Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Peter Daou
is just plain wrong about this:
Why on Earth Are Democrats Legitimizing and Empowering Rush Limbaugh?
... Limbaugh and his cohorts (Coulter, Hannity, Beck, Savage, and so on), are largely responsible for our toxic political environment. Given major media platforms to launch crude and brutal political and cultural attacks, to demonize liberals, and to use rage as a means of lining their own pockets, these 'entertainers' have poisoned our national discourse.
There's precious little benefit in making Limbaugh more of a central player, in engaging him directly from the White House podium, in raising his stature, in stamping, sealing and approving the years he's spent bashing his political opponents....
It's simply bizarre that the guy who started Salon's old Blog Report (which was once called the Daou Report) would say something like this. So much of what we bloggers were doing when Daou was aggregating our posts was to expose the toxic things being said by right-wingers, including Limbaugh and the others he names.
Why was this worth doing? Because, prior to the rise of lefty blogs and Media Matters and Think Progress and, eventually, Stewart and Colbert and then Olbermann and Maddow, hardly anyone was paying attention to the toxic things these people said
except people who approved of them. The mainstream press wasn't paying attention. Most non-right-wingers weren't paying attention.
These people were saying vile things -- but most of the people who would have thought the utterances were vile didn't know that. Therefore, much of America just had a vague sense that Limbaugh et al. were "irreverent" and "politically correct" -- not nasty and poisonous.
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