Conservative radio: liberalism's favorite target

townhall.com ^ | 5/11/02 | David Limbaugh

[kattracks]

News Flash: The liberal elite media, who incidentally (and laughably) deny they're liberal, believe that conservatives possess a "simplistic world view." This is rich -- on many levels.

But first, do you buy their denials that they are in fact liberal? Do you think they aren't elitists or that they have a respectful view of conservatives? Do you believe they are open-minded, as they imply? Do you think they don't inject their political bias into their "news" stories?

If you mistakenly answered yes to any of these questions, please consider a delicious gem from Brent Bozell's Media Research Center (MRC). The peerless MRC devotes its glorious existence to exposing liberal media bias and demonstrating that your answer to all these questions should be "no."

In their latest Cyberalert, MRC treats us to a tidbit from NBC's Lisa Myers on a recent airing of "Nightly News." The report is quite revealing of the mindset of this self-absorbed, uncritical media culture.

In the story, Myers observed that conservatives dominate talk radio, which she attributed to the simplicity of the conservative worldview. I'm not kidding you.

You might be asking yourself what talk radio's supposed simplicity has to do with its success. What is the connection here?

"Well," says Myers, "experts say conservatives are more entertaining because their message fits the media." Sounds insulting to talk radio and its audiences on first blush, but surely Myers didn't mean it that way. Oh? Read on.

Myers next quoted approvingly Talkers Magazine's liberal Michael Harrison, saying, "The conservatives are more cut out for today's sound bite-oriented, short attention span, media environment ... "Where others see shades of gray, (conservative radio talk show hosts) mostly portray the world as black and white ..." Come on, Michael, you're supposed to be a talk radio expert (and advocate) -- but your take is embarrassingly shallow.

Would somebody please tell these sophisticates that TV is far more sound bite-oriented than radio? TV newscasts barely contain over 20 minutes of news -- perfect for short attention spans -- and consist of a series of superficial snapshots of major stories. By contrast, the talk radio format is conducive to lengthier reporting and analysis, and interaction with engaged and informed audiences.

And you want to talk about simplicity of worldviews? When it comes to network news, there is much less diversity of message among the three "giants" than among any three prominent talk radio shows.

If you have ever had the misfortune of watching the nightly newscasts of ABC, NBC and CBS back to back, you would have discovered that their messages couldn't be more in sync if their production staffs were part of a conspiracy.

But beyond being wrong, these statements are illustrative of the big media's attitude toward conservatives -- and provide the answers to the questions I posed above. They wouldn't talk so disparagingly about conservatives if they considered themselves conservative. They wouldn't equate conservatism with black and white simplicity if they weren't arrogant elitists or if they had respect for conservatives. They wouldn't analyze the phenomenon of conservative talk radio success with so little critical thinking if they weren't themselves close-minded, undiscriminating followers of a party line dictated by their oppressive, monolithic, self-contained culture. And they wouldn't infuse their subjective opinions into a broadcast labeled as "news" if they weren't determined to flavor their reports with their undisclosed biases.

Now please don't tell me that Lisa Myers is not representative of the typical media elite. Truth be told, she's probably not as liberal as most of her colleagues, including NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, who quarterbacks the newscast and introduced Myers for this story.

Yes, conservatives are more likely to see black and white in the sense of believing in moral absolutes. But that doesn't mean they fail to appreciate the complexity of the world and its subtle nuances.

Sure, conservatives tend to believe that human nature remains relatively constant (fallen) and that we can therefore learn from history. For example, they accept history's lesson that socialism smothers freedom and prosperity. But liberals, with their blind faith in man's perfectibility, have difficulty absorbing such lessons.

If the media elites were truly independent thinkers, wouldn't you see some variety of opinion among them? Instead they march in lockstep like their mind-numbed soul mates in Hollywood. It appears that they are just attempting to project their own negative characteristics onto conservatives. Sorry, they don't fit.

I'm afraid the elitists are simply jealous that they can't compete in talk radio, the alternative medium providing refuge for those long since fed-up with their bias.

David Limbaugh is author of Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department.
Available through

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©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

[eddie willers]

Perhaps we should stop this uneducated banter.
It's much too simplistic and typifies Neanderthal conservative thought processes.

[eddie willers]

I wish someone really smart would undertake a thorough, objective, sophisticated analysis of why conservatives dominate talk radio and why liberals have failed to gain even a toehold in it. If someone were to write a book on the subject, I would buy it.

Why Conservatives Dominate Talk Radio:
(and why liberals have failed to gain even a toehold)
       by eddie willers.

---

We're right, they're wrong.
The end

---

Please send $14.95 to eddie willers publishing.

[Yardstick]

I started paying attention to politics about six years ago, and I've been listening to talk radio since then. Over this six-year span, I've live in two radio markets -- Nashville and Knoxville -- and neither has had (or even tried, not that I blame them) a liberal host. Chattanooga had a liberal guy named Hightower, but I think they dumped him. It's funny how the liberal talkers just don't seem to pan out for the radio stations.

I would probably listen to a thoughtful, rational, entertaining liberal, just to have my ideas challenged if nothing else.

[Yardstick]

No, I've never heard Cuomo's show. Was he at least entertaining?

Maybe the liberals should recruit that Dr. Dean Adelle guy to do a pure political show. He's clearly a liberal (his political leanings are abundantly obvious even as he talks about apendectomies and ingrown toenails), and I think his show is fairly popular.

[Yardstick]

LOL!

I read your book and I don't disagree with your analysis. But you've only explained why rational people would be disinclined to listen to a liberal host. I would think there would be sizable audience for irrational liberal spew, especially if it were entertaining.

[eddie willers]

I read your book

Ahem.....
Please send $14.95 to eddie willers publishing.



; )

[Capitalist Eric]

a total blowout for the conservatives... It is a striking manifestation of some fundamental difference in the way liberals and conservatives think about things..

It's actually not so difficult to grasp: simply put, being a true-blue liberal means you have to ignore reality. You have to avoid thinking intelligently about a given question, and actively pursue a simplistic, emotionally-charged answer. The facts are irrelevant, the reality of a situation unimportant. All that matters is how you feel, and this is easy to get after a sound-bite or two...

Anything beyond those sound-bites will require real thought, intellectual honesty and unemotional analysis... Talk radio is all about sensible analysis, liberals are anything but...

This is my take on why the sick liberal mind fails at talk-radio...

[Political Junkie Too]

I wish someone really smart would undertake a thorough, objective, sophisticated analysis of why conservatives dominate talk radio and why liberals have failed to gain even a toehold in it.

From a column by Neail Boortz titled O'Reilly Arrives – Leftists Upset:

Leftists like to come up with a variety of reasons why they fail so regularly at talk radio. The most-used excuse would be that these conservative talk show hosts are only there because they mirror the attitudes of their corporate owners.

I covered this in my book "The Terrible Truth About Liberals." Let's take another stab at it here. Liberals fail at talk radio because of the very nature of their political philosophy. The leftist ideology is based on disdain for the individual and on theft.

It's quite easy for a leftist to write a column or an editorial about the need to redistribute income from those who earned it to those who, in the eyes of a "compassionate" liberal, need it. You write the column or the editorial – it gets published – and you head off to suck down a grande caramel latte at Starbucks. You're a writer, so you get to choose just what responses to your column you will read – and whether or not you care to respond to your readers.

Try that on talk radio. You start your hour with a dialogue about the need for some new grandiose government-spending program. As soon as you finish, the phone calls start coming. "Sam, this is Bret. I have a question. I had to go out there and earn that money the government is taking from me for this new welfare program. I have things that I need to spend that money on. My wife is pregnant and I need to start saving for when she has that baby and has to quit work! Say, Sam, can you tell me why you think that this money should be taken from me and spent on these other people who haven't been as responsible with their lives as I have?"

Let's say you're a leftist talker pushing for more gun control. That's easy to do in a newspaper column or a simple commentary. But what if you have to face callers? What do you say to the caller who cites the statistics that clearly show that the easier it is to get a concealed weapons permit, the lower the rate of violent crime?

How do you respond to a caller who asks you to explain just why all of the 10 items in the Bill of Rights confer rights and powers on the people – EXCEPT, that is, for the Second Amendment, which only confers rights on the states.

Another example? You're a die-hard Democrat arguing against the Bush tax cuts. You say that these are just tax cuts for the "richest 1 percent." If you wrote this in a column or an editorial you could walk away, smugly satisfied with the blow you've struck for an egalitarian society. But … you're on talk radio. The lights are flashing. You need to put someone on the air.

A caller then asks you if you know how much of the total income the top 1 percent of income earners claim. You don't. The caller then tells you that the highest 1 percent of income earners earn about 19 percent of the total taxable income.

He then asks you if you know what percentage of all income taxes this top 1 percent pays. Again, you don't … but he does. He tells you they pay almost 34 percent of all income taxes. Then he asks you to defend that disparity. You can't. As a result, your credibility suffers. Your show fails.

Liberals wither and die on talk radio simply because they don't have fact and logic on their side. Their "feel good" sophisms just don't stand up to the onslaught of callers armed with information.

-PJ

[Yardstick]

It's actually not so difficult to grasp: simply put, being a true-blue liberal means you have to ignore reality.

Well, I think you're right (that was a nice post, by the way). That's probably about what it boils down to. And to be honest, I have known this to be the case for quite a while now.

I guess what I'd really like to see is this fact, as it relates to talk radio, proven, in a meticulously researched and documented book, so that whenever a liberal brings up the subject, I can cite the book and rub the liberal's nose in the author's irrefutable findings. As it stands now, I can cite Hayek if a liberal won't take my word for it that command economies are common to both socialism and fascism; but there's nowhere to turn if a liberal refuses to believe that the failure of liberal talk radio is attributible to the fact that liberalism's emotionalist, non-rational underpinnings don't hold up well under talk radio's spontaneous cross-examinations.

Yes, I'm being a little bit silly here. I know that citing such a book would be pretty useless with most liberals (after all, they reject Hayek). Still, I think it would be an interesting study.

Speaking of silly, I let myself go on a little tangent in my initial response to your reply. I was going to delete it, but I think I came up with a fun scenario, so I include it, for whatever it's worth:

**************************

I guess what I really want to see is for someone to prove this fact, in black and white, in a book that would catch the attention of lots of people. I'd like to see the book create a nationwide popular buzz. Then, I'd like to see Time and Newsweek, in response to the buzz, run headlines like "Talking to Themselves: Are Liberals Irrational?"; and I'd like to see the two concepts, "Liberalism" and "Irrationality", become linked in the minds of the American people, so that when Americans saw a liberal's lips moving, on TV or wherever, they'd automatically ask themselves "is this guy rational?". I'd like to see the phrase "Is it rational?" enter the popular vernacular, replacing Nike's "Just do it" or Homer Simpson's "Doh".

It'd be pure hell on earth for liberals.

****************************

Wouldn't that be cool?

[Yardstick]

Good stuff! I love the last paragraph (and especially the last line):

Liberals wither and die on talk radio simply because they don't have fact and logic on their side. Their "feel good" sophisms just don't stand up to the onslaught of callers armed with information.

This conclusion is the same one that most of the folks on this thread have expressed, and I agree with it.

[ninenot]

Some possibilities: 1) Liberals cannot debate intelligently--they have never been tested. Thus they are boring because they cannot prove their point. 2) No audience is available. You can read it in the newspaper, see it on CBSNBCCNNABC; why listen to it on the radio?

Actually, the 'no audience is available' item may bear further analysis. It is true that the circulation of most newspapers is declining (as are the ratings of the major network news shows.)

This raises the possibility that NOBODY is interested--or, possibly, that 1) the conservatives just won't tolerate the garbage and 2) the 'liberals' can't read and/or won't watch TV any more.

[ninenot]

Bill O'Reilly

This poser is not a conservative, and not a liberal. BO'R(e) is absolutely fascinated with only ONE topic: himself.

He has gotten rather far with his extremely well-honed ability to be a pain in the a$$--and that's his talent.

I don't think he will last HALF as long as Rush--in contrast to Rush, BO'R(e) takes himself WAY too seriously.

[VRWC_minion]

Was he at least entertaining?

No, pretty boring.

[Euro-American Scum]

I would probably listen to a thoughtful, rational, entertaining liberal, just to have my ideas challenged if nothing else.

Ain't no such animal. That could be why they don't catch on. There's just so much emotional ranting and raving a person can take.