At 02:21 PM 8/4/2003 -0700 Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>I don't doubt that Limbaugh makes mistakes. He speaks
>for, what, 2 hours a day, five days a week, 40+ weeks
>a year, without a script?
Actually, it is three hours a day.
FAIR, by the way, is a partisan organization whose sole purpose in life is
to bash Republicans in the media.
> _Of course_ he makes
>mistakes. I have a memory for policy minutiae that
>verges on the photographic, and I make mistakes on
>this list. I shudder to think how many I would make
>speaking as much as he does, without the chance to
>Google for research.
>
>Have _you_ ever listened to Limbaugh?
Clearly Reggie does not.
The idea that people listen to Rush to gobble up lies for three hours a day
is patently absurd - especially considering the ratio of even what "FAIR"
considers to be "lies" to his hours on the air.
> He's not
>popular because he lies, he's popular because, first,
>he's a gifted entertainer, and second, because he
>speaks to people in a voice that is almost nonexistent
>in other forms of the mass media - the voice of a
>patriotic middle American. Not something you can get
>on NPR - and I _do_ listen to NPR a lot.
>
>Limbaugh, like Fox News, is popular because he
>brilliantly figured out how to provide something that
>the market wasn't - not unbiased news, but news that
>lacked the pervasive liberal bias of most of the mass
>media.
With all that being said, I disagree with the above. Rush does not
succeed because he provides news. He succeeds because he provides
commentary, political humor, and "oddly enough" news items. Moreover, he
does all of these exceptionally well, and with a flair for entertainment.
Furthermore, when Rush first broke onto the scene in 1988, the commentary
he provided - mainstream conservative - was virtually unvailable on the
airwaves, making it all the more a phenomenon for his listeners.
As for Fox News, Fox News does succeed in part because it is perceived by
many as providing news without the liberal bias of essentially all other
mainstream media sources - but a look at Fox News' lineup shows that it
also succeeds primarily by producing commentary. Moreover, its
commentary is strongly right-wing - showing that it does, of course,
understand its audience. Cable News Viewers are heavily white and
middle-aged, demographics which skew Republican, and Fox News provides the
commentary that these viewers most respond to - filling a television void
that had inexplicable gone unfilled so far.
JDG
_______________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world,
it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03
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