Posted on 03/26/2003 7:02:44 PM PST by sjersey
The United States' anti-war movement has enjoyed strong support from its allies in Hollywood and some church denominations, but the pro-war camp has found a powerful ally in talk radio.
Conservative, polemical and occasionally inflammatory, America's right-wing talkshow hosts dominate the medium and in recent weeks the talk has been all war, all the time.
The tone is anything but subtle in this proxy battle for hearts and minds.
In one show last week, the nation's number-one rated talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, dismissed critics of US policy as "a lot of socialists, leftists and linguine-spined people who would leave Saddam's people to suffer while they sip their wine and nibble their brie".
A scourge of America's liberal wing, Limbaugh has been scathing of the anti-war camp - painting them as unpatriotic, "vandals" even - and an outspoken advocate for the war on Iraq, even on occasion, taking a more hawkish position than the US government.
"We fight them over there with soldiers so we don't have to fight them in our streets with police, doctors and firemen. Our brave soldiers do this so that they can go to their jobs in skyscrapers or wherever else without fearing someone will slam a plane into their office building or mail them a packet of anthrax."
Limbaugh reaches an estimated weekly audience of 20 million people, but dozens of other conservative talk show hosts are relaying similar messages to their listeners - with varying degrees of sophistication - at stations across the nation.
In Dallas, Texas, the switchboard of KLIF radio station "lit up" on Monday when one of the talkshow hosts played a clip of anti-war comments made by the liberal director Michael Moore at last weekend's Oscar ceremony.
Moore, who was honoured for his documentary on American gun culture Bowling for Columbine, used his acceptance speech to berate President George W Bush for essentially inventing a rationale for going to war.
"People are outraged at the airtime the Hollywood set are getting," said KLIF program director Jeff Hillery.
"The prevailing opinion is just act and leave the politics to the politicians."
The station was the first in the nation to organise a "pro-America" rally in February - an event that Hillery said drew 4,000 people.
Half a dozen similar rallies have been held round the country since then, the largest of them in Atlanta, Georgia (an estimated crowd of 25,000) and the last one this past weekend in Glen Allen, Virginia.
Conservative talkshow host Glenn Beck has become something of a cheerleader at these events, which draw a cross-section of Americans, from veterans to soldiers' families.
The grass-roots movement grew out of the "silent majority's" frustration with their lack of a public voice, particularly after weeks and weeks of headline-making peace protests at home and abroad, according to Beck.
"People were just fed up with the flag-burning and the ugliness associated with the 1960s peace movement. They wanted our troops to know that they have our support," said Beck, whose nationally syndicated show is carried by more than 100 stations.
According to Beck, many Americans see shades of Vietnam in the bitterly divisive public debate raging over this conflict. "They don't want to see the nation ripped apart like that again."
Those fears are particularly acute among some military families, with a number of soldiers' mothers wondering aloud if their sons will get a hostile reception when they return from the war as GIs who served in Vietnam reportedly did.
For Steve Rendall, a senior analyst with the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) in New York, the Vietnam card smacks of propaganda - an effort by pro-war activists to muffle debate by painting the peaceniks as disloyal, and unpatriotic.
"It's Orwellian," said Rendall, who has tracked the rallies and regularly monitors talkshows.
"The notion that the pro-war camp has a monopoly on patriotism is just false."
Most US academics now agree that stories of Vietnam vets being spat on and derided on their return home in the early to mid 1970s are - as best as anyone can determine - urban myth, according to Larry Lichty, a journalism professor at Chicago's Northwestern University.
Well, we all know how ignorant this reporter is, hey mate?
FReepers organized over a hundred of them just this past weekend.
Either that or they are liars.
Ah, but it's a journalism professor at a university.
Should I be surprised?
I just discovered Glenn Beck on the radio recently, and found him to be extremely entertaining, a bit outrageous and nearly always on the right side of political issues.
And best of all, he offends the hell out of liberals.
That's because most U.S. academics were the ones doing the spitting at the time and are cowards to admit it. It wasn't urban myth, that's for damned sure. I witnessed it first hand.
Hey! They're giving our support the troops rallies some publicity! They're trying to attribute nefarious motives to our rallies, but they can't. It's all from the heart! Has anyone noticed a lot of tin foil on the left lately? Besides, even if President Bush had asked Glenn Beck to go out and hold rallies, so what? It's not like the left isn't getting out on a daily basis and making their voices heard. It's possible to hold rallies and people don't show up. People are showing up now because they choose to.
Talk radio is not journalism, so the Europeans don't understand the difference between a Rush Limbaugh banging the drum and a journalist. This is the THIRD piece of this type today. I think their real concern is losing control of the media.
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