(John McEnroe voice): You
cannot be serious. You're back to swimming in deNial again. Rush is not an "attack dog model"?? You posted that with a straight face?
I suspect "Feminazis" and "the White House dog" are not amused. Lush
invented the model. The Hannitys and Boortzes are his imitators.
-- Coincidentally this all took off (as a business "success", decidedly not a rhetorical one) around 1990 just after the Fairness Doctrine was rescinded, and whether that's relevant or not, the general climate of our political discourse has degenerated and polarized itself ever since, and that's a whole 'nother worthy discussion. But the origins rest sqarely on Limblob's shoulders. And
that, before you point it out, is why I call him "Limblob" and such; for dumbing down and polluting the discourse in the pursuit of "success". It means "success" in terms of his personal pocketbook; it means "failure" to the public discourse. Which is something that doesn't carry a price tag.
And again, the definition of "success" in this context means commercial success, i.e. "does it draw enough flies?". But you seem to want to translate that into rhetorical success, i.e. the inherent value of the argument. Again, one does not follow the other. They act more like the same poles of two magnets: they repel each other. More commercial = less intellectual, and vice versa. So you can't take the result of one side (the commercial) and then claim it represents the other (the intellectual). It doesn't begin to.
What we're approaching here is a discussion on the corrupting power of money on discourse. Which is itself a worthy discourse.
Your cartoon is in itself dishonestly misleading. She didn't want her insurance to cover contraceptives. She wanted her insurance to cover contraceptives without any cost to her. She wanted the government to provide her contraceptives or force her insurance company to furnish her contraceptives for free because so many women couldn't afford to pay for them. And to forego sex until you could afford to be responsible about it was just unthinkiable. Somehow liberals always leave out that part don't they? Perhaps you can find anything even remotely comparable to use in the comparison of what Sarah Palin was ridiculed, demonized, diminished, or accused of?
Foxy, perhaps a nice cup of caffeine before reading is in order, because you have deftly ducked under the entire point, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Sandra Fluke or her issue. The point was
Lush Rimjob, of whom you just blindly disavowed his continuous use of ad hominem. The cartoon gives you a pictorial egregious and famous example thereof; two other examples were provided in the text. And yet even with all that, somehow you want to shunt this off to Sandra Fluke? Why? Because your position is false and worthless, that's why. You are truly drowning in DeNial.
Once again, you're trying to make the argument about business, which affects only that business. What we actually were dissecting is discourse. Whether XYZ Broadcast Corporation makes its profit, who gives a snit. Whether the national discourse is helped or hurt in the process -- aye, there's the rub. And that's where we were.
Was Air America a not-for-profit organization? No it was not. Was it able to attract audience despite more advertising on its behalf than ANY for profit entity has ever enjoyed? No it was not. Did advertisers see it as a viable source of exposure for their profits? No they did not. The ONLY way Air America survived for as long as it did is via contributions from people who wanted it to succeed. And those donors fnally had to admit defeat. The programming content of Air America wasn't interesting to them or much of anybody else.
I don't know that
any of that is true, save the first question/answer-- it was a for-profit venture. I'm not privy to their accounting books, nor do I care. Again, that's business, and their business. What I do know is they experienced some kind of mismanagement internally (again, not sure of the details nor do I care), and that the roster of talent they had on the air, is still on the air doing the same thing they were doing before under new management. That would seem to put the lie to your theory about inability to draw advertising, since they're still doing it several years later. It also puts the lie to this imaginary equivalence between business success and rhetorical assent ... but that's a point we've already established with TV audience psychology where we started all this.
However I do agree that attack-dog models of radio blather are not of any benefit to the national discourse and have been used to varying "success" (commercial) by ideological sides. But as we've established over and over, commercial success isn't related to intellectual/rhetorical success; the two are mutually antagonistic. So this desperation of martyr-complexed wags like the OP to see ratings as some kind of "vote" on content has no basis. But I still think it's a fascinating tangent to explore why attack media seems to "work" (in commercial terms) for the right, but doesn't work so well for the left. It's tantalizing to ponder what it is about the psychological makeup of each that would set up such a preference.
People tune in shock jocks. People watch NASCAR for the wrecks. People rubberneck at traffic accidents. It doesn't mean they "like" or "agree with" traffic accidents. Some of y'all, deliberately or ignorantly, conflate
attention with
assent. When Lush Rimjob starts yelling "slut!" for three days, what he's getting is the former. If he was also getting the latter, he wouldn't have had a hundred advertisers pull out and issued an apology.
When content is uninteresting and enjoys no redeeming qualities, the media source is not going to enjoy high ratings or a lot of profitability. And if it can garner almost no market share at all, it does and should close up shop.
True but that's entirely a statement about the commercial model of broadcasting, and we've got to assign half the blame to the audience on that as the enablers. If the unwashed simply refused to watch Gong Shows and people deserted on an island eating bugs and fake wrestling and Fraction News' big story on a fire in some neighborhood you've never heard of and Dog the Bounty Hunter, then it would all go away. But they're happy to exploit this character flaw, so we'll continue to get Lush Rimjob yelling "slut" and Fox Noise's creeping chyrons along with the rest of the vast wasteland of no redeeming qualities. They get attention; they don't get justification. There's a vast difference.
Actually you've just made an excellent argument for public broadcasting, where content can be driven by intellectual needs rather than commercial ones.
But don't be naïve, as far as ratings it still comes down to this:
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" -- H.L. Mencken