Why does the Right continue to control political dialog in this country?

I don't get it: We won, and by a significant majority, yet the Right still has us constantly on the defensive.

It seems to have gotten so much worse this summer, with the Town Hall protests, the birther idiocy, and the Million Morans march. Yet all those things involve a small minority of Americans. Why, for instance, aren't the vast majority of Americans who support Public Option controlling the health care debate instead of the other way around?

and they are not interested in reform.

:thumbsup:

...on the head

http://www.corporations.org/media/

And another link to a book that details the successful right wing campaign, since the 70's, to move our national dialogue to the right: www.whatliberalmedia.com . They've been working on many different fronts, including media ownership.

And then there's the famous Powell Memo of 1971, directing corporations on how to fight back against those who would attack our free enterprise system.
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html

They have seized control...

If the media truly was liberal, then it wouldn't be this way. The protests against the Iraq War and the Bush administration dwarfed these pissant tea party protests, but the media did their best to try and portray them as a fringe minority. But when it's conservative protesters that actually are a fringe minority, then the media plays them up like they're the voice of silent, oppressed, middle America.

The great majority of Americans are not batshit insane. They shudder when they watch the antics of these fruit loops. I say let America witness the loonies and they will wither rather than grow..

these vile and embarrassing people still get taken seriously by everyone from the local evening news to the Sunday morning nationally broadcast talk shows.

And unfortunately, there are more batshit insane people in American than most of us would like to think, due (I think) to declining public education which is replaced by Right Wing media willing to flat out lie and lie constantly.

Yeah, sure. :eyes:

I fear that the Amerikkkan Sheeple ARE that bat shit insane, and there aren't enough of us to overcome them...

That's the short answer. He who has the biggest gun, and the willingness to use it without shame or remorse, will always command the public's attention. Particularly compared to those who aren't similarly threatening. The psychopath with the big gun will always take center stage, at least until "the public" has nothing more to lose, and thus are no longer afraid of being gunned down.

Do you see any teabaggers out there getting arrested, getting shot with rubber bullets, getting gassed? They haven't even done anything yet that could be construed as taking a personal risk to "get their country back." Meanwhile, those on the left did those things and many more for the entire time Bush was president.

It has nothing to do with them being more dedicated than we are. It has everything to do with what kind of attention they're getting.

It's that they give off every vibe that they'll start shooting, any minute now. Even if they don't, that sense of imminent danger rivets the media's attention on them.

for sure.

I agree, the teabaggers etc. are big on noise and short on any real action. They want an end to 'big government' and 'socialism', but wouldn't last a day with out their personal shot of government funding (from the Fire Department to paved streets).

The people who seem most intimidated by teabaggers etc. are the Democrats. :(

So, part of it is a sort of "freak show" factor--the very shamelessness of the Right is getting them attention?

our fear that they really will blow the place up if they don't get their way. I think that restrains us from challenging them too forcefully, because we actually *care* about not blowing the place up. So, they're the only "outrageousness" out there for the media to focus on (which goes, slightly, to Downtown Hound's point)

Anyway, that's my opinion. If you read above, Downtown Hound disagrees.

The Democrats and Republicans are all part of the Central Leadership Corporation.

The joke's on us as they try to make believe we're a divided country.

You can have the best ideas ever, but CNN,MSNBC.FOX,NBC,CBS,ABC is not going to cover you unless you take hostages & barricade yourself inside a walmart..and then they only want to see you get taken into custody.

is dictating to the majority.

America is a very fear driven society and this plays in perfectly to republican themes. Think about the wars, terrorism, drugs, swine flu, etc. It's easy to stir up our people to a frenzy of what could possibly go wrong.

They say crazier shit than we do.

There are judgments made, hundreds of them, as to which issues and which groups get taken seriously before the agenda of a Sunday Morning talk show (for instance) is decided upon.

Those judgments should involve a rational assessment of, among other things, what is most important to the most people. Yes, weird minority views should get attention, but only if they can stand up to some serious fact-checking.

The Sunday morning talk show exists purely to make money.

They make money by attracting more viewers than the show on other channel.

Their careful deliberation and decisions are based on that primarily.

What content will attract more people to watch, to sell advertising to. And they put a lot of research and thought into deciding what that content is.

That's my take anyway.

Unless we're talking about PBS.

That's why the choices made on Sunday morning shows should be different. Shows like that should be viewed by the network as they once were: A public service, not geared toward making a profit.

one-sided that no one would be fooled. Just enough opposition dialogue is allowed to give the illusion of comprehensive and fair coverage.

:hi:

try this experiment. Monday afternoon, go to your care and turn on your AM radio. Tune it to the lowest frequency (530 kHz). Then press the button that says "seek". When the tuner lands on a station, listen to what is being said on that station for 5 minutes, or as long as you can stand it. Then press "seek" again, and repeat this process until you have listened to every station that your radio will receive.

What you will hear is 90% or more ultra-right-wing, violent, hateful, lie-filled propaganda, bearing no semblance of the truth, of balance, of sanity, of reason.

Seriesly, I can't believe that couldn't figure this out by yourself.

As to why the fascists control the media, that's a little bit harder to figure out, but I can tell you that it is not going to stop until we the people start calling Limpballs, King Glenn, and the rest to account for it. Once there ar some repercussions for their actions, things will start to change.

Read George Lakoff's "The Political Mind" to understand why we Democrats/liberals/progressives continue to suck in arena of political messaging and what to do about it.

Not flame-baiting but until we recognize this we will continue
to ask the question.

In our own so called party we have 2 groups of Righties.
DLC and Blue Dogs. Most often they agree with the GOP
than Democrats in their own party.

When it is down to the crunch, it is expected that we will
fall in line and not make the party look bad, whatever.
In the past, this has been our pattern.

When the Health Care Issue was first mentioned, the Blue
Dogs did not believe this was a good time because of the
economy. Between the DLC and Blue Dogs, Baucus has come
up with a Republican-lite Bill. We do not have enough Liberals
in the Senate to create a push back.

The scary thing is:We will end up passing Republican Legislation
it will fail and Democrats will be blamed. Republicans will
be laughing all the way to the next election.

See, the problem is we have Conservatives in our party.
Conservative Economic Fundamentalism led us over the cliff
to our present crisis. Our party digging the hole deeper
will in the end lead us over another cliff.

gives me chills. You are undoubtedly correct--Dems will be blamed for lousy legislation, because they didn't have the guts to make real change in this country.

This was first apparent during the 2004 "Rathergate" fracas, when a story was quickly piped from RW blogs to a RW news service to Drudge and then to the networks.

Drudge is less important now, but the basic structure continues. For example, the uproar over Obama speaking to schoolkids began on a couple of extreme right-wing message boards on August 27, was picked up by Michelle Malkin a few days later, and spread from there.

Fox News is most often the final destination for these stories.

Similar channels exist for less high-profile stories. For example, young conservative groups on college campuses are always on the alert for stories about some liberal professor giving a conservative a D on her paper. These get written up for some alternative conservative college paper and go from there to the national network of professional conservative outrage columnists.

The left has no equivalent to this. We all know how many important stories appear here or at Kos but never get further notice. These days, some of them may get picked up by Olbermann or Maddow, but even those often hit a wall at that point.

In addition, the right will never let go of an issue once they've gotten their teeth into it -- they've spent the last five years working to smear ACORN -- while the left seems resigned to swap stories back and forth without quite noticing they're not getting anywhere.

For example, there was yet another thread here today about the Texas Board of Education trying to rewrite the American history books in terms of Christians and conservatism and exclude liberals. And yet another thread on the creeping Christianization of the military and how this impedes American objectives in the Middle East. Both those topics have kept coming up here for months -- but hardly anyone in the general public, even informed liberals, is aware of them.

I don't think any of us want to emulate the obsessiveness and ideological lockstep of the right -- but there has to be some way we can move our messages to a wider playing field.

(Twitter, maybe? I've just been checking out Twitter resources and wondering why a "top conservatives" hashtag is currently the third most popular -- http://hashtags.org/tags/top -- but there's nothing equivalent for "top liberals," at least not that's widely used. There's some kind of invisibility going on there that can't be blamed on the mainstream media. Should we all be tweeting each other furiously, retweeting links to important stories, and creating continuing hashtags for core liberal issues? Or if some of that is already happening, should we be working to make it a lot better known and more widespread?)

Actually, we do, except for one significant element: We have no Fox News.

This is what has been confusing me: With all the diligent, brilliant leftists (much more than the Right has) blogging, writing books, and appearing on the media, we have no Liberal/Left "final destination". And I'm thinking now that's the key.

Thanks starroute, for your excellent thoughtful post. I will read it again later when I have more time--gotta run now.:)

We don't have a news service equivalent to the right-wing CNS to pick up under-reported stories and give them wider distribution. We have some aggregators but nothing equivalent to Drudge at his peak. The left has far more brilliant creative people than the right -- but we don't have the cheery little assembly line workers to move that brilliance along.

I think there's actually an opportunity here. Newspapers are dying or cutting back their news coverage at the same time as the cable news networks are starved for content to fill up all those hours. A lot of times, right-wing stories get spread around simply because they're there and formulated to fit standard news formats and come complete with right-wing think-tank "experts" to explain them.

Again, this is not creative work. It's drone-work, which is why the right is so good at it. But it seems to be an essential part of the process. As it is, we get scooped again and again. Not only does the right get its pet stories national distribution when we don't -- but the right gets its spin on stories of general interest and we're left in the dust.

The mainstream media may be sort-of conservative and definitely corporate -- but they're also lazy and they're cheap, and doing their work for them will get us a lot further at this point than all the bloggy brilliance in the world.

The right was way ahead of the left when it came to using computerized mailing lists early on and even in starting up political websites and blogs. It's only in the grassroots area that the left pulled ahead in the last few years -- and now the well-funded astroturfing operations of the right are figuring out how it's done.

I am really feeling nervous about this. Bitching that the mainstream media aren't on our side is both futile and possibly irrelevant. The real fight is going to be over the use of new media -- and at the moment, we're losing. The fact that Rep. Joe Wilson was able to catch up in fundraising so quickly after his outburst should be a wake-up call to all of us.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/18/republicans-internet-barack-obama

For Telford, though, dismissing the eruption as extremist or racist was to miss the point. For him, the 9/12 rally marked the moment at which conservative America finally embraced the new world and recovered its confidence. He believes the movement is now close to catching up with the Democrats in terms of internet savviness; in some ways he contends it has even surpassed them, particularly on Twitter, where much of the heavy lifting behind the so-called "tea parties" against Obama's tax and other policies is being done.

Matt Kibbe, who heads FreedomWorks, a national conservative group that led the push behind last Saturday's rally, goes further. He says that the movement has stolen from Obama the techniques he used to such effect last year and is now redeploying them as a stick with which to beat the president.

When Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, FreedomWorks studied how he did it and then copied him. They set up a ning site, a Facebook-like platform that allows members to talk to each other without having to go through the parent body. The result was explosive.

FreedomWorks now has more than 800,000 members who largely organise and fund themselves; all the group itself does is arrange permits for demonstrations and advise on logistics.

Yes, we believe it is enough to be thoughtful, incisive--and correct. Meanwhile the Right has discovered the effectiveness of quantity over quality, and the importance of selling their vision. I get the feeling those on our side think there is something a little sordid about selling our vision: It should be enough that we are right.

The Right seems to understand the media better than we do: It's coverage, not content, that counts. (I guess Mcluhan said that ages ago) Also, we see once again how much it helps to have huge amounts of money with which to fuel your information machine.

Gosh, this is depressing. I get the feeling the majority of Americans, no longer aroused by the disaster of the Bush years, may be slipping back into the sort of complacency that got Reagen elected twice because those who opposed him didn't bother to vote.

Thanks for your terrific information. If you're not, you should be working for the Democrats, starroute.

other such silliness.

The "right" has always had a message most people would rather accept-- "change is bad for you." They assume that you would rather not risk what little you have for the chance of getting more. And they are correct-- as popular as casinos are, most people do not bet the rent, even on a sure bet.

The other part of their message is that you don't have to do anything more than you are doing for things to work out-- you don't have to change your lifestyle or spend money to clean up the environment or claim the rights you and others should have, or any for other good result you may wish for.

These are powerful messages, and resonate in the US, particularly in the West and South where self-reliance is almost a religion.

The "left" has talked about your responsibility for others and the community, while the "right" has always talked about what you deserve. Which message will be received more openly?

one of hope that life can be better. Unfortunately, it seems to me that people get particularly angry at someone who arouses their hope, and then doesn't deliver or delivers only part. The Democrats have always been stuck in this position.

As you say, not only are we liberals are always telling people to take responsibility, we also tell them to be better people--less racists, homophobic, etc. Meanwhile, the Limbaughs of the world have a message that boils down to: "Go ahead and be a pig--you're beautiful, and better than those stuck up Liberals! Hell, look at me. Being a pig has made me rich and famous!"

See starroute's posts for how the Right has figured out how to use the mechanics of the media better than we have.

funding many of these individuals and groups who are supposedly grass-roots organizations.

The right-wingers are geniuses at this type of political manipulation. They can pull it off because they always reward their supporters MONETARILY IN A BIG WAY when they control the government or even when they don't--witness the current healthcare debacle, I mean debate.

When the Iraq War began thousands of companies lined up at the trough to get their payback for supporting the Republicans. They got it by the Swiss bank account full. Remember the NINE BILLION DOLLARS that simply disappeared??

This kind of political patronage and payback goes on with Democrats also, but they have not perfected it the way the Republicans have. Nor are they so morally bankrupt that they don't even think twice about stealing from the taxpayers to pay back their supporters. Wait!! I take that back. Let me change that to say that SOME OF THE DEMOCRATS are not so morally bankrupt . . .

When you add all of that private money to the power of the Corporate Media and the capitalists who support it, there is a formidable, perpetually-funded machine to beat down any leftist ideas or policies.

is formidable, indeed. Add to that the defense of the RW Christians, which boils down to the Devil made me do it as detailed in Max Blumenthal's new book:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=482262&mesg_id=482262

This lack of responsibility and moral bankruptcy plus nearly unlimited financial resources makes for something truly frightening.

We just prefer to run our "mouths" from the safety of the computer...

because media is in the pocket of the right..and has been for decades now.

While dems stress about "policy" and fairness , the republicans set out long ago, to control the message, by being bold, loud & persistent..

When you only hear ONE side, and it's loud, in-your-face, people eventually think that since no one is refuting it, it must have some truth to it.

Lefties have been "banned" from media for a very long time. Many voices we should have been hearing for decades, exited and were never heard from again, until their deaths were reported, as they died of old age.

you to the media's handlers. I'm sure there are many journalists who would like to practice real journalism, but they also want to keep their jobs which unfortunately are not related anymore.

what happens when reporters (regardless of how popular) don't toe the line.