From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Sun Mar 30 2003 - 04:44:44 MST
On Sun, 30 Mar 2003 05:21:11 -0500, gts <gts_2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
> And then there's Sean Hannity of FOX. He takes the prize for the most
> offensive.
...snip...
> Such rot.
I will run the risk of stating the obviuos from a memetic context:
The younger & hungrier Right Wing Talk Zealots do get cranked up a lot--
their producers and agents want them to stay in the
"shock"/controversy/polarization zone. It gains them market from
controvery's first-order (curiosity/first time listeners) and second-order
(polarity stimulation of the susceptible part of the listener base+mores
stations subscribed) effects. Controversy as free advertising for stim
junkies. Pandering, actually. Like the historical Joe Pyne or the fictional
[Bug] Jack Barron. It really is more than a bit like the WWF.
The pandering of some other media sources is more indirect and less
blatant. Not enough arsenic to kill you with one sip.
Hannity is interesting to me personally because he's a fresh revanchiste-
conservative [e.g. "Q.: Has affirmative action gone too far?"] secular
Catholic getting air time; for a long time Bill Buckley was the only one--
and Buckley is, as has been mentioned, at least rational enough to advocate
seriously countenancing ending the WoSD. Hannity gives me a read on a
population segment of interest to me with which I am otherwise not in
contact. My roots, sort of.
Yes, over a fairly low threshold, the squeaky wheel gets ignored--while one
winces from the splitting headache. Hannity is not Jack Kennedy or Eric
Sevareid, for damn sure. But he's not the far end of my personal
fingernails-on-chalkboard scale. I can usually stand about ten minutes of
Hannity, thirty seconds of Michael Savage (radio right gunslinger trying
for out-Rush Rush Limbaugh), and six seconds of Senator Charles Schumer
(who occupies the other side of some scale of mine, not exactly Left/Right)
. Six seconds is my limit for watching the WWF smackdowns, too.
MMB, donning anti-radation garb
-- I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. Sometimes I forget.
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