Word Processing - After all

Word Processing - After all these years, I finally saw a picture of Molly Ivins. She looks like Lambchop's alcoholic aunt.

Which might explain some of her "logic" in this column.

I almost hate to bother fisking Molly Ivins. I won't take the cheap shot route - the woman's neither retarded nor senile. She's just an idiot. An idiot with a way with a faux-homespun yarn, but an idiot nonetheless.

Edward Monks, a lawyer in Eugene, Ore., did a report for the newspaper there last year on the prevalence of right-wing hosts on radio talk shows. "The spectrum of opinion on national political commercial talk radio shows ranges from extreme right wing to very extreme right wing -- there is virtually nothing else." Monks notes the irony that many of these right-wing hosts spend much of their time complaining about "the liberal media."

Isn't this like complaining about how everyone in a bowling alley is talking about bowling instead of baseball? Talk radio is the only niche within the media - really, within public, non-military society - where the dominant culture is conservative. That is as compared to the networks, most newspapers, academia, the public school system, all unions, the non-profit community, Public Broadcasting, and on, and on...

Ivins continues:

On the two Eugene talk stations, Monks found: "There are 80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative talk shows, without a single second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective. ... Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it."

It's sort of like taking a little kid to a store ten times. The first nine times, you buy the kid a pack of gum. The tenth time, you say "no", and the kid scrunches up her face and pouts "you NEVER buy me gum!".

Yes, Molly and Edwin, talk radio is a conservative preserve. It is not "the media", though, just a medium. One medium, among the long list of news, info and entertainment media.

Commercial talk radio is conservative. Against that:

• All the broadcast networks but Fox News
• Most cable news outlets (from CNN on down)
• Public radio and TV
• the vast majority of newspapers
• Almost all entertainment television
• Almost the entire movie industry
• Almost the entire music industry
• Pretty much the entire arts community (which is heavily publicly-subsidized).

As always, the same challenge; show me a single medium other than talk radio that's even balanced, to say nothing of "conservative".

Indeed, it's the only intellectual competition there is among American media. Competition - a concept for which Ivins cries crocodile tears:

To point out the obvious, broadcasters and their national advertisers have a clear stake in promoting the views of those who advocate lower taxes on the rich and on big corporations. What is so perfectly loony about the FCC's proposal to unleash yet another round of media concentration is that it is being done in the name of "the free market."

Is the free market not supposed to encourage competition rather than lead to its disappearance? The U.S. now ranks 17th, below Costa Rica and Slovenia, on the worldwide index of press freedom established by the Reporters Without Borders.

So the US is ranked 17th by "Reporters Without Borders"? Whoah - where did they come in?

We're Number 17! - Who is this "Reporters Without Borders" group that Molly Ivins has so favored?

They're a French organization, for starters.

How did they end up ranking us 17th?

Look at this map - RW/oB ranks the US equal to the likes of Peru and France - and worse than Canada, whose trends on censorship would make any genuine American reporter or libertarian blanche in horror.

No, indeed, the only criticism RW/oB seems to have is that we're in the midst of a war on terrorism - and the poll, being compiled from reports sent in by journalists in the countries themselves, reflects the rather exacting standards of journalist/activists in the US, who would seem to regard any hint of restriction of information as censorship.

Not that it's not justifiable - a free press is vital to a free society. But RW/oB's poll, as quoted by Ivins, is an incredibly misleading piece of work.

Posted by Mitch at February 26, 2003 11:29 AM