Who Needs The Fairness Doctrine?
One of the most hilarious and bizarre obsessions to come out of Talkradioland since The Rise of Obama has been the idea that Obama and the Democrats want to reinstate The Fairness Doctrine to take our Rush Limbaughs away. Needless to say, as with most of the emissions from the right-wing fever swamp, the truth content is roughly zero parts per million.
The thing is, as much as I personally find the talk radio screamers offensive and repulsive, they’re doing far more damage to their own cause than they are to ours. McCain and the GOP ran the most talk radio-y election campaign in American history, accusing Obama and other Democratic opponents of socialism, atheism, terrorism, Islamism, being-black-ism, and every other ism they could think of, and it blew up in their faces.
Tom Schaller, Tod Lindberg, Ron Brownstein, and others have all documented how Democrats have gained ground in Republican territory while Republicans have been all but evicted from Democratic territory. Obama dominated the youth and Hispanic votes 2 to 1, both groups that will only grow larger and more influential. The future looks promising for the left, and bleak for the right.
The GOP desperately needs to reckon with America’s inexorable demographic march towards tolerance, and right-wing talk radio makes that difficult, if not impossible. Not only do virulent creatures like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage make the Republican Party look like red-faced, intolerant bigots, but they also exert pressure on the Republican Party to pander to red-faced, intolerant bigots, making it ever more toxic to the growing majority of Americans who are reasonably sane and well-adjusted.
As with any other pollutant, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Limbaugh and company go away, but it’s not Democrats that they’re poisoning.
2 comments November 22nd, 2008 at 05:05pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Media,Politics,Republicans
