Monday, September 7, 2009

The Rushification of America

Rush Limbaugh controls the republican party by harnessing the manufactured rage of millions of listeners in letter/email/fax/telephone call campaigns to keep republican legislators in line. I am increasingly afraid they have figured out that they can control society at large in the same way.

BarbinMD (DK): Politico Fans The Flames

On Thursday, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne had a spot-on criticism of the traditional media's overblown coverage of town hall protests of health care reform:

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

And here's a hit from Politico that shows just how media-created impressions are born -- this time, on the rightwingnuttery's objection to the President's planned address to school children across the country:

School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation’s classrooms.

The outrage is sweeping the country. And how do we know? A quote from a vice principal of a school district in Maryland about some complaints, a district in Virginia that said they wouldn't show the speech, and there were "a few calls," according to a spokesman for the Denver Public Schools. Oh, and Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin are against it.

Never mind that Maryland has nearly one million school age children, Virginia has about 1.3 million, Denver has nearly 200,000, Glenn Beck thinks Obama is planning to turn the U.S. into a Marxist, Communist, Socialist nation, and Michelle Malkin likes to attack the President with jokes about September 11th -- that doesn't stop Poltiico's breathless headline:

School speech backlash builds

Dionne said of the town hall protesters of August:

It's also clear that the anger that got so much attention largely reflects a fringe right-wing view opposed to all sorts of government programs most Americans support.

And if it worked with health care reform ...

DougJ: Radio, radio

One of the things I wonder about when right-wing radio hosts force the resignation of government officials or when the Washington Post admits it takes conservative criticism more seriously than liberal criticism is the extent to which right-wing radio influences American politics and media coverage. I do believe that reporters and editors are keenly aware that if they piss off the right, it means all of Rush’s 15 million listeners will be on their ass, whereas any reaction from the left will be more diffuse. On the other hand, right-wing radio waged an anti-McCain jihad in the 2008 Republican primaries, to no avail. I happen to believe things would have been different in 2008 if the official candidate of right-wing radio hadn’t been a Harvard-educated Mormom millionaire who bragged about shooting varmints, so we’ll see if things are different in 2012.

I decided to look at some numbers about the portion of conservatives who listen to right-wing radio. According to Arbitron Rush Limbaugh has an audience of about 14 million viewers, with Hannity at 13 and Beck at 8. There’s a lot of overlap in the audiences, buti it’s probably safe to say that the total number of people who listen to one or more of these shows regularly is over 20 million. It’s probably also safe to assume that nearly all of the listeners are over the age of 18, i.e. are of voting age, and that nearly all identify as conservative. The total number of Americans of voting age is around 230 million. The proportion of Americans who identify as conservative is about 34%, so that means the number of self-described conservatives of voting age is just under 80 million. Thus, around a quarter (a maybe more) of conservatives of voting age listen to right-wing radio regularly.

That’s a pretty astounding number. It means that Republican officials are in no position to criticize Rush, Beck at al. without paying political consequences.

No comments:

Post a Comment