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Oliver Willis
Like Kryptonite To Stupid
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Someone put this up on YTMND quick!
what’s there to say?
Actually enjoyed watching Fox tie itself in knots.
I’ll give Joe Scarborough a surprising nod for trying to be intelligent and suggesting Obama should ‘rule’ like Reagan: Don’t appologize, go for the aggressive stance and don’t quibble like Clinton did during Clinton did in his first year in office….
but add that listening to the Right isn’t all bad. Obama should play the bipartisan card and still rule from the Left!
Those pictures seem sized roughly to indicate their relative (supposed) influence.
Um, they didn’t fail, you know. They wanted to breed suspicion and hate of Obama and a host of other candidates. They succeeded. A large portion of the electoral voted for an ideologically bankrupt system. A small but significant bunch actually believe now that Obama is a radical-Socialist-Communist-anarchist-Jesus-hating-gay-loving-gun-loathing-non-citizen.
Laugh at them all you want; the only way to deal with the hate radio and Faux News people is to get rid of them, and as soon as possible. With the Fairness Doctrine’s return, and FCC rulings that force the end of media monopolies formed under Reagan’s “enlightened” premiership.
This is really something I think Obama has to address pretty quickly, in his new FCC. Because these folks, these jokers who cynically play off hate for popularity…? They’re going to get out the knifes, now. You ain’t seen nothin’, yet.
Please, give me a break. The goal of these people is to make themselves rich and elect Republicans. We can’t do anything about the former, but we have equaled them on the second. They will push back, and we will push back harder.
The culmination of their work was the re-election of George W. Bush.
We got President-Elect Obama.
We win.
“They will push back, and we will push harder”? Oliver, they got tens of millions of votes. We don’t just wait for them to attack, in order to push back. We’re not the X-Men, for crying out loud. We’ve got to axe them before they get going, using the law to bring honesty and openness back to the airwaves. It’s just my opinion, but they don’t need time to develop new campaigns and undermine the new administration.
Murdoch quasi-endorsed Obama before and after yesterday. Wonder what his game is…
Whose the guy top right and bottom right?
We’ve got to axe them before they get going
We did. We just won a crushing election.
Top right: Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News.
Bottom right: Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, NY Post, WSJ, etc.
“We’ve got to axe them before they get going
We did. We just won a crushing election.”
Oliver, they aren’t crushed. They have enormous money, they have a large audience, especially in rural areas–where McSame did statistically better than Obama–and they have the malignant desire to turn as much of the nation as they can against the new administration.
Come on: you know they’ve done it before. I’m far less of a fan of Kerry than I am of Obama, but did a good look at what the Swiftboaters did in miniature to The Lord of Sleep. Obama is stronger, smarter, and has a better team, but there are more than two dozen hate radio producers and literally hundreds of radio stations carrying that muck. Not to mention Faux News, always willing to lie about whatever Obama said.
We can’t just sit on our hands and let the good times roll. We have a chance now to stop the hate at the source–before it encourages yet-another person to bomb a women’s center, lynch an Asian, black or gay. The election was a bold first step–but we’ve got a ways to go.
Feel free to disagree, but if you honestly don’t know what hate radio is or what it’s done to the US since Reagan’s FCC opened the airwaves up to corporate monopolies and shut down the Fairness Doctrine, you owe it to yourself to review it. If you do know all about this, I admit to finding myself puzzled over your attitude. No offense meant.
Oliver, they aren’t crushed.
Tune in. They’re crushed. Are they permanently crushed? No. But right now? Crushed.
They have enormous money
We have more.
they have a large audience
We’ve got a similar audience, in the blogosphere, Huffpo, etc.
especially in rural areas–where McSame did statistically better than Obama
No offense, but la-dee-fucking-dah. They have the super-rural areas. We have the suburbs, we have the exurbs, we have the cities. They own areas of stagnation, we have the America that is growing.
but if you honestly don’t know what hate radio is or what it’s done to the US since Reagan’s FCC opened the airwaves up to corporate monopolies and shut down the Fairness Doctrine, you owe it to yourself to review it
I deal with it every single day at my day job. I know far more about the right’s media infrastructure than the average person.
Look, pardon me if I’m being an ass, but we just won the White House. I’m not interested in still being a nervous nelly. I dont believe in gov mandated competition in the press, I think we can do fine competing in the arena of ideas. They have Rush, we have the blogs. They have Fox, we’ve got Huffpo. We won this round, we won’t rest on our laurels and we will beat them again.
But we don’t need any rending of garments.
Oliver,
Could you explain what was so bad about the Fairness Doctrine? It seems like people actually didn’t see the media as so biased in favor of liberals when we had it, yet the right is extremely opposed to it. I don’t see how it kills talk radio to require that the host have a guest from each side of the issue.
I’m just listening to a sensitive interview with Congressman John Lewis on the CBC radio show called As It Happens. He marched with King Jr and was beat unconscious by the police during a Civil Rights march in ‘65. He said that when he casted his vote he was casting it for King Jr. and all of the others who marched to end the injustice. He sounded tired and serene and his quite pride in this accomplishment was undeniable. There must be so many of these stories and it could make a good thread.
One more thing, just before that interview I was listening to Mark Livid Levine. What a bitter man. He who has nothing to be bitter about is bitter about everything and Mr Lewis, who could be bitter about many things, was not bitter at all. The contrast was poignant.
To me, the fairness doctrines says “waaaah! liberals suck at talk radio, so lets put a law in that says it has to be balanced.”
In the arena of opinion, I believe in competition. While I support things like limiting media ownership, I don’t believe in government mandated balance. Would you like some right wing douchebag shoe-horned into Olbermann’s show? Would you want every other post on Dailykos or OW.com given over to a right wing idiot? No.
We can compete. We don’t need the gov’t to intervene to compete.
That’s a defensible position, OW, but the Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast media, and it didn’t require every show to exhibit self-contained balance. It wouldn’t have required Countdown to be balanced, but rather MSNBC to be balanced, and even then not 50/50. In fact the original was so vague (something to the effect of ‘reasonable opportunity to respond’) that it could be something on the level of five or six to one and still be considered balanced enough. IIRC it was used mostly against out-and-out lie personal attacks, like the kind perpetrated against Sen. Kerry and P.E. Obama.
The Fairness Doctrine worked to stifle political broadcast media by making sure it didn’t exist. If it were to return, you wouldn’t see broadcasters alternating perspectives. You’d see them switch from the format altogether and play Hot 40 or something. More Britney Spears and N’Sync clones is not a good thing.
PG:
This election convinced me that we don’t need the Fairness Doctrine. I wasn’t that big a fan before but it can stay in the dustbin of history. Look, they called Obama all sorts of things and look what happened. He still kicked their ass. It proves what I’ve thought for a while. Give Democrats a good candidate who knows how to run a campaign(or at least hire people who know how to run a campaign) and we’ll kick their ass.
Give Democrats a good candidate who knows how to run a campaign(or at least hire people who know how to run a campaign) and we’ll kick their ass.
And a LOT of money. If we’re going to bin the Fairness Doctrine, I suspect we’d probably throw in the towel on pushing candidates to limit themselves to public financing as well. Which means we had better be ready to pony up a lot of money — this is the first federal election in which I’ve ever donated money, and I ended up donating about 25% more (than I had intended.
Hmmm, needs more Michelle Malkin, eh?
The Fairness Doctrine = Who cares. Listen, these guys were doing exactly what they always do, maybe even louder this time around, and they got stomped. Totally stomped.
The fairness doctrine was fine in a three network universe but it’s no longer needed or even possible. Forget about it.
Any liberal or democrat who advocates reinstating the fairness doctrine is just feeding the right’s paranoia and victimhood while giving them an excuse to cry “liberal fascism.” All it would do is galvanize the hard cores when what we should be doing is continuing to deflate them.
To that end, try ridicule. It’s free, effective and more than well deserved.
As a matter of fact, the only people I hear taking the fairness doctrine seriously these days are the right wing blowhards. For months they’ve been telling their listeners that if Clinton, then Obama, were elected, that the right’s voices would be silenced! Silenced, I tell’s ya!
The fairness doctrine is the bedtime story that Hannity and Limbaugh use to scare their child-like listeners and so, keep them listening and buying into get rich quick schemes and diet pill fads. Simple as that.
“The Fairness Doctrine = Who cares. Listen, these guys were doing exactly what they always do, maybe even louder this time around, and they got stomped. Totally stomped.”
So all actions in time are a progression towards perfection, that ends at the current moment? Because in 2000, there were screams about the corporate media and their use of Republican talking points and outright lies (remember “I invented the Internet”?) that cost Gore the White House. And in 2004 it was the Swiftboaters that cost Kerry the election. But in 2008, because Obama wins–with the help of a terrible economy–I read you as saying, “The way it happened now is the way it always will happen, there can be no deviation from this, we’ve perfected the answer to hate radio and Faux News.”
But the thing is, we didn’t. The economy was the #1 issue on exit polls for more than three-quarters of people who voted; and if we didn’t have that, things might have been very, very different. And in any case, winning one, or even two against an extremely well-financed hate machine controlling the media doesn’t mean we’ve crushed the machine, or have the perfect reply to their propaganda.
Hate media is the worst, most dangerous threat to any self-defined free state. It was pioneered by Goebbels under Hitler. It was responsible for the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, where nearly 1 million people died. The Fairness Doctrine is feared by people like Hannity for a very good reason: because it makes hate radio and its lies impossible to operate. That’s a very good reason to consider it. Feeding their paranoia…? Lol, anything will feed that!
And the Fairness Doctrine is the best way to kill all the falsehoods they spread.
Simply put, if the Fairness Doctrine had been in place in 2004, the networks giving airtime to the Swiftboaters would have been required under law to provide rebuttal time to Kerry. I’m not saying he would have used it well. Knowing Kerry, he probably wouldn’t. But a lot of media that simply took the Swiftboaters at their word and ran with it because it was such exciting “news” would have had to allow for opposition correction. And that could have braked the entire downward spiral of the Kerry campaign.
“Simply put, if the Fairness Doctrine had been in place in 2004, the networks giving airtime to the Swiftboaters would have been required under law to provide rebuttal time to Kerry.”
I’m sorry, did I miss the memo to every print, broadcast, and internet outlet which said they couldn’t accept Kerry or the DNC’s money to run an ad countering the Swiftboat Vet’s claims? I’m trying to remember when the FCC or the FEC said that the Kerry campaign wasn’t allowed to rebut the SBV?
So, because the Democrats ran two candidates so bad they couldn’t beat George W. Bush, broadcasters should be required to give valuable airtime to people no one wants to listen to.
Makes sense to me.
In 2004 the Kerry campaign did not know how to utilize friendly media outlets to fight back. Sen. Obama did. That’s a big part of why he won. Not anything to do with the fairness doctrine.
Al Gore and to a lesser extent John Kerry weren’t bad candidates. They both would have made fine Presidents. They just ran bad campaigns.
You know they are hurting when Livid Levine aired a speech that Reagan gave in the 1960s. I guess they’re starting from scratch.