Nick Coleman is dazed and confused (I purchased that sentence from the Department of Redundancy Department).

Nick thinks Sarah Palin winked at him, and his “male” readers. It’s either an attempt at humor (stick to being a broken bat Nick, humor is above your pay grade) or a view into Nick’s psyche; certainly not Sarah Palin’s.

Sarah Palin winked at me during her debate with Joe Biden. She winked at the camera, and I think it was meant for me. There is a connection between us that goes back to that tear-gassy September night in St. Paul, when she gave her acceptance speech and I was up in the balcony, taking notes.

Sarah Palin’s wink was not a come-on, and most certainly not directed to Nick Coleman.

As if.

Now Nick, if you see Sarah lift her middle finger…

Sarah Palin’s was a wink of encouragement to all working Americans. It was a wink to the Democrats “We’ve got your number; you don’t have the answers.” It was a wink of confidence…and it was a wink to her father sitting in the audience during the debate.

I would make a good First Dude.

Silly Nick. A pandering liberal soon-to-be-unemployed columnist for a failing paper vs. a real man in The Deadliest Catch business, who races snow machines and lives off the land in the Alaskan frontier?

Nick, you couldn’t iron her shirt.

…and for your enjoyment, I give you Mariah Carey.

Oh, when you walk by every night
Talking sweet and looking fine
I get kinda hectic inside
Mmm, baby I’m so into you
Darling, if you only knew
All the things that flow through my mind

(But it’s just a) sweet, sweet fantasy, baby
When I close my eyes
You come and you take me
(On and on and on)
So deep in my daydreams
But it’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby

Nick goes on in his column (blah blah blah) and I think he actually says some nice things about Sarah Palin and acknowledges the political clout of soccer moms (blah blah blah) but I lost interest.

Regional pundits that remember the seventies constantly bemoan the lack of “bipartisanship” in Minnesota politics.

Of course, the only “bipartisanship” they seem to get around to is the kind were Republicans act like and coalesce around DFL positions.

Never, ever stories like this:

Longtime DFL legislator Doug Johnson said he was ingrained with the political philosophy of Minnesota legendary Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey — “The worst Democrat is better than the best Republican.”

But on Nov. 4, the former chairman of the powerful state Senate Tax Commission, will split his vote for the first time ever. His ballot will be marked in a familiar Democratic way for Barack Obama for president, Jim Oberstar for 8th District congressman, Tom Bakk for state senator and David Dill for state representative. But in the U.S. Senate race, Johnson will cast his vote for incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

So when the Override Six betrayed Republican Party principles and stabbed Governor Pawlenty in the back, Lori Sturdevant demanded that the GOP keep a wide, Wide, Wide open mind toward their self-interested treachery, and chided the GOP for trying to squash the traitors.

Wonder how Johnson’s move is going to play in the DFL – and with the likes of Sturdevant?

UPDATE:  Welcome Hot Air readers!

…the media’s dissection of the minutes of then-mayor Palin’s remarks about praying for an Alaska Huskies victory made during a 2003 meeting of the Wasilla City Council to bring you some actual signs that a vice presidential candidate is unqualified to serve:

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Katie Couric.

Herbert Hoover, actually, was the president in 1929.  The crash happened largely because of pseudo-socialist meddling in the economy.  Plenty of people got rich under FDR’s administration.

Oh, yeah – and while FDR was the first President to appear on television, it was ten years later.

A dumb flub?  Yes (and one among many, many, many such for Biden).  And one that, had it come from McCain or Palin, would have made the front page of the NYTimes.

I’m going to start with the conclusion:

The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal’s respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, “The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis.”

That conspiracy not only has Photoshopped out all of Obama’s imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent McCain’s image) but also has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.

It’s the conclusion of Tony Blankley’s latest on RCP, “The Man Who Never Was”, an allusion to the WWII-espionage classic (and true story) in which British intelligence sent dropped a corpse wtih a completely fictional identity and a stack of faked war plans ashore in occupied France to deceive the Germans.

The media must think we’re the Germans:

They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Thus, the public image of Obama is of a “man who never was.”

…The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don’t see Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile “come on” when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels’ disciples, not Cronkite’s.

And it’s not just building a fictional person; they’re trying to tear down a real one:

More appalling, a skit on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” last weekend suggested that Gov. Palin’s husband had sex with his own daughters. That show was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate. Talk about incest.

Where have we seen that before?
And of course, the real deception:

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama’s life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama’s two years at New York’s Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband’s driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

But in two years, they haven’t bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Go read the whole thing.

And ask your friendly local media “what’s the weather like in that bag, there?”

“But why are Mac’s handlers keeping Palin away from the media?  Hah!  Evidence that she’s not ready for prime time!”

Interesting theory.

Now, reality:  They’re bypassing the mainstream media and going directly to the voters.

In fact they are allowing her message to be absorbed without the skepticism of the old gatekeepers interposed between Palin and voters.  The enormous crowds validate the approach and at the same time further diminish the MSM’s old guard who just can’t seem to grasp that their disapproval just doesn’t matter to most of America.

It worked for Reagan.  And given the froth that the MSM and the Obama campaign (pardon the redundancy) have worked themselves into, I think it’s working now.

…a “column I didn’t finish” – one I found so atrociously bad I had to bail out in mid-stream (and not in the bad, AIG, taxpayers-funding-stupidity sense, but in the “save a few precious minutes of life” kind of way).

Garrison Keillor in the Strib:

I saw two moose on a bike trail in Anchorage last week and did not kill either one of them, neither the cow nor her calf, though under the Bush Doctrine I certainly had a right to, since the cow could have charged and pinned me to a tree and danced me to death.

The moose would have gotten off on rhetorical self-defense.

Charlie Gibson, spectacles dripping off the end of his nose, asked Governor Sarah Palin to offer an opinion on the “Bush Doctrine.”

In my interchanges with some of the most politically articulate people I know, Sarah Palin’s response to the question has come far less into question than the existence of a “Bush Doctrine” and the wisdom of Gibson’s attempt to trip up the Governor.

The consensus? There is no singular “Bush Doctrine.” Clearly, President Bush has articulated (admittedly a poor choice of words for G.W. Bush) America’s response to the attacks of 9/11 as a desire to secure America’s safety through the promotion and support of democracy throughout the world. This is an element of his neoconservative roots. He has also asserted that America now retains the unilateral right and responsibility to strike terrorists and hostile regimes before they strike us; but no one has consistently used the phrase “The Bush Doctrine.”

That is, until now.

From Wikipedia (emphasis mine)

The Bush Doctrine is a term used to describe the foreign policy doctrine of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It may be viewed as a set of several related foreign policy principles, including stress on ending terrorism, spreading democracy, increased unilateralism in foreign policy and an expanded view of American national security interests. Foreign policy experts argue over the meaning of the term “Bush Doctrine,” and some scholars have suggested that there is no one unified theory underlying Bush’s foreign policy. Jacob Weisberg identifies six successive “Bush Doctrines” in his book The Bush Tragedy, while former Bush staffer Peter D. Feaver has counted seven.

Set back on their heels, Democrats on the talk show circuit are saying Charlie Gibson wasn’t tough enough.

The rest of America is putting themselves in that chair across from Charlie Gibson and saying (or at least thinking):

“Charlie, you’re an a**hole.”

We expect the media to conduct hard-hitting interviews and do their part in the “vetting” process. But to intentionally attempt to trip up Sarah Palin with a contrivance only serves to elevate the contempt the voter has for the media.

And it surely doesn’t help the Obama campaign because everyone is still talking about Sarah Palin. They are rooting for her because so many Americans are like her.

The Gibson interview is a bad omen for Obama. The Democrats are quickly realizing that there is no way to take down Sarah Palin without severe blowback. She is rubber, they are glue.

…and the best is yet to come!

The confluence of Joe Biden’s inability to control his diction and the strengthening warm front that is Sarah Palin’s candidacy portends The Perfect Storm for the Obama campaign.

A post-convention wrap-up: 

The RNC convention bump has McCain up +1.0. Time will tell if that will stick. The USA Today poll, Obama’s favorite isn’t good news for him. McCain +10.

Of late, polls of polls have shown Senators Obama and McCain deadlocked. But McCain clearly has the momentum right now…voters by the thousands in attendance to see McCain/Palin.

56 days to go.

Can America really be split exactly down the middle?

How accurate are polls at predicting the outcome of the election to come?

Is the liberal media behind the design of most of them? If so, do we assume McCain is doing better than he is?

When Americans step into the booth, hand on the lever, are they ready to vote for an African American President for the first time in history?

Conservatives – if the GOP candidate were Colin Powell, would race be even more a factor?

Personally, I hope race is no longer a factor but am I naive?

Is McCain, the more historically conventional candidate, the default if voters enter the booth undecided?

…or will they stay home?

Speaking of staying home, will Obama once and for all be the candidate that gets young, first-time voters to vote? If so, will they all vote for him?

If the polls continue to reflect a shift in momentum to McCain/Palin, should Obama dump Biden, in an unprecedented admission of a poor choice of VP, and select Hillary?

Is that what lunch with Bill is about? Change?

Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Undecided…all are welcome: Discuss. Pick any (or all) question(s) you’d like.

What do you think? 

On the show last Saturday, Ed and I got a phone call from “Doug”, a volunteer driver who ended up spending most of the convention shuttling MSNBC people around the Cities.

And yow – what a phone call.  Ed has the audio from the phone call – it’s about six minutes.  Give it a listen.

Ed summarizes:

• According to Doug, MS-NBC apparently took no chances on questions from the crowd.  Rather than get caught with a question that might make Republicans look good, their producer pre-screened questioners, and Chris Matthews pretended it was random.
• Republicans were good tippers.  MS-NBC stiffed the drivers.
• Media people talked in the cars about how effective the Republican convention turned out to be, while publicly saying something else entirely.

Now, reading this bit here – which criticizes Ed’s piece (and, by extension I suppose, mine) on the subject – there are a few legitimate questions about this segment:

…much as I realize that MSNBC is now a left leaning network, mostly at night, this sort of “bottom of the barrel” type of scraping to find dirt on networks that don’t agree with your political ideologies is, quite frankly, childish and immature.

There was no “scraping”; Doug called us, unsolicited.  And

You think Fox News doesn’t pre-screen people on their network? Please. Don’t make me laugh.

I won’t make you laugh, but I might make you learn something, with any luck.

Of course Fox (and everyone else) screens people.  The objection is to screening to find people that precisely fit the narrative that’s already been written.
And finally:

Okay, first of all, were any precautions taken to ensure that this guy was not some sort of crank caller? I highly doubt this.

We – our producer Matt, in this case – did the usual phone screen.  It’s not impossible to think there was a crank.

So we’ll do what bloggers do; cast the question open to the legions of experts out there.

Were you a volunteer at the convention?  Were you in the audience on MSNBC?  What did you see?

My gut says the guy was on the level.  But what the heck; let’s shoot for confirmation.

Palin is more popular than Mac or Barry O, says the latest Rasmussen poll:

A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 37% hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom.

The figures include 40% with a Very Favorable opinion of Palin and 18% with a Very Unfavorable view (full demographic crosstabs are available for Premium Members). Before her acceptance speech, Palin was viewed favorably by 52%. A week ago, 67% had never heard of her.

That’ll adjust over time, of course; they honeymoon is on, and rest assured the left and media (pardon the redundancy) will be in full slime mode for the next two months.

But if you’d told us two weeks ago we’d be at this intersection, how many people would have thought you were nuts?

I was sitting two booths down from Hugh Hewitt last night, on Radio Row. At one point, I was in a clutch of guys – Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Duane Patterson, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey – that’d challenge anyone’s intellectual adequacy (unless you, like I, ignore the concept).

And you could tell they were elated at the Palin speech. We interviewed Duane and Hugh after the event – that’s a matter of record (and should be going up on Townhall soon). Dennis Prager had another story he shared with me that I’ll hold off on until after his show (since I’m assuming he’ll use it; it is that good).

Hewitt writing on Townhall this morning:

Until yesterday the collective MSM sneer was that Palin was “Hello Kitty,” reeling backwards under the pressure. Now she’s Gorgo, smashing up the MSM’s cars. The dismayed punditry is pondering the “meanness” of her attacks and her lack of details on health care refom. A complete triumph over the Beltway-Manhatan media elites, but they will of course regather in Mordor and try again next week.

That, again, was Duane’s salient point; her address was straight out of the Reagan playbook. It bypassed the media and went to her real audience, the American people.

Of course, nothing cheeses off Big Media like being bypassed.

The Obamains decying “mean-spritiedness” are diminishing Obama the former giant slayer turned victim. They think Sarah Palin, Rudy, Mitt and Huck are tough? Remember Obama is scheduling meetings with Ahmadinejad, Kim, and Chavez for ’09. Disarray is far too complimentary a word to use for the Obama campaign.

So here’s hoping Mac scores the kill tonight.

Well, hey, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, AP, UPI, the NYTimes, WashPost, ChiTrib, LATimes, Denver Post, Bloomberg, BBC, NPR, NDW, AFP, Tass and the rest of the world’s media!  Welcome to Saint Paul, all you producers and reporters and anchors and you legions of APs and PAs . 

Welcome to Saint Paul.  This is my town.

Many of you will have come here from one of the news business’ bigger centers; New York, LA, Chicago, London, wherever.  You’ve been joking with your friends about the time you get to spend in “flyover land”. 

Here’s a couple of tips for you:

1. It’s Saint Paul.  Not Minneapolis.  While they share a border, the two downtowns are ten miles apart.
2. Get out of downtown once in a while.  Yeah, I know – that’s where the convention is, and I know your job is to cover it.  But the Twin Cities are a neat place, and Saint Paul – unbeknownst even to many who live in the area – is the best part of it all.  Mark Twain once said “Saint Paul is the last city of the East, and Minneapolis is the first city of the West”, and it’s still kinda true; parts of Saint Paul feel like Chicago or Boston or New York; Minneapolis feels more like Denver or Seattle or San Francisco.  It can be a fun place.
3. See those people out there holding “Support The Troops” signs?  Not everyone in this town has drunk the lefty koolaid.
4. Shaddap about Mondale and Humphrey and Orville Freeman already.  Yes, they were part of Minnesota’s political past, and a big past it was.  But in case you haven’t noticed, the people who are making a difference in Minnesota’s political present – Coleman, Pawlenty, David Strom, Marty Seifert – are all Republicans, and to one degree or another right of center (although that’s a discussion that’ll rage into the wee hours if you get some Minnesota conservatives talking this week). 
5. Please, dear lord, don’t interview Jesse Ventura.  Not once.  Ventura is to Minnesota politics what that drunk weekend back during your sophomore year in college was to you.  You don’t keep lording that miserable fiasco over us, we’ll make sure the photos are destroyed.  Deal?

Anyway – welcome to Saitn Paul, an I hope you enjoy it!

In a post last Friday about the “Fairness” Doctrine, a commenter quipped:

Imagine the outcry when the wacko Phelps family of Kansas gets to have anti-gay programs on all of the stations that have pro-gay rights material.

Heh. Funny – but as luck would have it, that’s not how the “Fairness” doctrine works.

Here’s how I remember it working in the first eight years of my radio “career”, from 1979 to 1987, when both the Doctrine and my job at KSTP were repealed.

The “Fairness” Doctrine didn’t assign ideological quotas to station’s programming; there was no bureaucrat in the Minneapolis office poring over stations’ schedules, coloring in liberal shows in crimson and conservative shows in blue, comparing swatches, and issuing orders to reprogram dayparts.

What the “Fairness” doctrine did was give the public – or parts of the public that were up in arms about a station’s presentation of one or several issues – legal and procedural grounds to challenge a station’s license renewal.

When stations renew their licenses (and I forget what the time period is for that; it happens every several years; I want to say “seven”, but don’t bet your mortgage on that), the FCC takes complaints from the public about the station’s “public service”. During the period of the “Fairness” Doctrine, that meant that people could write the FCC and complain that the station’s politics didn’t grant equal time to one view or another. Investigating these complaints and adjudicating them was part of the license renewal process was part of getting the license renewed; the FCC could assign corrective actions or (in theory; don’t know if it ever happend) deny renewal.

For most radio stations, the “programming” was mostly music – a matter of taste, certainly, but not a matter of public policy interest; writing to the FCC to demand a country station switch to alt-rock (record stores in Minnepolis in the mid ’80s frequently had “petitions” sitting around from groups that wanted the FCC to “serve the public” by forcing, say, K102 or KOOL108 or some other FM frequency to play alternative rock) would pretty much fall on deaf ears. But stations did (and to an extent, still do) have to show some effort to serve the public interest; these efforts had/have to be documented to the FCC at license renewal time. For a music station – like the first four I worked at – it was a matter of filing logs showing that the station had played

• public service announcements – non-paying commercial spots for non-profits and charities.
• “public affairs programs” – these still pop up; some stations will do a half-hour interview with some community figure or organization, and play it back on Sunday mornings when nobody’s listening and it won’t kill the ratings.
• news – back then, anyway. This hasn’t counted in over 20 years – which is why radio station news departments are scarcer than polka stations these days.

For talk stations, though, the potential was there to discuss controversial topics – news, current events, social issues and so on. These issues go way beyond having political overtones; most are inextricably political.

Under the “Fairness” Doctrine, the public could complain about the “balance” of the station’s presentation; at renewal time, if people complained the station was “too liberal”, the management had two options: have some sort of counterbalancing conservative on the air so they could tell the FCC they were taking measures to balance things out (which was how I got my first show, in 1986; KSTP had plenty of liberals on the air, and Scott Meier put me on weekend graveyards to cover the station’s butt for very, very cheap), or avoid controversy in the first place.

It all came down to showing to the FCC’s satisfaction that the broadcaster was adequately “serving the public interest”, so they’d renew the station’s license to use their frequency.

Since the license was mandatory for keeping the station on the air, most stations’ managers opted not to rock the boat – opted to play toward the middle and avoid complaints that could lead to costy, license-risking challenges.

So if the “Fairness” doctrine is reinstated, what’ll happen?

There won’t be any more time given to Fred Phelps; there won’t be a huge phalanx of complaints demanding equal time for his views. I have THAT much faith in my fellow citizens.

There also won’t be any equal time for conservatives on network newscasts, because it’s news and journalism, and everyone knows news and journalism are balanced and objective.  Also they subscribe to “journalistic codes of ethics”, and while you and I both know that a “journalistic code of ethics” is nothing but a framework to rationalize dodgy behavior on the part of journalists, to the FCC it’s a get-out-of-“fairness”-free card. It’s not bias – it’s journalism!

But talk radio? The leaders of the medium – Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Hewitt, the Northern Alliance – proudly identify themselves as conservatives. It’s part of their marketing; it’s how they reach their audience.

So when stations come up for renewal, their schedules will show a number of hours of talk that, for marketing purposes, labelse itself “conservative” talk. And in a world where Atrios and Kos draw half a million visits a day, the left powers that be COULD, in a “Fairness Doctrine” run broadcast world, send hordes of droogs after that station up for renewal, demanding more liberal programming “in the public interest”; an Obama-appointed FCC would likely give the complaints plenty of credence.  In order to retain their license, the station would have to add some liberal programming, like the Stephanie Miller or Ed Schultz – if they’re lucky (they’re the two liberals who show any life in the ratings at all) – or some stiff like “Lionel” or Michael Jackson (who do not).  While there is nearly no audience for this programming, the FCC will be acting on the complaints, not ad receipts or ratings.  The station would do as well to leave the transmitter off.

Of course, conservatives could in theory challenge the licenses of the few liberal talk stations – Minneapolis’ KTNF, the local FrankenNet “Air America” affiliate is a good example – but that’d really be a side issue and a diversion. The entire liberal commercial talk radio audience could fit into Rush Limbaugh’s garage with room enough left over for his cars. Limbaugh, Hannity, Bennett, Ingraham, Boortz, Miller, North, Liddy, Medved, Prager, Hewitt and even Jason Lewis are an army of 900 pound gorillas driving armored bulldozers, in ratings and financial terms. Comparing the ratings firepower of conservative and liberal talk radio is like scrimmage between the US Seventh Fleet and the Saint Paul Sailing Club.

So given the pain that the Doctrine will cause stations that run conservative talk, saying “conservatives can get equal time on liberal stations” would be like getting stripped of a Super Bowl ring, but knowing someone else gets a free toaster as a consolation prize, On a station running five 900 pound gorillas in armored bulldozers, it’d be like being forced to trade three of them for schnauzers on trikes.

It’s a win-win for liberals – – they get to water down the conservative movement’s best vehicle for free speech –  and a lose-lose for conservatives.  And anyone who tries to convince you there’s any other rationale to it is either uninformed, disinformed, or trying to make you one or the other.

According to Rasmussen…:

Nearly half of Americans (47%) believe the government should require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary, but they draw the line at imposing that same requirement on the Internet. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say leave radio and TV alone, too.

I have to wonder what kind of rock those alleged 47% live under, to either think…:

• that there isn’t an over-ample amount of both liberal and conservative opinion out there
• that the “Fairness Doctrine” will “balance” anything.

I also wonder something that wasn’t in the Rasmussen breakdown: were part of that 47% conservatives who believed that the “Fairness” doctrine would actually bring conservative points of view to network, non-Fox cable and the major-market print media?

It’d be interesting to see the way the questions were put to the audience. Stating the issue as “should television and radio be balanced by federal decree”, for example, might make respondents think the question was about the general question of “balance”, rather than the left’s attempt to silence talk radio and the conservative internet.

At the same time, 71% say it is already possible for just about any political view to be heard in today’s media, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twenty percent (20%) do not agree.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) say the government should not require websites and blog sites that offer political commentary to present opposing viewpoints. But 31% believe the Internet sites should be forced to balance their commentary (full demographic crosstabs available for Premium Members.)

Again, I’d love to know the actual questions.

Is it worth being a “premium member”? Probably not.

People sometimes ask me “Mitch, how does the “Fairness Doctrine” work?”

And I respond “Very badly, if real-life experience counts for anything”.

While the notional idea behind the doctrine is to force “balance” in programming, it really works one of two ways:

• As it did with about 90% of talk stations before 1987 – by eschewing political or remotely controversial talk, or…
• …as in the example linked above, mixing conservative and liberal programming. Which fails because the liberal programming (as well as some of the conservative shows in the example above) is pretty dreadful, unmarketable stuff.

And that’s not even the worst news: the doctrine will likely put a damper on all alternative media, including this blog.

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.
The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told the Business & Media Institute the Fairness Doctrine could be intertwined with the net neutrality battle. The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.

They’re going to have to smart up mighty fast.

“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”

“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

On the one hand, it sounds stretchy. On the other hand, liberals have been unable to make the faintest dent in talk radio, and their strength on blogs is largely on hive sites heavily supported by the likes of George Soros and his various sockpuppet non-profits; surely they would like to save a buck or two and have government, especially an Obama government heavily in their debt, to “level the playing field” for them.

“The Fairness Doctrine has not been raised at the FCC, but the importance of this election is in part – has something to do with that,” McDowell said. “So you know, this election, if it goes one way, we could see a re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine. There is a discussion of it in Congress. I think it won’t be called the Fairness Doctrine by folks who are promoting it. I think it will be called something else and I think it’ll be intertwined into the net neutrality debate.”

The other “rationales” for the “Fairness” Doctrine – scarcity of media (in a world where it takes two minutes to start a blog, and digital radio is about to explode the number of frequencies available), corporate censorship of liberal views (which explains why a black maria came for Keith Olberman and why Bill Maher is breaking rocks on a chain gang in Mississippi) and public interest (in a world where media of all types are orders of magnitude more ubiquitous than they were 21 years ago) – don’t stand up to even silly scrutiny.

So I guess the order of business is to figure out which leftybloggers I have to add to the staff to balance out Roosh and I.

Given the quality of leftyblog writing in this town, I’ll probably have to make it like five or six of ’em.

When I cast my first-ever conservative vote – for Ronald Reagan, in 1984 – I didn’t tell anyone. Part of it was that the whole conversion from mushy-left to right was so very recent. Part of it was that I was still feeling my way around an unfamiliar place.

And a big part was that I really just didn’t want to be associated with “those” conservatives.

In the media of the day, “out” conservatives were pretty much portrayed as smug fundamentalist televangelists, warmongering caricatures or malthusian skinflints. I edited a college newspaper at the time, and our syndication service – the “Campus News Service” – fed us a constant stream of anti-conservative, anti-Republican propaganda in written and cartoon form, all of it based on the three stereotypes above and the notion, constantly hammered in story after story, cartoon after cartoon, that President Reagan was

a) a doddering buffoon
b) a warmongering psychopath
c) both.

I got over it.

I graduated, moved to the Twin Cities – and it got worse. The media of the day ranged from left-leaning (it was the golden age of Jim Klobuchar; Nick Coleman was just getting started as a columnist) to falling-over left. Just before I started my old KSTP talk show, I remember reading a piece in the City Pages about some counselor/”artist” type in some political action group saying – unchallenged – “liberalism is the only intellectually acceptable philosophy”.

The attitude one perceived could have fairly been called “contemptuous” against conservative people and ideas.

And on the issues? Well, it was at KSTP in 1987, in a discussion on handgun control, where I first heard the old chestnut “I think people who think they need guns are…[brief pause as a verbal wink and nudge] compensating for something…”. It is, of course, the standard line for anti-gunners who want to believe they’re bringing the forces of soft science to bear against their opponents without actually understanding any. And it is nothing if not contemptuous. And it’s not the only issue where conservative substance has been met for decades with ignorant contempt.

To sum up: Twenty years ago, the contempt for conservatives was everywhere.

One thing that was not everywhere was avenues for response. This was before the market drove talk radio to the right. This was before conservatives had any written outlet, short of the National Review and the odd token George Will or Cal Thomas column set into the OpEd page like an exhibit at a zoo. The Strib’s letters to the editor, then as now, published only the most carefully-bowdlerized selection of conservative opinion (seemingly selected for sounding the least coherent, at times)

Today, of course, it’s a different story. Conservatives have voices – and those voices pretty well crush the opposition (which is why the Democrats are talking about bringing back the “Fairness” doctrine). Conservatives have outlets, and they’ve become influential out of all proportion to their size, which is why George Soros and his deep-pocketed friends are trying to buy a share of the blogosphere; it’s not really working (which is why the left has already tried to regulate blog content).

At any rate, in the last twenty years – and especially the past five years or so – people on the left, especially people who remember what life was like back when the conservative in the street only got to speak at the bar and around the table and every couple of years at the polls have had to learn that there really are more than one side to an argument.

The masthead of Charlie Quimby’s blog reads “How Can People Disagree And Still Build a Decent World?”; it’s a good question, one that I ask a lot in this blog and – rather more often – in personal conversation. It is important, and not merely because I’m a conservative with a mother who thinks Jane Fonda is a reactionary.

Charlie poked a little fun last week at the selection of Republicans getting credentials at the Convention next month. The common thread he found: “From Ladies Logic to Grizzly Groundswell to Pair O’Dice you’ll find at least one thing in common: a fairly strong contempt for liberals.”
Over the weekend and still on the subject (having gotten some pushback from a couple of the bloggers he’d names), he asked:

It is possible to separate personal relationships and politics. The success of any free political system depends on it. But over the past 20 years or so, it seems to be happening less and less. Contempt — not just philosophical disagreement — has been ratcheted up and real tolerance for human differences over policies is given the sort of smirking pro forma observance we see between Hannity and Colmes…

The difference, I suggest, is that over the past twenty years contempt and ridicule (and the guys behind their respective curtains, ignorance and fear) have become two-way streets. There’s not more contempt and ridicule; you can just see it. And if you’re a Twin Cities’ liberal, you can see it aimed at you for the first time.
You don’t have to read Nick Coleman or Lori Sturdevant or Brian Lambert all that terribly long to realize that Minnesota liberals of a certain age just aren’t used to being questioned, much less criticized, to say nothing of being the objects of contempt. I’m going to venture that not one of them, growing up in acceptably-lefty households, coming up through a left-leaning academic establishment, and working a career in left-leaning newsrooms, has ever heard someone say “I don’t know why people need pay-equity laws, unless they’re compensating for something, nyuk nyuk”.

Or bloggers and their invisible moonbat/wingnut friends. Which is why here I try to make those exchanges real and open, aimed at understanding rather than refuting the other.

Contempt is the tip on the iceberg of ignorance and – toward the bottom – hatred. I try to avoid it, and seek out conversation with the rare liberal blogger who’s not too stupid and sodden with fake intellectual entitlement…

…oh, crap. Let me start over.

Contempt is the junk food of rhetoric; it’s cheap, easy, and sometimes all you have in the cupboard. It’s easy to say “I don’t use it”; everyone knows better. There are times when it’s the easiest way to respond to the gaffes and slights and sins of the “other” side. It was the same thing twenty years ago; if Hubert Humphrey and Ronald Reagan are the respective egos of the left and right, “guns are compensating for something” and “liberalism is a mental disorder” are the respective ids. And we all balance these in different ways.

At some point, contempt for ideas and values becomes contempt for a group becomes contempt for a person, as the bones in mass graves the world over attest.

True.

But a lot of things have changed in the last decade or two. Liberals in the Twin Cities are having some inevitable growing pains realizing that there is more than one point of view in this world (just like conservatives in Austin Texas and Chapel Hill North Carolina have been having to do).
It’s just all out in the open now.

The only real question now is how people deal with it – a question people have to answer whenever there is more than one side to a debate.

Which is why it’s such a new thing in the Twin Cities.

…that Rush Limbaugh’s nationally-syndicated radio program debuted.

To me, in 1988, it wasn’t a good thing; Limbaugh (and the contemporaneous euthanasia of the “Fairness” Doctrine) not only changed the content and tenor of talk radio (and saved the AM band in the process) but changed the business model as well. Up until 1988, talk radio was an expensive format; instead of hiring a couple of disc jockeys and sitting them down with a stack of records (on tape cartridge, in those days), you had to hire people who could talk about whatever the subject was, and put ’em in a studio; the audience before Limbaugh, lulled by the enforced mediocrity of “Fairness”-doctrine-era radio, was either smallish or, in the case of middle-of-the-road talk giants like WCCO, interested mainly in farm markets, temperatures and scores. And to staff those shows, smaller talk stations had to hire someone; sometimes, it was a 25 year old kid who’d had a graveyard shift show in Saint Paul who’d come to Santa Rosa or Columbus or New Bedford and work mid-days or evenings for $20,000 a year.

But Limbaugh changed that. His program was free; it cost the stations nothing. Limbaugh paid his salary, his tiny staff, the uplink fees, and covered it with advertising. Suddenly, stations had access to a big-budget, major-market air talent, and he was not only free, but his controversial, entertaining, funny program brought in gargantuan ratings. Which, for a smaller station, literally meant money for nothing.

Which didn’t do a lot of good for the career prospects of that 25 year old kid from Saint Paul. But it did turn talk radio into something nobody had dreamed about before then.

Any station could now be a talk station – which, for AM stations, was the life ring they n eeded. When I worked in radio in the eighties, there was serious talk about decommissioning the entire AM band; when I worked at KSTP-AM, it was the poor cousin of the Hubbard Broadcasting machine (including Channel 5 and KS95). The station was on the block, for a ludicrous price, and couldn’t get a taker.

Suddenly, Limbaugh made these underpowered, undervalued stations into money machines; hundreds of AM stations that had been ekeing out a terrible income playing country or oldies or polkas started carrying Limbaugh, sometimes several times a day via tape delay. And the money poured in – to the stations and to Limbaugh. When I went back to KSTP for my one-night fill-in gig for Bob Davis, I talked with my old friend, the late Joe Hansen, who was producing Jason Lewis at the time. The station, the former poor cousin, was “carrying the rest of Hubbard”, said Hansen.

A month or so ago, Zev Chafets did perhaps the essential profile on Limbaugh, in the NYTimes Magazine.

At 57, he is an American icon, although his fans and critics don’t agree on precisely what he is iconic for. I’ve heard him compared to Mark Twain and Jackie Gleason, the Founding Fathers and Father Coughlin. Serious people have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a public intellectual, nothing more than a radio windbag and nothing less than the heart of the Republican Party.

One thing is certain: Limbaugh has been a partisan force for two decades. In 1994, he was so influential in the Republican Congressional landslide that the grateful winners made him an honorary member of the G.O.P. freshman class. He moved not only voters, but the party itself. “Rush talked about the ‘Contract With America’ before there was a ‘Contract With America,’ ” Karl Rove told me. “He helped set the agenda.”

What Rush was was a voice to people who’d not had one; the masses of Middle Americans who consumed American media culture, but really weren’t part of it. TV, newspapers, NPR and traditional talk radio, all of them based on the coast, driven by the dominant, Northeastern culture, had very little to do with the lives of most of Middle America, and cared even less.

And then, along came Limbaugh. He gave that huge mass of people something that resonated.

“Yeah”, say the detractors, “racist sexist lies!”

Well, no. He gave them a voice in New York, who didn’t so much shout back at the lumpen masses of the media establishment, but cut their knees out from under them with humor, biting satire, and something that they just weren’t used to; articulate opposition.

His success has vexed his detractors for a solid generation, now; they’ve tried many times to meet and beat him in the free market, with Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower and Air America and Nova M. And all failed, to the point where the American left is next going to try to resort to government bullying to shut up conservative talk radio.

They missed the point, of course:

When we met he was on the verge of signing a new eight-year contract with his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks. He estimated that it would bring in about $38 million a year. To sweeten the deal, he said he was also getting a nine-figure signing bonus. (A representative from Premiere would not confirm the deal.) “Do you know what bought me all this?” he asked, waving his hand in the general direction of his prosperity. “Not my political ideas. Conservatism didn’t buy this house. First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”

And for all that, the part that most inspires me is this:

Limbaugh was a failure almost as long as he has been a success. And although he is now an apostle of sunshine (“having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” he crows on his show), he spent many years trying to convince his family — and himself — that he wasn’t wasting his life…Limbaugh drifted from job to job…In the mid-’80s he took a job in the front office of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. He was making $12,000 a year, and he almost quit to take a more lucrative job as a potato-chip distributor. “They were offering $35,000,” he told me. “That sounded like a lot of money.”

“But what”, ask his detractors, “does this say about our society? That all the dumb people are listening to Limbaugh?”

Well, the simple answer is, they’re not. As most multi-issue movement conservatives can tell you, conservatism takes more thought than liberalism. And Limbaugh’s audience bears this out (emphasis added):

Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners. The study found that “readers of newsmagazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR and viewers of the Daily Show and C-SPAN are also much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.”

Read the whole (nine-online-page!) article, perhaps the best thing I’ve ever seen in writing about Rush.

And happy anniversary, Rush! Your new contract means the NARN has eight years to get its act really humming!

(Brad Carlson also writes on the anniversary, and Jen O’Hara not only gathers scads of great tributes from others, but writes a wonderful one of her own).

I – and quite a few other regional conservative bloggers – got an email from an MPR producer the other day:

MPR News asks: What course would you set for the GOP?

The Republican Party is at a crossroads. An unpopular president is on the way out, and the party’s election-year hopes are pinned to a candidate who sometimes strays from the party line. With the convention coming up and the GOP seeking the public input on their platform outline, we want to know: Where would you steer the party? And how was your Republican identity shaped?

To share your thoughts and your story, please visit: www.mpr.org/gop

Please contact Molly Bloom at mbloom [at] mpr [dot] org with any questions, thoughts or concerns.

Do go out and respond (presuming you’re a Republican, natch.  Not such a big deal if you’re a DFLer, since, doy, the programming is mostly about you anyway.

Scott Johnson, who also posted the email, notes in response:

President Bush is still relatively popular among Republicans from whom MPR hopes to hear, but the reference to his unpopularity by Ms. Weggel is not unfair. President Bush’s unpopularity contributes to the enormous electoral challenge facing Republicans in the fall and to the interest of a project such as MPR’s.

All very true. 

I can think of a few responses, and I suspect so can you.

Your mission is clear.

I’ve avoided the suppurating mass of leftybloggers and commentators that have reacted disgracefully to the death of Tony Snow.  I haven’t commented on this blog because my only reaction to such moral retardation – depressed disgust – doesn’t translate to print well.

Patterico notes that there is one guy who does this sort of thing very well:

I stopped watching Bill O’Reilly a long time ago, but he’s good for one thing: righteously laying into someone with passion and anger. When there are goons who laugh about people’s deaths — whether they are Ted Rall, or commenters at the L.A. Times web site (posting with the permission of comment moderators) — you need someone with O’Reilly’s attitude to take them to task.

Well done.

I’ve only seen O’Reilly’s show maybe three times (barring the odd clip that pops up here and there).  Don’t care much for him, most of the time.

But…well, just watch:

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, Zev Chafets has a fascinating profile coming out on the man in tomorrow’s New York Times magazine.

It’s about 8,000 words, and very worth a read. I’ll have some comments next week.

UPDATE: The leftysphere reacts with the sort of class we’d expect.

I’m a conservative. No surprise there.

But when it comes to a couple of things, I pretty much suspend politics. My day job would be one example; good interaction design isn’t political.

The other is the business and tactics of radio; while my political sympathies are obvious, when it comes to the business and the craft itself, I’m supremely clinical. I’ve said in the past that Janet Robert (GM at the local Air America affiliate) could hire me has her Program Director and I’d do a better job that whomever she’s got doing it now (not that she could afford me), without even impinging on notions of my own political orientation.

Good business is politically agnostic.

That’s just the setup to the real piece here: the pack on the left is getting a chuckle over Rush Limbaugh’s eight year deal with Clear Channel:

“I think it’s a monster error,” [CNBC contributor and Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael] Wolff said. “I know – I’m sitting here saying, ‘What are these people smoking?’ You know, the truth is that Rush Limbaugh has been – he’s ridden the rise of conservatism for 25 years and I don’t, maybe nobody quite, quite has been following the news, but that’s coming to an end.”…”According to a link posted on the Drudge Report on July 2, a New York Times Magazine story will reveal on July 6 that the long-time conservative talk show host has secured a 9-figure signing bonus. The report says the total package is valued north of $400 million.

Now, the irony here is that Michael Wolff is, more or less, the equivalent of a talkradio personality, only in print – and as such, he should (and, I suspect in the pit of my gut, does) know better.

Again, we’ll come back to that.

Wolff based his assessment on the assumption Americans are shifting to the left politically, based on the success of presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois. Wolff’s comments repeated Obama’s theme word “change” at least six times.

“It’s going to be over and Rush Limbaugh in a relatively short period of time is going to look like a really kind of out-of-it kind of oddity,” Wolff said. “And I can not for the life of me imagine how someone could have made this deal.”

Again, we’ll come back to that.

Wolff, y’see, isn’t the only one coming up a buck short in the perspective department:

Brian Stetler, a media report for The New York Times, appeared with Wolff and maintained Limbaugh was worth the deal. However, he suggested Limbaugh may have to “be a little less conservative.”

“[I] don’t think it’s a good sign though for the ad market,” Stelter said. “I talked to Clear Channel and Premiere Radio today and they said it’s pretty much a flat-to-declining market. That said though, Rush is looking at the long-term and if he has to reinvent himself, if he has to be a little less conservative – I think he will, as long as he can retain that audience.”

Let’s take a whack at this.

Does anyone remember when Limbaugh got started? It was 1988. Tne end of the Reagan Administration. For all of Reagan’s accomplishments, there’s no way around the fact that outside of foreign policy, the last two years of the Gipper’s administration were not the ones that’d go on his resume. Petty scandals, media riposte over Iran/Contra and our involvements in Central America, and some legislative setbacks had some of the punditry – including George Will, if memory serves – declaring that conservatism as Reagan had practiced it was dead. George HW Bush was talking “compassionate conservatism; pundits said America was wearying of the right.

This was the market into which Limbaugh launched, twenty years ago this summer.

And yet while there’s no way you can say America has had as conservative a president as Reagan in the past twenty years, times have been – to say the least – good for Rush Limbaugh and the industry he led to prominence, pariah-dom and immense profits over the past twenty years.

However, Wolff wasn’t convinced there would be a demand for conservative talk radio – including talk radio host and Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” co-host Sean Hannity. Even though eight of the top 10 talk show hosts on Talker’s magazine “2008 Heavy Hundred” list are conservative hosts, Wolff asserted the era of conservative talk radio is drawing to an end.

“I mean, I think that there’s another underlying thing here and this is talk radio has been the province of conservatives, if that’s going away – then there’s going to be a big problem – not just for Rush, but obviously for Sean Hannity, too,” Wolff said. “And I do not think in a major way that it’s a question of them becoming less conservative to follow a less conservative audience. They are conservative – that’s what they do. If they can’t do that anymore, they are worth much less than they are being paid.”

Well, there’s a huge “if” in there. There’s no rational sign that the demand for conservative talk has changed.

Still, Limbaugh has demonstrated his ability to maintain high ratings no matter who is in power. He enjoyed much of his success during the eight years of the Bill Clinton administration – a Democratic presidency, as CNBC’s Julia Boorstin pointed out.

“I think the theory here is that Rush Limbaugh has held up despite who’s been in office and he has a loyal listener base,” Boorstin explained. “These are people who tune in every single day, in the same way that people want to tune into Howard Stern. Limbaugh has his audience and they’re going to be tuning in no matter who’s president – whether it’s a conservative administration or a liberal one.”

Let’s get one point firmly established, here; Limbaugh, and all of conservative talk radio, is at its best when it’s swimming against the current in Washington (and, for that matter, Saint Paul). There is, indeed, an argument (a badly flawed one, at that) that conservatism is at its best when its on the outside, firing in; with Limbaugh and conservative talk in general, that’s certainly true.

An Obama presidency would usher in a second Golden Age for Limbaugh, and conservative talk in general.

Conservative talk has never been about being on top of the trends (assuming Obama’s “audacious change” is a broad social trend at all); indeed, even when conservatism was at its peaks in the past twenty years, conservative talk radio nagged and hectored conservatives to stay true to the beliefs that got them there; it’s to the GOP’s chagrin in 1996, 2006 and, likely, this fall that they didn’t listen.

Not so, says Wolff (emphasis added):

“You know, I just think that that’s myopic,” Wolff said. “Things change and when they change, they change in a big way. And we are now looking at that kind of change. It’s the kind of change, which if you run a large public corporation, you’re supposed to look at and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. There is something here and this is something that we have to take into consideration.’ When change comes, it is going to be devastating and absolute.”

The only “change” involved in this campaign (I’m stepping out of clinical mode here) is that a Chicago ward heeler has managed to armor himself with a perfectly vacuous set of slogans.

So forget Michael Wolff’s advice; go long – if not on Clear Channel, then at lest on conservative talk in general (barring, of course, federal action to censor it via the “Fairness” Doctrine.  Government intervention inevitably skews markets, pretty much always to everyone’s detriment).

Here’s the funny part:

Wolff isn’t exactly batting 1.000 when comes to this sort of analysis. Jack Shafer, a media critic for Slate.com called Wolff a “sloppy, lazy media columnist” in a May 5, 2005 column.

“Gifted with a hyperactive and malicious mind, Wolff’s forte is not reporting and analysis. It’s the oh-aren’t-I-naughty clever slur, a talent worth admiring if not applauding, especially when you’re the target. Which I, and the Web site I call home, am,” Shafer wrote.

He’s a pundit who looks for an emotional hook to his statements – something to keep people tuning in to see what he’s going to say next.

Just (stepping back into clinical mode) like a talk show host.

(Via Gary at LFR)

Can’t shut ’em up with reason, or in the marketplace?

Sic the government on ’em!

The speaker of the House made it clear to me and more than forty of my colleagues yesterday that a bill by Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) to outlaw the “Fairness Doctrine” (which a liberal administration could use to silence Rush Limbaugh, other radio talk show hosts and much of the new alternative media) would not see the light of day in Congress during ’08. In ruling out a vote on Pence’s proposed Broadcaster’s Freedom Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-CA.) also signaled her strong support for revival of the “Fairness Doctrine” — which would require radio station owners to provide equal time to radio commentary when it is requested.

And that?  That was the good news!

“Do you personally support revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine?’” I asked.

“Yes,” the speaker replied, without hesitation

Let’s dispense with a myth here:  “The Fairness Doctrine” is about making the public airwaves public again”: Oh, goody.  Then we’ll also bring federal sanctions against the imbalances in the print media?  Academia (especially public academia)?

It’s a simple lie:

Experts say that the “Fairness Doctrine,” which was ended under the Reagan Administration, would put a major burden on small radio stations in providing equal time to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters, who are a potent political force. Rather than engage in the costly practice of providing that time, the experts conclude, many stations would simply not carry Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other talk show hosts who are likely to generate demands for equal time.

Let’s remember a couple of things:

1. Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Ingraham, Medved, Bennett and Savage are free to radio stations.  No radio station pays a nickel to carry their programs.
2. If  they are forced  by law to “balance”  the likes of Limbaugh and company, most stations will do what they did before 1987:  punt.  They’ll avoid politics altogether; they’ll broadcast the bland teleshrink or blander, crypto-liberal MPR-Lite pap like Owen Span and Larry King.  Or they’ll pick up on the biggest trend in talk radio in 1985-86 – “Brokered Talk”, selling airtime to real estate agents and investment advisors and nutrition supplement dealers.  That’s the way talk was headed up until the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.
3. Or they can look for successful free “liberal” talk to fill out their requirements under the Fairness Doctrine.Um, yeah.  Good luck with that.

This is a coup against the First Amendment.  There is no other explanation.

(Which isn’t to say that I don’t want my left-of-center readers to try to provide one.  Expect a spirited response).

Bob Collins at NewsCut commented on a letter to the editor in the Strib that aroused his ire. Collins’ comments – or, should I say, his sources – are a bit troubling as well.

Collins:

Are Midwesterners simply better than people in other parts of the country? Do we work harder? Are we less reliant on others for help when we need it? Are our values more aligned with the American ethic?

Being a good conservative, I tend to think more in terms of individuals than of groups, classes or communities. And while like a lot of Midwesterners I have had in my life a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the nation’s media’s big-city-centeredness, I have stopped believing that nobility and ignobility are regional, class or community virtues. New Yorkers on 9/11, for example, behaved like…well, humans.

And Midwesterners are perfectly capable of ignoble behavior under stress.

But we’ll come back to that.

Today’s Star Tribune “letter of the day” seems to think so. Writer Jeffrey Seyfert of Farmington compares Hurricane Katrina in 2004 with the flooding in Iowa and sections of Minnesota last week.

There is historic flooding involving five Midwestern states; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Where are the news anchors reporting from the bridges asking where is the federal government and when are they coming to the rescue, as they did back during Hurricane Katrina?

The reason you don’t see them is it doesn’t fit the template. It doesn’t fit the template that the federal government is supposed to be omnipresent in our lives and that self-reliance and self-responsibility are mere clichés of days long ago.

The difference is our fellow Midwesterners are picking themselves off the ground, brushing themselves off, and getting to work. Their first instinct is not to blame government; their first instinct is to help each other out and try to put their lives back together.

The letter ignores that, naturally, there’ll be plenty of federal help in the recovery (and I don’t doubt for a minute that the Strib letters editor knew that when they picked the letter over many no-doubt more reasonable-sounding ones for publication).

But there is a communitarian streak in small-town America; borne from isolation and impoverished German and Scandinavian ancestry, on the good side it does mean that these small, integral communities, mostly with roots going back generations, are able to pull together in a crisis pretty seamlessly. (On the flip side, it means they’re pretty suffocating, hidebound places to live, which is why a lot of people – like me – leave ’em).

Just as there is a communitarian streak in small towns in the deep south, whatever their ethnicity. Traditions of community and family bring people together when there’s a problem.

And what does more than anything else in this country to destroy family and disrupt community?

We’ll come back to that.

Syefert’s letter could be dismissed if it weren’t for the fact it’s part of a growing chorus in the Midwest: black people got help in 2004, and the mostly white Midwesterns can’t catch a break.

I will speak at the risk of being accused of projecting my beliefs into a letter written by someone I don’t know (and as we’ll see shortly, I’m not the only one projecting, here); I think it’s fair to say that Midwesterners aren’t saying “black people got help” so much as “the media and punditry racialized New Orleans to create national hysteria over the disaster, turning it into a fundamentally racial issue, partly for political gain, partly to shame the nation into paying to rebuild the place. On the other hand, the coverage of the floods in the Midwest is, well, just another day’s news”.

Let’s not forget that Katrina was racialized by Al Sharpton, by Kanye West, by Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin. The media took up the story to use as a cudgel against the Administration (after carefully scrubbing out Nagin and Kathleen Blanco’s incompetence, and the fact that FEMA has been a disaster waiting to happen since the seventies).

I think there’s a certain amount of wishing, on the part of people who haven’t had their hip waders off in a week and are sore from sandbagging, for just a little hysteria sending goodwill their way.

Speaking of projection, Collins cites a ChiTrib article. I’m going to emphasize one passage for us to come back to later:

Today, the Chicago Tribune profiled the growing sentiment in the Heartland:

“Where is all the fundraising that Katrina victims had?” Ben Creelman asked, a disgusted tone seeping into his voice. “Is it because we’re not from the Deep South? Is it because we’re from the Midwest?”

Creelman didn’t put it in so many words, but his message was clear. The poor, mostly African American residents of New Orleans’ 9th Ward inspired a charitable outpouring not seen since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The flooded farms of the central Midwest, meanwhile, just can’t catch a break.

It gets worse. One man, sandbagging in Columbus Junction, Iowa said “even the Hispanics” were sandbagging, while pointing out that African Americans weren’t.

So – based on statements by two people in a Midwestern disaster area, the writer detects a “growing trend?”

I’ll allow that this might be writer David Greising’s first trip outside Chicago, but I’ve got two bits of news for him:

1. Redneck insularity exists
2. It – and its analogues – exist everywhere. Some call it racism; I call it “we-ism“.

I suggest – strongly – that it’s no more a “Growing Trend” than tribalism and ethnic insularity, both of which trace back to times when humans travelled in packs of hunter-gatherers and fought other packs for prime berry patches.

I might also suggest that, as Katrina was an excuse to find racism inherent at all levels of the system, that David Greising is looking for that seemy, David-Lynch-y underbelly to the Midwest that just about everyone in the media seems to think is lying in wait out there.

As for the government’s response, one difference in the Midwest is that there was one. At least $2 billion in federal aid is expected in the flooded area. Gov. Pawlenty toured Mower, Houston and Freeborn counties last week, declared it a disaster area, and triggered a review for FEMA help.
President Bush toured the area last week and promised plenty of federal help.

True enough.

But let’s get back to the notion of communitarianism, of multigenerational communities (rural, urban, or suburban for that matter) that just get up and do things when they need to be done. While the govenrment is going to help the farmers in the Midwest just as (Greising’s claims notwithstanding) they did in New Orleans, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into the role of generations of government programs breaking down those very traits.

Thousands of acres of farmland has been lost to crops this year, and disaster payments to farmers will help cushion some of the blow.

Of course, the people of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois showed a resiliency in their crisis. Their recovery, however, was a team effort.

As most things are.

But to take the word of two tired, angry sandbaggers and a letter writer in the Strib as signs of a trend is…

…well, one of those parlor games journalists at all levels play.

I merely suggest there’s a lot less there than meets Bob Collins’ and David Greising’s eyes.

Last night after work, I went to the “No Primate Pets” rally at the XCel Energy Center. Of course, the X only holds around 20,000 people with the floors entirely opened to an SRO crowd; as I walked up to the press box, I saw crowds standing eight abreast all the way up Fifth Street, circling around the Travellers building, and over to the Saint Hotel, waiting patiently as the doors closed on a full house. Some waved signs – “Keep oar Monkeez in the White Haus”, “Primates Make Bad Mates” and so on – as they trudged over to Kellogg Boulevard to watch the proceedings on the Jumbotron.

Inside, a tripartisan coalition of Ellen Anderson, Brian Sullivan and Dean Barkley (wearing a “Will Advise Your Administration For Food” T-shirt) led the crowd in a mass “chant-in” on behalf of apes around the world; former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel provided interstitial music, keynoting his set with a newly-rewritten “Don’t Shock The Monkey”.

And when former Governor Jesse Ventura – perhaps the most respected man in Minnestoa politics today – took the stand and bellowed “No primates for…um…pets”, the building shook, as the 20,000 voices inside, and at least as many outside, joined their voices as one to demand that Congress ban monkeys as pets.

No, really! Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros Monitor Independent says that Minnesotans are really, really fired up about this issue!

“Michele Bachmann is out of step with Minnesota citizens who want common-sense animal welfare policies and want their communities protected from dangerous attacks and diseases,” Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund said in a press release Thursday.

Ah. Well, if the Humane Society – AKA “the voice of Minnesota” – says it’s so…

Bachmann – Minnesota’s Sixth District congresswoman, who excites more unthinking hysteria than any other politician in Minnesota (indeed, some have called her “The Katherine Kersten of Politics”) voted against the bill, doncha see. And if Rep. Bachmann – who won her office in 2006, a famously bad year for Republicans, by the biggest margin of victory in any seriously-contested race with her rigorously conservative message – votes against something, well, most Minnesotans just have to be for it.

Right?

Of course, we don’t know why Bachmann voted against the bill – not from Birkey’s story, certainly.

Perhaps monkeys as pets are not rightfully a federal issue, and that Rep. Bachmann was correct in voting against it? Perhaps?

The Minnesoros Monitor Independent’s spiral into self-parody continues.

John Hinderaker at Powerline notes that even the NYTimes is noticing; mainstream media coverage of Iraq is in freefall.

John concludes:

The conclusion of the Times piece is revealing, too:

Journalists at all three American television networks with evening newscasts expressed worries that their news organizations would withdraw from the Iraqi capital after the November presidential election. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid offending their employers.

It’s interesting that the journalists themselves link their employers’ interest in Iraq to the election. I think it’s fair to say that the mainstream media’s interest in Iraq has always been driven largely by the opportunity to spin events there in a way that advances a political agenda. Remember al Qaqaa? That story dominated the news for a week before the 2004 Presidential election. It was a story of great importance, however, only as long as it could be used to help John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. Once the election was over, al Qaqaa was never heard of again. With hindsight, that episode might be taken as a paradigm of far too much of the mainstream media’s coverage of the war.

So the bad news is that the mainstream media is, for whatever reason (and I’m neither rushing nor shying away from ascribing cynical, political motives to this) is losing interest in covering Iraq.

The good news?  The mainstream media is losing interest in covering Iraq.  Since we can not trust the MSM to be evenhanded in its coverage, it’s just as well that our troops can do their jobs without a malignant buzzard on their backs.

Oh, of course it’d be good if the media did manage to get the good news out – but that’d only bolster the case of the “stay the course” candidate.

And we couldn’t have that.