No one can be surprised that when Democrats lose elections (and almost lose elections that “weren’t supposed to be close”), the liberals blame an infernal “right-wing media machine.” That’s what Brian Stelter did in his Sources of reliability podcast on November 4.
Stelter reached out to Brian Rosenwald, the author of The Book. Talk Radio’s America: How An Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United StatesThis is what it sounded like. The listeners received a lot more lame theories than concrete information.
To process Democrats losing the governor’s race in Virginia, Stelter quoted from leftist Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent that while Republican Glenn Youngkin campaigned on a softer rhetoric in opposing critical race theory in the schools, he capitalized on right-wing media driving a much more “visceral and hallucinogenic” version of this argument directly to the base. They apparently were hallucinating with “daily propaganda coming from the likes of Laura Ingraham.”
Argument here is that Republican candidates may sound less extreme because they are able to use the media “machine,” which provides all of the base-stoking rhetoric. Stelter said it “makes a lot of sense” to think of Fox and Newsmax as “base turnout operations.” As usual, Stelter pretends that CNN’s hardcore base-stoking rhetoric from Jim Acosta & Co. doesn’t allow the Democrats to run milder campaigns.
Stelter complained about all the “propaganda and grifting” from the right about local school-board issues in Loudoun County, Virginia. Stelter claimed that Fox News had made more than 400 mentions of the county in 2021. He never even mentioned sexual assaults at high school campuses as an issue. Was that “grifting” to mention? It is important to remember that leftists make national news from local crimes and controversies. Look for George Floyd or Michael Brown in Minneapolis.
Rosenwald then claimed that right-wing TV and talk radio liked cultural topics because they were Dullsville. They need “emotionality,” and “when you start talking about supply chain issues and inflation and those kinds of things, that’s complicated, right? That’s economic theory, you’re going to have to understand what’s going on.” But when you talk about kids in schools, “man, that’s simple.”
Stelter sensed danger from conservatives: “Hold on. My friends at NewsBusters are going to listen to this and they’re going to say you’re saying that conservatives are dumb. This needs to be simple.”
Rosenwald claimed he wasn’t saying they were dumb, but they need radio to be “kind of like a soap opera,” because “nuance is boring.” He claimed he’s talked to Republicans who said “when we talk about the debt ceiling, or the filibuster makes us compromise, that’s boring, that’s nuance, that’s process. People don’t want to hear about that. They want to hear something big, bold, exciting, dramatic.”
How on Earth do you claim that persistent inflation and shortages of toilet paper or Christmas toys aren’t going to be dramatic political issues?
They then turned their attention to the arrogant idea that liberals do not have Fox News or conservative radio stations on their side. They talked about how liberals listen to NPR’s Morning Edition instead of Sean Hannity or Mark Levin, as if that show isn’t one-sided propaganda. That taxpayer-funded bubble is so tranquil and urbane, oh!
This again completely misses that CNN and MSNBC are the obvious equivalent to Fox News, that they are talk television more than “news channels.” Rosenwald actually discussed how liberals could really use a billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to found something like Fox, because there’s a “huge imbalance in politics and in political media.”
Who precisely sounds “hallucinogenic” on the media landscape?
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