In addition to my earlier comments, you’re being unoriginal, too.
I wasn’t trying to be humorous - I was speculating on the relative intelligence of the two audiences.
I wasn’t in the studio, so I can’t answer your question. There was a laugh, and I suppose there could have been coaching (highly improbable, I figure) or laugh-track enhancement (possible, but I think unlikely). And the point isn’t whether or not random people know what NaCl is, it’s that Colbert’s self-selected audience probably knows, and Limbaugh’s self-selected audience probably does not.
I’m not having a hard time grasping anything, including your attempt to refute a position I never took. Someone said he was only in it for the money and would reverse himself and become a liberal if there was more money in it. I posted information to the contrary and now you’re dancing around trying to use Limbaugh’s comment to mean he’d do anything for money, and while that may or may not (and I’m coming down pretty firmly in the “may not” column) be true, it has nothing to do with what I said and which you have since been trying to mischaracterize ever since.
How can I say this…oh, wait. I know: “Big deal!” So it’s an Op-Ed piece. Feel better now?
Hey, what can I say? It was a piece that showed up on the NY Times and purported to show that Limbaugh, Beck, etc. weren’t as powerful as some people like to think. Given that I already knew the kind of numbers the Limbaugh drew and that he’d failed to keep McCain from getting the Republican nomination for president, his point seemed well-taken to me. What difference does it make where the information comes from as long as it’s accurate?
Then you haven’t been paying attention. To hear people around here tell it, every conservative in the country gets their marching orders directly from Rush Limbaugh. He tells them all they know and he tells them what to think. He tells them who to support and he tells them who to oppose. He has Republican politicos kowtowing to him and he is alleged to be the voice of the Republican Party.
And yet in reality he only reaches 3% of the electorate and couldn’t even swing the nomination against John McCain. Doesn’t sound like his influence is all that significant to me.
No, I’ve blown the case of posters like yourself who try to portray him as the walking, talking embodiment of every conservative in America and who has them all marching in lockstep to his tune.
He’s a guy with a talk show on the radio. Only one out of every 30 voters listens to him, and most of them only sporadically. And even though they listen and may become alternatively angry or amused, they still have minds of their own and vote the way they feel is best. So yeah, given that he doesn’t reach that many people and that he has no real control over those he does and falls far short of getting the nomination to go his way, I’d say his influence isn’t all that significant.
And my point is: so what? It’s a meaningless little tidbit that would be more likely known by someone either in or recently out of school. It proves nothing, and the fact that it’s supposed to say something significant about either audience simply shows the levels of pettiness and dishonesty that Colbert’s writers are willing to sink to in order to try to make conservatives look stupid. But I can tell you this: if I had to run a company or invest a windfall or mortgage a house or look for correct values in order to lead a responsible and successful life, I’d look to Limbaugh’s audience far more readily than I’d ever look to Colbert’s.
Heh, Colbert didn’t say anything about conservatives in that bit. I speculated that Colbert told a joke his audience would get but Limbaugh’s audience would not.
And that’s an unfortunate statement on who holds power in your country.
And if any people here are experts on ad hominem attacks and political caricatures, well…
(To be fair, there are a number of “librul” posts here which specifically vilifies Rush’s audience (rubes, troglodytes, etc). But note that these make the distinction between Rush’s followers and conservatives/right-wingers in general. An important difference in approach, methinks.)
He’s very good at getting a certain segment of the population to voice their outrage, but I too question how much influence he really has on the electorate. As someone mentioned about, he was not at all enthusiastic about John McCain, but that didn’t stop him from clinching the GOP nomination (of course Rush might argue that that was because there were no *real * conservatives in the race).
I’m a liberal, and I strongly dislike Rush Limbaugh and all he stands for, and think that he and his ilk make the country a worse place. Not because they express views I disagree with (reasonable disagreement and debate about the issues is something the country needs), but because they are so divisive. We can see it in this very thread, where Bryan Ekers thinks conservatives are too dumb to know basic chemistry, and Starving Artist thinks that liberals are too irresponsible to understand mortgages. (Both patently ridiculous claims.) Not that one can blame that level of divisiveness solely on Rush, but he and his ilk are more than happy to fan the flames and capitalize on it.
And I hold any liberal who does so* in just as much disdain.
All of that said, I have no reason to think that he doesn’t fundamentally mean what he says, and I would certainly never make any hyperbolic claim about every other word out of his mouth being a lie, or anything of that sort. I suspect that, like a lot of people, he thinks he’s usually telling the truth, but is happy to grab onto the first apparent fact he sees and run with it, without putting much effort into verification, balance, or anything of that sort.
One final point: way back when he first became popular, he tapped into a massive group of people who felt disenfranchised by the national media discourse. Now, I’d like to say that that feeling of disenfranchisement was totally ridiculously baseless, but that would be facile. Who am I to tell someone “oh, of course there are voices in the national media who express what you believe, you silly conservative you”? However, the greatest trick the devil has played, to paraphrase The Usual Suspects, is to keep that fundamental narrative of “we’re the silent unheard majority who the mass media elites try to ignore” going in people’s minds, even though in this modern world of Fox News and blogs and 6 recent consecutive years of Republican domination of the federal government it’s pretty patently ridiculous. I think that’s one of the things that liberals like me find most teeth-grating about him and his success.
*Who are these liberal commentators who I hold in similar disdain, you might ask? I don’t think there’s really an equivalent to Rush on the left, although some combination of the worst moments of Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann, and Bill Maher certainly have similarities. However, I went to see Janeane Garofalo do standup comedy a few years back. I’d seen her once before and she was totally hilarious, and I’ve been a fan of her for years. But a bunch of her act was just “those conservatives… they’re all a bunch of douchebags. Am I right?”. I found it really off-putting and not at all entertaining. And, like conservatives figures I criticize, it was certainly divisive.
I’m afraid you completely missed my point. The point was that young people not long out of school would be much more likely to know what NaCl is than someone of middle age as I suspect much of Limbaugh’s audience is and that that knowledge is relatively useless, whereas among people who’ve been out in the world a while and had to learn about things that are useful in life, such as Limbaugh’s audience has, you’ll find knowledge that not only requires greater intelligence than that required to know the meaning of NaCl but also eminently more useful.
In other words, it was an age and experience thing, not a responsibility thing, and it would be just as unreasonable and dishonest for a middle aged businessman to be scornful of a college kid for not knowing how to negotiate a loan as it is for a college kid to be scornful of a middle aged businessman for not knowing the meaning of NaCl.
Fox News and “blogs” are still vastly outnumbered by a news and entertainment media with a left wing slant, which would include ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Playboy, and Hollywood celebrities, movies and television shows, all of whom promote liberal politics and ways of life.
This statement itself is pretty ridiculous. Do you really mean to assert that Republicans being elected disproves media bias? I’d say it simply means that they were elected despite media bias.
It has been a LONG time since I listened to Rush Limbaugh regularly.
I basically identify as fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and so I guess that makes me libertarian in the mode of say, the Economist magazine.
From what I hear of what Rush Limbaugh says, I rarely agree with him
Agree with whoever above said that Limbaugh is basically an entertainer
When I listened to him, it was in the early nineties. I was working at a lumber yard cutting wood all day. Our boss provided us with fancy noise cancelling earphones and we could listen to the radio. I found that when I listened to Limbaugh’s show, the morning would go by more quickly. I did not agree with just about anything Limbaugh said, but the show was kind of bouncy and provocative (in a goofy way) and it helped pass the time.
A reasonable point. Although I think Bryan Ekers was initially just basically taking a cheap shot.
I have several responses to that:
(1) To the extent that I think there may have been some unintended liberal bias in mainstream media 20 years ago, and I think it’s plausible that there was some, I’d argue that there’s much less today. Reputable journalists are VERY aware of the issue these days, and bend over backwards to try to be fair and balanced.
(2) To a certain extent, a mere headcount is a bit irrelevant. If the issue is “these people feel like they don’t have a voice”, then all that matters is that they do have a voice, which they unquestionably do. Elsewhere in this thread, people are calculating Limabugh’s audience at around 3 or 4% of the US populace. Is 3 or 4% of the US media right-wing?
(3) I also in no way believe that any of the media outlets you named there (with the arguable exception of “hollywood celebrities”, who are of course not a media outlet) are any way as left-slanted as fox news is right-slanted.
(4) But we’re getting away from the original topic.
It doesn’t disprove media bias per se. It certainly does argue heavily against a general “no one hears what we have to say, the liberal elites run the country, we have no power” mindset.
No, you can’t. I expressed doubt that Limbaugh’s audience knew basic chemistry (or at least at a significantly lower rate than Colbert’s audience), not “conservatives”.
Rush is a tool for the rich and most powerful of the Republicans. He gets into name calling and insults. Feminists or women who want equal pay are referred to Femi-nazis. People who want clean environment are Eco-terrorists. He childlishly calls opponents names ,insults them and lies like hell. For instance he claimed Obama had the oil rig blown up and it got out of control.
The odd part is many people follow him. Which seems impossible to believe . He has incredible power. When a repub politician disagrees with him, the Repub has to make an apology in public. He was the biggest nastiest commentator in the news for decades. Then he got out-dumbed by Beck.
Criticism of liberals = proof of liberal failings
Criticism of conservatives = proof of bias
Also: Cosmo is liberal? Do they even express political opinions? I thought the rag was pure consumerist capitalism and was only liberal in a Miss America “I love fluffy kittens and world peace” sort of way.
The thing is, there’s a fine line there. Even if you mean what you say with 100% sincerity (and I have no reason not to believe you do), that’s exactly the kind of statement that sounds like you’re trying to use it to insult conservatives as a whole while being able to deny it… the kind of thing I always get mad at people like Shodan for when they pull it in the other direction.
I mean, there’s clearly a strong correlation between being conservative and listening to Rush, and you’re claiming there’s a strong correlation between listening to Rush and not understanding basic chemistry. Ergo…
It’s a one-way correlation, though, isn’t it? I expect that nearly all of Rush’s listeners are conservative, but not nearly all conservatives listen to Rush. Starving Artist claimed that his audience was only 4 million people, and surely there are more conservatives than that. Even the results of this poll show more conservatives disagree with him than agree.
An insult to Rush’s listeners is not an insult to all conservatives, but some may try to claim it is as an example of how conservatives are vicitimized.
Unless I massively fail to understand what “correlation” means, it’s still a correlation.
Here’s Bob. Bob is a conservative chosen randomly from among all US conservatives, and that’s all we know about him. What are the odds he’s a regular Rush listener?
Here’s Doug. Doug is a non-conservative chosen randomly from among all US non-conservatives, and that’s all we know about him. What are the odds he’s a regular Rush listener?
The first odds are clearly higher than the second.
Here’s Mary. Mary is a regular Rush listener, chosen randomly from among all US Rush listeners. What are the odds that Mary is a conservative?
Here’s Anne. Anne is not a regular Rush listener, chosen random from among all US people-who-are-not-regular-Rush-listeners. What are the odds that Anne is a conservative?
Again, the first odds are clearly higher than the second.
To me, that is pretty much a textbook correlation.
I dunno, I don’t instantly conflate the two. What’s Limbaugh’s audience, 10-20 million? The popular vote for McCain/Palin in 2008 was about 60 million. Broadly assuming the latter qualify as conservatives (and only conservatives listen to Limbaugh) , the majority of conservatives are not Limbaugh’s audience. Similarly, potential Palin voters are not, I believe, the majority of conservatives.
The tragedy, as I see it, is that what might be good conservative ideas are being drowned out by a loudmouthed attention-seeking minority that is quite open about distrusting higher education and anyone who professes to have it, unless said expert is in agreement on feel-good truthiness issues.
Well, not just chemistry - I accuse them (i.e. Limbaugh’s audience) of general-purpose ignorance.