Posted on 05/15/2006 5:36:17 AM PDT by Quilla
One of the Left’s great agonies and frustrations of the past fifteen years has been its abortive quest to field a counterpart to Rush Limbaugh. Fully cognizant of the massive damage inflicted on it by talk radio, a number of contenders placed bids to mount a counterattack. To their bitter dismay, they all came to grief despite the great hype and hope that surrounded each successive attempt.
A decade and a half worth of feverish effort thus produced no headway, not even a single nationally viable liberal host. With nothing to show for, the time has surely come to ask the obvious question: Why?
Why have liberals failed to make any inroads in talk radio? And why has their failure been so complete?
It surely cannot be due to a lack of trying or will, since they have done everything they could to prop up their hopefuls, even to the point of raising donations in this consummately commercial medium. All to no avail.
But rather than to reevaluate their obviously failing approach, they stubbornly carry on in the same way with predicable results. Again and again they run headlong into the same wall, each crash more pathetic and embarrassing than the one before. So bad things have gotten that most recently they placed their bets on Al Sharpton, hoping that the kooky reverend would carry their water on national airways. A futile dream if there ever were one. Rather than pursuing vain hopes, liberals would do much better to take a pause and search for the root cause of their fiasco.
Any such effort would have to begin with a hard look at the format in which they are trying to succeed.
In the type of political talk show invented by Rush Limbaugh, the host openly takes an ideological stance (conservative or liberal) and then applies it to the issues of the day during his hours on the air. What this in effect amounts to is in-depth analysis of current affairs from a specific political point of view.
The key to success in this kind of enterprise is the host’s ability to articulate his positions in a logical and cogent manner. This is because most people will not listen for very long to an analysis-driven program if the analysis itself does not make rational sense.
And this is precisely where the crux of liberals’ problem lies. They are simply not able to explain and defend their views in rational fashion. This is not at all surprising, for how does one justify high taxes, gay marriage, abortion, multiculturalism and such? They are all based on false premises and they all produce disastrous outcomes. Anything more than a superficial examination must reveals them for the frauds and failures that they in truth are. This is why liberalism cannot withstand the analytical vigor of talk radio and why it has failed so abysmally in it.
Talk radio has thus exposed in a striking way a fatal flaw at the very heart of liberalism – its indefensibility by rational argument. Without having yet grasped it, it is the medium’s format that became liberals’ stumbling block.
However abysmal their current predicament may be, the future holds bleaker prospects still. Most liberals do not yet realize that they will never be able to succeed in talk radio. To make it there – at least in the form in which it is currently practiced – requires that hosts do something which liberals simply can’t: logically and rationally expound their views. To make matters even more desperate there is nothing they can do about it short of abandoning their untenable ideology. In popular parlance, they are cooked… completely and utterly cooked.
Things used to be infinitely more palatable (for liberals) when the television talk show was the main forum for the mass dissemination of political opinion. Its relatively short broadcast time – rarely more than fifty minutes – is usually intensely contested by several guests. As a result of severe time constraints, the discussants rarely speak for more than a couple of minutes at a time. This, of course, makes any serious analysis all but impossible. This problem is made all the more acute by the fact that the guests’ statements are routinely intended to rebuff points made by their opponents which themselves are often quite irrelevant to the topic under consideration.
This format is just fine with liberals who – knowing instinctively that their positions cannot withstand thorough scrutiny – are always happy to avoid in-depth discussion of anything. Conservatives, on the other hand, are badly disadvantaged in this kind of environment. Conservatism requires methodical exposition, quite unlike liberalism which can only survive in the realm of disjointed statements and unsupported assertions. The television talk show is thus liberalism’s perfect vehicle. Often nothing more than a scattered clash of personalities, it is normally dominated by those with the biggest mouth. And since liberals have almost a complete grip on television, they make sure that the biggest mouths on their programs come from their own camp.
But things changed dramatically with the advent of Rush Limbaugh, when the program format he made commonplace became the first ever forum in the mass-media that allowed for the systematic analysis of issues. Nowhere indeed are things discussed more deeply and thoroughly than in talk radio where not infrequently the whole show revolves around two or three subjects. The level of analysis is further deepened by the input from callers who enrich the discussion with their unique input and perspective.
And then, of course, there are those who disagree and openly challenge the host’s positions. To retain his audience’s trust he must be able to deal with their objections in an honest and fair manner. Woe be to the host who keeps dismissing those who oppose him without properly addressing the points they raise. Sooner or later he will be abandoned by all except the most narrow-minded in his audience. No one understands this better than Rush Limbaugh who accords those who contradict him the time and courtesy which go far beyond the bounds of common politeness.
Unable to face the unsavory truth, liberals charge that Mr. Limbaugh owes his success to his showmanship and that their failure to compete is due to their inability to field an equally talented performer. But this surely is not the case. Success in talk radio is not contingent on the host’s ability to be funny. There have been a number of other conservatives who succeeded in this medium without possessing Mr. Limbaugh’s flair for entertaining. Sean Hannity, Michael Reagan and Oliver North immediately come to mind. Funny or not, not a single liberal talk show host has come even close to matching their level of success.
The most acute observer of the American scene, it is his intelligence, penetration, and grasp of issues that primarily account for Rush Limbaugh’s success. His sparkling humor is merely the icing on the sumptuous cake of analysis he serves up on a daily basis. To liberals, however, it does not taste as delicious and understandably so. To them his wit feels more like a stinging petard in their rear regions as they lie prostrate in the ruins of their ideology brought down by the power of his analytical firestorm.
Or, as Rush said so eloquently years ago, "it takes work, and time, to turn a rational child into a liberal." With arguments for abortion that, while abortion kills a baby, the birth of a baby "kills" the dreams of the young teenage mother, so it's really about which killing is more appropriate.
Only if you're intellectually dishonest, which is the case for the entire enterprise of schools of journalism.
I asked why shouldn't we subject the democRATS to the same scrutiny? Why should they get a pass? Why should they be allowed to remain vague and contradictory?
In response, you send me to your post #49? Why? What does your post #49 have to do with my question?
It's not a bash of Sean, it's that he's not Rush in terms of intelluctually being able to break down an issue and put it on a shelf that all can reach.
Sean's addition is his Q factor, largely due to his Hannity Fox exposure. As for Reagan and North, No comment?
I didn't say you were bashing Hannity. I asked you to provide evidence of your claim.
Levin is funny in small doses, but I don't think I could take 3-4 hours a day of him. I've never heard Savage, but I've heard the horror stories, so I'll pass. As for Hannity, he's okay, but nowhere close to being in Rush or Laura Ingraham's league.
It seems the only questions Sean knows how to ask are "So you hate the President" and "why do you hate America".
He was talking to Gingrich the other day on the TV show and wasn't even responding to the response Newt had given in the interview. It was purely the talking points.
Hey, I'm no fan of Newt, but Sean missed the target on that interview.
The reality is, most people are conservative. Those with longer memories remember when there were three (3) stations to watch on TV, that was it. Many folks lives were considerably complicated by being certain to have parked their kiester in front of the tube at a given time, or miss Lawrence Welk entirely. In any case it was possible for almost 50 years to convince Americans their views were a minority, and made to feel guilty about them to boot.
Huh?
God, I love this man! Rush has put it all together for a long time and when he's good, he exposes a whole Congress full of critters for what they really are, smelly politicians!
With all due respect you do not know what you are talking about.
I was listening to Rush when he was a local talk show host in Sacramento. He was doing the one thing that local radio management did not want done, talk nationally. He refused to discuss local matters.
At the time Rush went National, the only national talk shows were late at night. None were during the day.
When Rush went national, no one believed in him, not even the stations he managed to sign up. The original deal was he had to do a local three hour show (in New York) before they allowed him to do his national three hours show, so in the beginning he was doing six hours a day.
On top of that, he wasn't getting paid. If I remember the situation, that was why he had the weekly RUSH TO EXCELLENT TOURS, this is where he earned the money to pay his bills.
Rush openned up a whole new world of talk radio, and sure it looks inevitable today, but not when he started.
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An excellent point. I had no idea that's how Prof. Walter Williams became a guest host.
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I don't have any special insight. I am only surmising how it came about based on bits and pieces of what has been said over the years. I think I heard the first time that Dr. Williams was on, and he was sure as green as any summer intern that AM broadcast stations sometimes use in the early morning hours where they can get experience when nobody is listening.
Admittedly my #49 does not say that liberal politicians should get a pass from journalism - only that it is inevitable that they will. Journalists report bad news - inevitably. Liberals propose impractical solutions which reaffirm that the journalists are right to point out the problem. One hand washes the other, and the only people who get criticized are those who actually are responsible for getting things done.Are oil prices high? Blame the people who, by producing oil and bringing it to market, are preventing the price from being even higher. And blame freedom, which allows people to buy cars and SUVs which use gasoline and allows people to go to the gas station and voluntarily pay the high price for gasoline. Do not blame the politicians who prevented ANWR drilling and offshore drilling, and nuclear power and the construction of new refineries.
The criticism is always on the responsible middle class, never of the rich who promote attacks on the middle class in the name of the poor and call it "liberalism." The rich in question being limosine liberals, including newspaper publishers.
What I don't understand is why would someone want to use lies to get power?? Once obtained, what do you have?....only lies.
Truth is much better.
I apologize if you misunderstood my posts. My only point, there was, and is, 50 years of pent-up general cussedness at conservative thought - which is the majority of Americans, being excluded from the national debate. So, it wasn't surprising that a good talk show host cleaned up. Not to me anyway. Consider that he capitalized on AM radio - a moribund medium before Rush came along if there was one, and caused much consternation amongst "liberals", even though they had/have a lock on major television outlets, academia, hollywood, local and state governments, etc. etc.
The President will speak more on that in his speach tonight..
I want to add two points I noticed when trying to give liberal radio a fair shot.
1. The liberal/Democratic base is significantly younger than the conservative/Republican group. Getting talk radio to look "cool" to a bunch of liberal 20-somethings is a losing battle, methinks.
2. They had NO content. The few times I flipped over, intending to listen and give it a chance I heard: A) Dead air, B) A gardening show (twice) and C) Two hosts talking about uninteresting events in the life of a celebrity I'm not familiar with.
Socialism is defined as "government ownership of the means of production." The fallacy in that is that it takes what is produced as well as how it is produced as a given. If it is a given, it "was inevitable."Such an analysis cannot survive any understanding of the real world, where nothing is quite as inevitable in prospect as present reality always seems in hindsight.
If socialism had been allowed to freeze "the means of production" - and what was produced - back in Karl Marx's day, we would all be wielding the hammers and sickles which seemed so properly emblematic of work in the nineteenth century rather than mostly working in air conditioned offices to which we commute in air conditioned automobiles. And we would be dying by age 55.
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