etc) this is the ideal format to retain listeners. What Air America lacked was the quick punch, the glib one-liner, that allowed me to get in a nutshell what they were talking about while I was half-listening, but my attention was divided. As is the case for a lot of listeners with jobs. It’s on during the work day, so. When else are the working classes going to listen to the radio?
But where’s the in-depth analysis? How deeply do they touch on things?
In my years of watching and listening, I found that you get fed a steady diet of hors d’oeuvres and some after dinner mints, and you get plenty of refills on the soda. But, the meal never comes.
The format goes a little something like this: Promo music, enthusiastic opening lines, big story of the day in our opinion, no further analysis or citation other than to attribute the story to the conservative publication it came from. Usually along the lines of “Democratic Politician does something we feel is negative.” Then there’s opinion for a while, in the form of a monologue. This monologue will be light on facts, and whatever facts are being discussed are only factual if you accept them as such, except in rare cases where those facts are being repeated (or, mainly, reported in the first place) in the mainstream media, where they’re based on something objectively true.
And then there’s an interview with someone who agrees with the host of the show. Or they take some calls, mainly from people who agree with the host of the show. Sometimes they take a call from someone who has a contrary opinion.
First, they’re screened. They tell the call screener what topic they want to talk about, briefly, what position they have on the issue, and a very brief sample of the argument. If the argument is rejected, the call screener thanks you for calling in, or they simply keep you on hold and eventually disconnect you.
And that’s fine, it’s their house. But the bottom line is, any liberal opinion you hear on the program has been pre-approved to be on that program. And if you’re someone who has repeatedly been approved to get on the program, and regular listeners even know your name, that’s because the call screener and the radio host both know you put up quite a weak fight, and you argue terribly for your own side.
Then, you have a couple minutes of airtime, maybe. The host can cut you off at any time, mute you, talk over you, disconnect your call, and everything is on a delay, so any surprise arguments the host cannot rebut can be cut off after the surprise is revealed, before the audience can hear about it. Also, you eventually find it interesting that in a country with hundreds of millions of adults, the same 3 liberals call in and get through all the time, in order to be roundly beaten up and tossed back out on the street.
And they’re an in-joke among the listeners:
Oh hey, it’s lefty Larry calling in again, regular listeners know who he is. What’s going on, Larry?
*What’s up, Sean, I just wanted to disagree with your last point, Hillary Clinton does not actually worship Satan, she’s actually a member of the Belphegor worship cult, he was originally referred to as Baal-Peor, and he’s not the same as Satan, they’re actually distinct entities. He’s the demon of lewd orgies, not eternal damnation. *
Okay, thanks, Lefty Larry, we appreciate your unique and slightly loony perspective. Don’t be a stranger and thanks for your call.
Oh, those wacky liberals. We know. Everyone nods knowingly.
They *mean *well, but boy, they just don’t get it. I mean, Lefty Larry is actually a dunce who thinks he’s knowledgeable and that he has something important to say, but every time he talks, he fails to make a persuasive case.
Fancy that. What a coincidence! It’s amazing he can get on the program so many times, too. What are the sheer odds?
TL;DR: The 1% where they show the opponent’s point of view, it’s screened, sanitized, edited, shouted over, talked down, sneered at, or deliberately poorly argued.
If you’re a regular viewer or listener, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. I mean, you’re aware of all of this. You just don’t care.
Why?
Because it’s *funny *to listen to Lefty Larry get destroyed over and over by Sean Hannity. Even if on some level you’re aware that this is as staged as professional wrestling, and Lefty Larry is jobbing for Conservative Heavyweight Champion and well-groomed man and usually polite Sean Hannity, you don’t care. Wrassling is fun.
Why they retain listeners is because these guys fill time by telling stories, personal, Biblical, or plain old imaginary, which listeners care about more than the politics. The politics is always the same: Hillary Clinton is the devil again today, who knew?
So they tune in for the creative content. Glenn Beck was the master of this. Glenn got his start doing non-political talk, and he would create parodies of songs or write and read limericks or do phone pranks. It was this part that he was the best at. Whenever he was not talking politics, he was a genuinely funny entertainer.
TL;DR: It’s political theater and talk-enterainment, mostly. With little snippets of partisan talking points blended in, so the message is more palatable.
On some level, all of these conservative talk radio hosts try to hit the funny bone of their listener. For some it’s different. With Bill O’Reilly, he tends to go for the patronizing condescending biting sarcasm, for Sean Hannity, he likes to present a liberal idea as being dumb and then mock it, as gentleman-like as he can, because he’s there to be polite and charming, so that when he eventually does get really nasty, you know it’s serious business, like when Jon Stewart utterly destroys him and he has nothing to retort with, so he simply gets very angry.
Anger is something that the audience identifies with, because whenever they’re presented with a contrary viewpoint which is deliberately mocking, and worse, makes an excellent point, the only valid emotion they have is anger. They don’t have a rebuttal. So anger is a great place to go whenever you get wrecked by a liberal and all the layers of careful screening can’t protect the host of the show from looking like a fool, all the host has to do is:
- Get angry
- Go on a tirade that doesn’t address the points
- Then change the subject
After that hurricane is over, you realize that he didn’t actually touch the points being made, instead, he predictably said that Jon Stewart has writers and gets paid lots of money, so he’s no different than Sean Hannity himself.
That’s been Sean’s stock response for a decade. I should know. I’ve heard it probably a hundred times over.
**TL;DR- there’s no debate, no actual refutation of liberal’s correct talking points, and anything that can actually seem damaging is glossed over, shouted over, or we focus on the real emotional response to being checkmated, and we sympathize with the host of the show rather than take the opponent’s side. **
In other words, even when the radio host finally gets utterly destroyed and called out for his lies, that only makes his listeners hate the opponent who did it, and love the radio host more.
Kind of like if you insult the prophet Mohammad, or if you draw penises all over a picture of Jesus. There’s no way actions like that would really cause true believers to ever sympathize with the actions of the mockers. And these people truly believe that their radio host is an awesome guy. Any criticism against that host will always also insult the listener, because when someone mocks your friend, you get angry.
And that’s what liberals tend to do when presented with the garbage being peddled by these hosts who have the rapt attention of their captive audience and control everything their audience hears- they go to telling the truth as they see it, with jokes for emphasis.
The goal of the liberal satirist is to shame and embarrass the host who they know is lying and will have no actual rebuttal to the facts.
But no such reaction ever happens. None of these people feel shame when called out on their lies. And they’re not ever embarrassed. They get paid a ton of money and they never really lose listenership or viewership and afterwards they take a bunch of calls where the callers all *surprisingly *support the radio host.
Whenever you’re confronted with something you cannot actually respond to, you drown it out by sympathy and support and loyalty. You give the audience who was offended that some of their views were mocked the feeling of family, like this liberal who was attacking this lie told by the host, was actually attacking the listener personally, and their values. So the sympathy being extended to the show’s host is actually catharsis for the listener who might have momentarily, even while hating the smarmy and smug comments made by the evil liberal, had considered that they might have made a valid point, even if it stings.
Instead, that thought is always drowned out by a flood of sympathy and support.
No, no… we’re not wrong. We’re a family and we support each other. It’s actually that Jon Stewart whose opinions are in the minority who is wrong. Plus, he didn’t respect our beloved talk radio host, whose personality I like and who tells me funny jokes that I laugh at about the wacky transgenders and the liberals who want to protect them from nonexistent hatred that exists only in their mind. They’re all guys in dresses! Predators! You’d have to be as crazy as Lefty Larry to want to protect child predators against repercussions for touching the children!
TL;DR: The host doesn’t need to really respond, because the listeners circle the wagons and the host validates the anger the listeners feel when their beloved talk show host is mocked, and by extension, their shared viewpoint.
**It ceases to be: Jon Stewart rhetorically wrecking Sean Hannity’s actual lies IRL with Sean failing to give a proper refutation. Now it’s: disrespectful Liberal Former Comedian insults Guy I Like Whose Opinions I Share.
There’s one last component to this mixture.
Find a happy place. Something we’re really sure we’re right on.
What’s the one thing you’re absolutely sure about?
Pick from: Jesus, gun rights, abortion is murder, or Sean Hannity is entertaining, or Democratic politician physically makes me ill and I hate him/her.
If ever truly challenged, realize that you can always retreat to this happy place, a world of things you’re always absolutely sure are true, and that liberals are wrong about.
Liberals and secularists mock Jesus, I can’t support them.
Liberal gun-grabbers, I can’t support them.
Liberals kill actual smiling infants.
Liberals mock Guy I Like who is otherwise pleasant except when called out by Jon, and I hate to see my best friend Sean Hannity lose his cool. It makes me feel bad.
Well, frick, at least I know that Hillary is evil. Bottom line, even if I can’t defend anything else that’s going on, the one thing I’m absolutely sure about is that the Democrats are screwing the pooch even worse.
So those ideas are the ones constantly reinforced by the books, radio shows, and TV shows. Ultimately, liberals cannot win me over because ultimately, they violate one of the above, and that makes them worse.
Bottom line: Liberals make me angry, and you cannot reason away my anger. I have a position you’ll never budge me on, supported by this party. I’m with my party, right or wrong. Mocking it just makes me dig in deeper.
When I began this journey, I was looking for ideas being pitted against one another, debate style.
You can’t find that anywhere. Not on Fox, or on CNN, or on MSNBC. I mean, I’ve seen a little bit of that on Rachael Maddow, where she goes out of her way to talk to conservative politicians, pundits, and anyone who has made a statement that’s in the news, and she actually gives the person time to talk, and does very well in not cutting them off. Even when it’s a person peddling ex-gay therapy to her actually lesbian face, who admits he still continued to sleep around with men. But that’s so rare in politics.
There is no meeting of the viewpoints in the media, for all intents and purposes.
It took me a while to get enough information to see where the weak points are for both sides. But it’s not equal.
What’s presented as the “liberal version” of this is the non-partisan media who simply report the story. All facts are considered to have a liberal slant *until *Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly tells you what really happened. Only after it’s been properly prepared and Hannitized, is it then ready for human consumption. Or, MSNBC who has Joe Scarborough in the morning and is about to add more conservative voices for balance. And Joe’s opinions are not of the watered-down conservative-version of Alan Colmes variety. So there is actually a difference of opinion and each are presented.
But MSNBC is “the liberal network” and conservatives generally aren’t watching that. Just like liberals are largely not watching Fox News.
But I’ve consumed conservative media for a decade now. This is what happens on conservative media outlets.
And it causes problems, like for example in the minimum wage debate. There are so many conservative publications that run a story about how the minimum wage is evil according to these theoretical models I have. The “liberal” news outlets aren’t talking about it, except once in a while in a rebuttal in a blog, or a small snippet about a protest, while taking no position. Because their objective isn’t to sell someone on a viewpoint. And partly because they themselves are owned by massive corporations who would be better off not talking about it.
Strongly Opposed and [COLOR=DarkSlateGray]No Position [/COLOR]are not giving you the entire story.
And sometimes a third position doesn’t have an entire media empire with millionaire pretty boy and blonde girl hosts to entertain you for 8 hours a day at your job with jokes on the radio and mockery of the opposition, followed by more non-stop programming at home that you’ve got DVR’ed in case you miss it.
That’s why if you’re a consumer of these conservative kinds of media, you’re missing out on the debate, and the “other side” isn’t CNN because they’re *not *an advocacy group, like you know very well conservative media is. The news they report may indeed have a bias, but it isn’t rampant anti-conservative bias. Sometimes it’s whatever gets us viewership bias. Sometimes it’s this story might actually be damaging to our fiscal interests bias. Sometimes it’s I’m a centrist and I don’t want to actually allow advocacy of either kind on my network, so I’m using my editorial discretion to suppress facts that might be relevant to a left versus right debate.
Look, I get it. They’re good for entertaining you and filling airtime that you’re going to be listening to or watching. And folks that advocate for the working class are not entertaining you 8 hours a day.
But if you believe you’re experiencing vetted political ideas which withstand the test of a real debate, you’re wrong. And the other kinds of media out there that you’re not watching are not socialist, I can promise you that, and often take no position because of journalistic integrity. Comedians might have the kind of integrity that leads them to tell the truth, but they are not required to take a neutral position and they are not required to not advocate for a position. Tell me CNN is actually advocating for a position. That’s a hard argument for you to make if you watch it. Sometimes it’s hard to argue that they’re even advocating for reporting the news, given the stunts they pull to attract viewers and make sure they don’t offend anyone of any political leaning.
The conservative talk show host can cut you off and shout you down and talk over you. And they are pretty good at convincing you that this is the correct way to deal with liberals. The alternative is to simply not talk about anything they’re actually talking about, and when something is happening live which all the other networks are covering that we think might be damaging, we can switch to a different story. Like during the DNC speech by the father of the fallen Muslim soldier.
That kind of selective editorial decision making is designed to protect you from seeing something that might get you to agree with Lefty Larry. Ultimately, if you ever view Lefty Larry as an intelligent, legitimate, equal patriot, with some views that might even be better for the country and based more in fact than what you’ve been told on conservative media, that would be very damaging.
It’s much better to cut off Intelligent Larry and not show his arguments, and switch back to Lefty Loony Larry.
This post is a lot shorter than any conservative pundit’s book you’ve ever read. But it’s still too long for many of you to have paid any attention to it, and criticism of something you like makes it uncomfortable.
** If you’ve read all of this post, and are a conservative, give me a hell yeah.**
I will now bust open a beer with you and give Alan Colmes a stunner.
