Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Liberal cynicism about the power of conservative propaganda media

"At the heart of the problem is that when it came to what conservatives were willing to believe and act on, 2016 was simply an exaggerated version of what had come before."

Paul Waldman has that and other valuable observations in a nevertheless overly cynical column, Democrats' Unsolvable Media Problem The American Prospect 09/17/2017:

There's a doctrinal basis to conservative media that makes it fundamentally different from liberal media, that makes Rush Limbaugh most definitely not the mirror image of a liberal radio host and Sean Hannity not the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. It's not merely about the conservatives' and liberals' respective adherence to truth or penchant for ugly demonization of their opponents, though they differ in that too. It's that an argument about the larger media world is the foundation of conservative media. Conservative hosts and writers tell their audiences over and over again that nothing they read in the mainstream media can be accepted, that it's all twisted by a liberal agenda, and therefore they can only believe what conservatives tell them. It's the driving backbeat to every episode, every story, and every rant.

Liberals complain about media coverage of one story or another all the time. What they don't do is tell their audiences that any news source that is not explicitly and exclusively devoted to their ideological agenda cannot be trusted. But conservatives do.
Where I think Waldman goes wrong is that he effectively concludes that this gives conservatives a decisive advantage that liberals can never overcome.

And yet, somehow Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate dearly hated by the right, won a clear majority in the 2016 Presidential election.

I don't say that to minimize the magnitude of the Democratic political disaster in 2016. It was genuinely historic.

But it shouldn't be used to justify cynicism, no matter how sophisticated the packaging. Cynicism in politics for most people is virtually the same as conservatism.

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