Talk Radio, Blogs, and Overturning the Election

Which is a better forum for political expression, the blogosphere or talk radio?

Talk radio depends on commercial sponsorship for specific programs. This necessarily creates a conflict of interest between hosts and their sponsors, predisposing them to be biased toward the concerned business interests. Blogs may or may not fall into this category. Most personal bloggers (like this one) don’t carry ads and don’t feel beholden to any other interests but the expression of their own opinions. But the main difference I see between bloggers and talk radio is one of diversity versus mass duplication.

When Rush Limbaugh calls for listeners to write or call a politician or media figure about something that HE finds objectionable, that unfortunate individual is flooded with negative, sometimes hateful messages from everywhere across the country (and abroad). The pressure to conform to Limbaugh’s message, or at least to not openly criticize him, is very strong among conservatives. And it gives Limbaugh an unwarranted amount of power. Just follow the elected politicians who care more about pandering to him than their own constituents. That Georgia congressman who apologized to him on-the-air for having had the temerity to criticize him earlier no longer has any credibility as a public representative, in my opinion. But Limbaugh isn’t the only bully on the block. Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and Mark Levin regularly target individuals in government for criticism, knowing that the hate element within their own legions of followers will quickly set to work beleaguering anyone who is the hapless target of their self-righteous wrath with e-mails, phone calls, and hate mail.

Even major blogs such as the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post don’t have this sort of intimidating power over our leaders. I for one find it a bit frightening that our recent election seems to be in the process of being overturned by leaders more concerned about what powerful talk show hosts think than about the people whose interests they are responsible for looking after and for whom they were elected or appointed to serve.

What’s really the final straw to me is when a Limbaugh or Hannity gets on the air and begins to rant against blogs that disagree with them. Or when Limbaugh, with all of the power that he has to publicly defame people (and which he regularly exercises), characterizes any media coverage that doesn’t conform to his extremely narrowly defined ideology as an example of the “drive-by media”.

Just who won the election last November? We had a Democratic president elected with the greatest majority of the popular vote in twenty years. The Democrats took away a net of seven Senate seats from the Republicans (and eight if Franken’s victory is affirmed by the courts). And they added considerably to their already-solid majority in the House of Representatives. So you’d think that the Republicans who are left would read the results and work with the majority-elected party to help solve the problems that the electorate is concerned about. But instead, they seemed to be lining up to suck up to a tiny group of powerful and loud political extremists who have gained, with the assistance of their corporate sponsors, a stranglehold on talk radio.