Brian Lambert writes a great column laying out what might be a true bottom for the end of the uncontested, logically-challenged, reign of the Talk Radio dictators over the minds of the witless.
See, it always bugged me, how karma never seemed to come back on these people, how they committed outrages against reason, logic, propriety, and even the English language and never paid a price for broadcasting their stupidity for so many to hear.
I mean, sheesh, I went around worrying about accidentally saying something stupid in front of a class of 28 college freshmen. I'm like most people, in that an ill-chosen extemporaneous word or phrase can keep me up all night, fuming, "Why did I say that THAT way?"
Not these folks, apparently. All the stupidity, and all the calling out of the stupidity, had no effect on their righteous obliviousness. They didn't even have the sense to be embarrassed, nor were the listeners parsing the logic all that actively either. Libel mattered little to them.
But now the "worm may be turning" on these folks, in the words of Brian Lambert.
We can only hope. But I like the way Lambert puts it best. (and for the record, I watched Rahm Emanuel frame the Limbaugh position on Meet the Press Sunday and came to the exact same conclusion Lambert and others did: it was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel for a guy like Emanuel, who is such a hilarious chess player, I just love to watch him work. I swear he must be a Scorpio.)
What Letterman (and His Ilk) Get That Couric (and Her Ilk) Do Not.
By Brian Lambert
One of the classic admonitions of political warfare says that when the other guy is doing a perfectly fine job of mounting the scaffold and hanging himself, you don't go mess up a good thing by warning him about the trap door.
Still ... this Rush Limbaugh as "Leader of the Republican Party" thing, with Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee offering a groveling apology to Limbaugh barely two days after asserting that he and not Limbaugh, a radio entertainer, was the "de facto leader" ... is beyond anything someone like me could ever hope for. (The only thing better was being live on KTLK a couple years ago when Limbaugh was brought in on his dope bust.)
The Rahm Emanuel strategy (his MO and prints are all over this one) of squeezing hapless Republicans into the position of either accepting Limbaugh, an unabashed cynic, as their "leader" or face an avalanche of "dittoheads" melting down their phone lines and e-mail is diabolically brilliant. Of course it wouldn't work if the Republican party weren't still a captive of its most hidebound and reactionary elements, the crowd with a near religious attraction to Limbaugh that has had its hands around the neck of actual conservatives for the last 25 years and is now preparing to yank back the lever that drops the party through the trap door.
[...]
Jon Stewart nearly wet himself with all the clips the 4% Republican "base" served up.
Frankly, after 20 years and hundreds of columns/blog posts about the bizarre hold talk radio entertainers have over their astonishingly credulous audiences and the fear they strike into the hearts of the mainstream press, I'm at a loss to flog it all over again. But the worm in this long-running act has turned. In a media universe where 5% of the total audience keeps you rich as Croesus, Limbaugh and other big name radio performers have a rock solid base from which to ride out the "deep recession". But good lord, look what makes up that base!
At least two things have changed dramatically: 1: Newer, fresher, funnier alternate-alternate media on TV (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert) and all over the internet has succeeded in drawing a dark red margin around these characters that no one in media dared in their uncontested glory years during the Clinton administration. And 2: The "conservative ethos" that Limbaugh continues to defend as though it were handed to him from God himself, has exploded in everyone's' face.
[...]
What Couric (and her ilk) avoid saying is that Limbaugh's act has always been nakedly cynical. For people in the accuracy business they've never had the stomach to point out that he is flat out wrong about ... well, damned near everything. But now, as the "Limbaugh base" has been reduced to shrieking for Joe the Plumber in a ballroom of rabid acolytes, it is a bit like Joe McCarthy post-Army hearings. The rest of the country -- supposedly Couric's primary audience -- has been bitch-slapped by reality and is struggling to find a way out from under the slag heap of mismanagement and corruption that has overwhelmed them.
Couric can demure out of fear of offending Limbaugh (who she might bump into at an upscale Manhattan restaurant) and incurring the wrath of his minions, but all she does is reaffirm in the minds of a healthy majority of viewers that she, like Michael Steele and those truly pathetic Republican congressmen who plead for Limbaugh's forgiveness, that she can not dare to speak candidly and truthfully.
This is a classic dilemma for journalism in the internet age. How assiduously to you stick to "objectivity" when one party in a story not only has been proven wrong, emphatically, and is constantly being deconstructed as frauds and fools by alternate "news" sources that are eating your lunch? In an appearance industry "objective journalism" suffers from a truth deficit. That is a competitive liability.
Letterman lives and dies by ratings as much as Couric, but has the guts/common sense/business acumen to reassert what is now a cultural meme. Namely, that the "principled, true conservatism" shtick of Rush Limbaugh has been revealed to be a sick joke. A profitable one for Limbaugh to be sure, and nothing that needs to be regulated out of business, but a cynical shtick and little more.
Comments