Air America–the liberal world’s most recent and most expensive attempt to counter the perceived influence of conservative talk radio . . . expired this afternoon.
Actually it had been hemorrhaging cash and on financial life support for several years, kept alive only by the largess of deep pocketed socialists like George Soros.
The whole undertaking was built upon a multi-layered foundation of deeply-flawed premises. First liberals assumed that millions of Americans tuned in to Rush and Sean and Glenn to be told what to think. Wrong. The reality was, millions of conservatives, weary-to-death of a uniformly liberal mass media culture, tuned in to hear someone articulate what they already were thinking.
Secondly, liberals assumed there would be a listening audience for liberal talk radio . . . that there was unmet demand out there for Al Franken’s and Janine Garafolo’s views on current events. Wrong again. Politically liberal media consumers need only to flip on any radio, television or DVD player at random to have their world view smugly validated.
In other words, talk radio thrives because conservative opinion in other media is so rare. Liberal talk radio failed because it was utterly and completely redundant. Superfluous.
This was the essence of something I wrote in another forum a while back. I opined:
The tendency to have a low opinion of the intelligence of people who disagree with you is an ugly but common aspect of human nature. Thus, liberals have widely assumed that conservative Americans tune into Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity (or Paul Harvey for that matter) in order to be told what they ought to think. In reality, conservative Americans have enjoyed these programs because they represent a rare opportunity to have what they already think validated in the media.
This is an understandable misconception. If you hold liberal views and values, you tend to have your biases validated and reinforced constantly. Not only are most mainstream news media programs edited and delivered by people who have a liberal philosophy, but the writers of most television dramas and comedies do as well. Stand up comics, popular song lyrics, movie plots, Hollywood stars and starlets being interviewed . . . they all consistently deliver subtle and overt validation if your views are left of center. This experience is unnoticed by liberals precisely because it is so common. It’s normal.
This explains why so many sputter and rage about the “bias” of Fox News Channel. Many liberals have become so accustomed to never being confronted by an opinion that differs from their own, that some now seem to think of it as an inalienable right.
This is why liberal talk radio is always doomed to fail. It’s utterly superflous. For liberals, consumption of popular media is just one giant foot rub.
Conservatives, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of thinking that way. For them, virtually every foray into mass media represents a walk through a hailstorm of in-validation. Talk radio on AM became one of the only media refuges in that storm. And this explains both why it is so popular on one hand; and so despised on the other.
This is also what public policy wonks like Taylor and conservative journalists don’t get. They spend their days thinking about and defending conservative ideas. They have a highly-developed infrastructure under-girding their worldview and are constantly immersed in its implications.
These folks can scarcely imagine what it’s like to be an viscerally conservative accountant, UPS driver, or business owner who has way too much on his or her plate to read Heritage Foundation white papers or pore over The Claremont Review of Books or follow debates about Leo Stauss at The Corner. What they know is that their country seems to be going to hell in a handbasket and that almost every time they sample any popular media–news or entertainment–they get a liberal thumb jabbed in their eye.
But then they can flip over to Rush and for 15 or 20 minutes and get a pat on back instead.
That both talk radio’s critics and defenders don’t seem to recognize the power of this validating function, is understandable. If you do public policy, you’re just not going to “get it.”
So Air America is dead. And the lessons its failure offers to those who financed and rooted for it will go unlearned, I suspect. And perhaps that’s all for the best.
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