Posted by
Juwar74 on Saturday, September 06, 2008 7:18:09 AM
I remember a television show Rush Limbaugh had briefly in the nineties. It came on around 1 p.m. in my area. On one episode, he showed a video of Bill Clinton coming out of a funeral laughing and joking. About ten seconds into the video, Clinton saw, out the corner of his eye, the television camera. When he realized that he was being filmed, he immediately went into grief mode. Clinton starting wiping his eyes and heaving from the somber event as Rush's audience laughed out loud at the hypocrisy.
The story illustrates an interesting trend that conservative media began to perfect in the nineties. Many conservative pundits and their followers figured they couldn't win against the elite academics on the facts on shows like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and McLaughlin Group, so, starting in the nineties, they began a strengthening of their own media movement in magazines, books and talk radio. Because they knew many of their arguments were seriously filled with holes, where an intellectual would be ready to pounce and pick apart their logic until it crumbled, they pretty much avoided situations where they would be challenged in a network televised public forum. They instead focused on building an audience, not on the facts of issues, but on opponent character assassination, satire, and sarcasm.
It was always strange to me in the nineties that Rush Limbaugh, who became the most influential voice of the conservative view, and clones like him had never been on network political shows to defend and debate serious issues against the academics. He and his clones played it safe. They stayed in their bubble, on talk radio and other conservative outlets, and tried to legitimize their viewpoint by keeping a count of the number of people who listened to them. The thinking essentially was "I have millions and millions of listeners, therefore my viewpoint, the conservative viewpoint, is equally true." Even though it wasn't. You are either right on the facts or wrong. The conservative viewpoint was mostly flawed on the facts, but not so on ideologue.
Also strange during the nineties, the conservative media began to play the victim, taking a strategy that liberal interest groups used for years since the sixties in order to get sympathy from its audience. The conservative media big-dogs of radio, magazine and books planted into the minds of their followers that mainstream media was beating up on them, were discriminatory. They were developing a psychosis that all victims have. The problem was Him not me, so much so that they began to write his name with a capital letter--The Mainstream Media, a perceived and fictitious boogeyman...
The mainstream media, of course, never refused a conservative voice. It has been the platform for serious journalism to have both sides. I'm sure mainstream media had invited big conservative personalities that were growing in the nineties. But when these conservative big-dogs found out that they will be on a panel with some hotshot from Harvard or Yale, they essentially said no thanks, or whined, "Why do we conservatives have to always be on a show with them eggheads, why can't it just be us? You guys are so bias!" So they went back to their little bubble and do what all victims do--complain. And in that bubble, they began to argue like a victim, and pass off their logical fallacies as legitimate facts.