Sometimes you do confuse me a bit. I don't mean to say that youre not observant or anything. But it seems that you're saying that you thought Limbaugh and Beck and O'Reilly and their ilk were not working from a script. *I* always thought they were fairly obvious about doing it. Although the most obvious they could have possibly been was that all three of them compared Obama to a fascist eugenicist in the same two day news cycle. The Daily Show did a video montage where they combined footage from Limbaugh's live feed and Beck's evening show and the two were finishing each other's sentences. But none of this is new, even the Daily Show treats it like a regular feature rather than a one-off 'hey isn't that weird' sort of thing. They ARE Big Corp Media, Limbaugh has one of the largest market shares in the country and Beck and O'Reilly have exclusive contracts with Fox News.
And it's not like Limbaugh has denied that he likes starting and/or fanning fires specifically for a profit. On and NPR 'Fresh Air' interview he said quite succinctly that he had always wanted "to be the largest Op-Ed radio program in the country so he could charge outrageous fees for advertising". He's a California shock-jock from the 1980s, he just found out that politics is a more lucrative and long term gig than having women in bikinis throwing hotdogs for distance.
O'Reilly has a degree in marketing and started life as a TV anchor on "A Current Affair" which was basically "The National Inquirer" for telivision, also in the 1980s. These guys are old school yellow journalists, it's not surprising that they know their market and have a lot of the same dialogue.
And really, Rush Limbaugh has gone on record as saying that the best thing about a tree in the rain-forest is what you do with it once you've cut it down. But since he was probably high as a kite on illegally obtained vicadin at the time, do you really want to count yourself in his camp?
Aug. 21st, 2009 08:53 pm (UTC)
One tall-tell sign of someone thinking less of your thinking is their prefacing excuse from condescension.
Since you believe this "ilk" read from a script ... well, that may just mean that you aren't observant. Beliefs are fickle like that. So is watching a medium, in this case mass media, accuse the object of loathe with the same beliefs as you ascribe to them. So Jon Stewart in your case. It's simplest (and obvious) to say that a critical observer who watches the Daily Show or the Oreilly Factor always doubts the claims made. aka. don't necessarily believe everything on TV -- even from "newscasters" who generally have a similar belief system as your own.
I'm one of those individualistic idiots who likes to see the evidence for himself and make his own conclusions. I can assume that you, however, believe everything that Jon implies, and that's a rather conformist position to be in.
Re: You didn't know?
Hey now. I didn't accuse you of anything of the sort. If you're having a bad day I get it, but I haven't said anything condescending. I said that you're observant and that I was therefore surprised that you hadn't noticed something. It was by way of an introduction to the topic, I didn't say you're an imbecile.
And I can't really "believe" in the Daily Show. Any more than I "believe" in Saturday Night Live. Both make fun of everyone, so it would be difficult to find an overarching political sentiment, since they're satirists not pundits.
My key point was that you have said in the past that your awareness of popular culture is recent and not, as it was for most of us, something you've been practicing from childhood. You therefore may not have known that O'Reilly was on "A Current Affair" or that Limbaugh was a shock-jock DJ in the 80s. Thus, you may not have had that information to determine their relative bias and likelihood of presenting information as-is and without an eye towards their commercial success.
I'm not assuming anything about their character. I'm working from their past performances. I take umbridge to the idea that I am somehow not processing your truth and are instead mocking reality out of some left wing knee-jerk reaction. I said nothing that was an implication of a bad act, I stated facts. Frankly, to say that someone who's on Fox News is somehow incapable of being part of Big Corp. Media is a *belief*. So I'm not the one holding fast to a contradictory assertion in the face of direct evidence.
I like to think that our previous interactions and my journal taken in total demonstrate that I have very few sacred cows, that I am not in the habit of mocking you, and that I gather my information from a variety of sources to determine their validity for myself. Which is exactly why I know what I know of the "ilk" we're discussing. News never exists in a vacuum, there's always a bias, even with an eye-witness. I don't "loathe" any of these guys, I simply would prefer to not receive my news from people who have destroyed their credibility so frequently in the past as this "ilk" has.
If you felt insulted, that was not my intention. I was aiming, perhaps, for playful. There are no snakes in this jar, just a few ideas. If this is a touchy subject for you then I am truly curious why.
And that should be umbrage, not umbridge. Damn Harry Potter.
fireboy4plai : You didn't know? [+3]