Conservative Media!

I thought this was an interesting piece about the effect of the conservative media. I was going to post the piece in the thread about the Romney/Republican excuses but figured it was worthy of its own discussion.


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...-the-msm-and-failed-the-rank-and-file/264855/

Basically, the underlying argument is by living in the echo chamber and not in reality, conservatives took a different approach to the election than they might have otherwise. The "information disadvantage" led to them spinning wheels and not addressing things that could have led to a route to victory.

Thoughts?

It's funny the piece singles out Hugh Hewitt. He happens to be on at a time when I'm in the car a lot, so I listened to him quite a bit over the last few months. The guy was in a full-blown alternate reality, where Romney was the presumptive favorite and Obama was a socialist flea to be swatted away. Not only could Obama do nothing right, but Romney was the savior of the party and the Last Best Hope for America. Of course, all that was going on between endless commercial breaks, and in the few moments he wasn't shilling for his website, his books or his sponsors. Which might have been about ten minutes an hour.

And last night was the crescendo to the delusion. At a time when big swing states were already coming in for Obama, Hewitt was speculating on who Romney's cabinet would be, and basically saying he didn't believe the early numbers.

He was totally outside the boundaries of what was actually happening. They all were. And they got crushed for it.

"Conservative media"? You mean Fox?

An excellent article which explains the problems conservatives having living in their echo chamber bubble. Reality really punched them in the face though in the end.

I found Fox to be very entertaining. For example, just last night I saw: 1. Megyn Kelly walking awkwardly in her 5 inch heels through a serpentine maze at Fox News, 2. Karl Rove's meltdown after Megyn throws him under the bus.

Did you read the article?

Here's another take on the same issue from a conservative who wasn't fooled.

irst, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data which now exists (it is truly staggering how much more information there is today than there was, say, in 1980) would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.

As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

For conservatives, this natural human inclination to embrace the data that they like and discard the rest is greatly enhanced, and essentially injected with steroids. This is because they have a very understandable and highly justified distrust of a news media which has been showing open hostility to the prospects of our candidates for as long as any of us can remember.

While I am not the very first person to question the credibility of everything I hear in the news media, having once worked for a polling institute and having commissioned several high profile national polls myself, I understand that polls, while hardly perfect, should not generally be thought of as part of the biased news propaganda machine (which is why, ironically, the Fox News poll is often not at all favorable to conservatives).

But because conservatives are understandably so distrustful of everything they are told by the media, it becomes easy for them to fall into the trap of assuming that polls showing Obama winning are inherently flawed. They are even able to come up with enough real numbers to make arguments which appear to be based in intellect, even though they are really being driven by emotion and self interest.

This phenomenon was made even more pervasive because to the conservative political junkies who spend their lives absorbing every possible news item with the assumption that it is simply not possible to comprehend how anyone would vote to reelect Obama. This fed into their fervent belief that the polls must simply be wrong (as did their forgetting that, when nearly everyone votes in a swing state, it really doesn't matter how much more enthusiastic one side is than the other).

Full Story

Beyond Fox, there are a bunch of conservative outlets, bloggers, pundits, etc.

Those include, but aren't limited to, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, the National Review, WorldNetDaily, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Redstate.com, the various Breitbart sites, etc., etc. etc.

Some of those were explicitly referenced in the article. Others, I'm sure, people here are familiar with.

If those news/opinion sources had been more dedicated to telling people what they needed to know (Obama was leading in polls fairly consistently, for example) instead of what they wanted to hear regardless of its truth (Obama is a failed socialist and Romney is likely going to win with 300+ electoral votes), they probably would have served themselves, their readers/viewers and the conservative cause better.

Ah. So you weren't talking about CNN, ABC, MSNBCPUSA, all the -- ahem -- major media outlets. But then you should also not have left out STRATFOR, because their staunch refusal to spin to the Left also makes them a "conservative" media source.

I would hope this will signal to the conservative audience that conservative media, especially Fox News, usually does not offer real news. Conservative media is making them less informed than a high school dropout pothead watching the Daily Show. It would be an ideal outcome for them to start thinking critically or at least exposing themselves to either unbiased journalism or journalism with non-conservative biases, but I'm afraid it might take some more shattering of their echo chamber to expose them to reality. If they're not willing to grow out of their fantasy, I guess we just wait for them to die off (considering they have more elderly, that won't take long).

There are some conservative journalists out there who don't alter reality to sell advertising (which is basically what Fox News and a lot of conservative talk radio has become). My hope would be that they step forward as well.

The fact that conservative media so consistently misinformed or outright lied to its audience used to be a useful propaganda piece, but not anymore.

And this is why the GOP will win in '16 -- because here you are doing exactly what you've just dissected. Living in the echo chamber. The past four years and the next four will see how overconfident the liberal establishment will be in '16. I expect the adjective that will describe that state will be 'grossly.'

Did you read the article?

Yeah, so overconfident that they won the election handily.

What a rejection of the Democrats, how will they ever survive?

Ladies and Gentlemen.... Exhibit A.

.... and Exhibit B.

I hope that the Republican party can really get it's act together and put forth reasonable alternatives.

So your exhibits consist of quoting one of the dumbest posters on WF?

Can I use Baba for my exhibit?

I think it's illegal to put people like Baba in exhibits.

Oh, please do behave dismissively toward that point. For one thing, it reinforces that point. For another, I'm counting on it. You get just as smug, dumb and ignorant as you want on the way to 2016.

I think there was a lot of wishful thinking in the conservative media in the aftermath of the first debate. I think the effects of that debate were overstated and had essentially dissipated by the time the third debate rolled around.

Then the storm basically froze the race in place for about 3 days. And the electorate tends to solidify with about a week remaining so there was little opportunity for Romney to rally at the very end of the election.

without going through the whole thread and the predictable responses (of which this is probably another)...

My view is that there is an echo chamber on both sides, and few there be that listen to sources of info from both sides (with the understanding that some sources are slanted, you still ought to know what the other side is saying and doing) and that in each election cycle, one or the other echo chamber is closer to reality than the other.

But that said, I think there was a time when those on the right still listened to "the middle" even with skepticism about their bias....and possibly in the last five or six years (since the 2006 election cycle say) there might be a trend towards simply ignoring anyone who's perceived as being off the right wing reservation.

I have to agree. The first debate went to the media's heads, but not just the conservative media (what little of it there is). Seems to me that the conservative media forgot what a slick con man Obama is, and the liberal media refused to even consider it. Obama played lame duck for one debate, knowing full well he had two more to go. In short, he bluffed, and everybody fell for it.

I think the difference is that for whatever their faults and biases, the mainstream media and left-wing media/blogs tend to acknowledge the shortcomings of "their" candidate and the strengths of the other guy, the news events that hurt their candidate and help the other guy. Or if "tend" is too strong, there are at least examples of such things with some frequency.

I don't think that you can say the same thing about the conservative media.

To put it in an analogy, the mainstream media and left-wing media tend to cover politics, it could be said, like sports reporters. You figure that someone covering, say, the Lions wants the Lions to win. But they are not going to automatically predict a Lions victory every week regardless of their opponent. They are not going to look at a Lions loss and lead with various conspiracy theories about how the Lions were defeated because the Mafia wanted them to lose or whatever. They generally will look at various aspects of the game and praise or criticize or advocate as they see appropriate. Certainly, their interpretation can be way off, but the goal is at the heart of it to inform in an entertaining way.

Conservative media generally is more like cheerleaders. Their goal is to entertain first and rouse support second. If information conflicts with these goals, forget about it.

To put it another way, I don't think there was any mainstream media figure that predicted Obama would have an electoral college victory that involved him winning states that there was no reason to expect he would win, like Texas.

But people in the conservative media were apparently making predictions that Romney was going to win states there was no particularly good reason to think he was going to win, even that Obama might lose Illinois.

Why do you think he would do that? What advantage would accrue to him from this ploy? I can think of one, maybe two reasons, but I don't think they are of enough value to warrant the risk.

I don't think Obama and/or his advisors are daring enough to deliberately crater a debate.

I think Obama and his people saw the polls, saw he was noticeably ahead and simply decided that "going in fighting" was a bad play to make in the first debate.

They got caught off guard and paid a price for it temporarily.

I think Romney and his staff were really surprised at how well the first debate went and were unprepared to capitalize on it. Romney's second and third debate performances were more in line with Romney's general thinking.

I think Romney's advisers were also worried about "over doing it" against President Obama and that it would make Romney look like a "bully" and disrespectful toward a sitting president.

The lackluster performance of Obama bothered me, but what I find more disturbing is why the incumbent almost always has a poor performance during the first debate. The only one considered to win the first debate in the history of televised debates was Clinton. I wonder why. Is it because a president is surrounded by sycophants for 4 years and not used to having their ideas challenged? Doesn't seem likely since the president is often confronted by congress...

I just don't understand this phenomenon.

The advantage in it that comes immediately to my mind was to instill in Romney a false sense of his debate opponent, prompting him to "be a kinder, gentler debater" in the next event; and it seems that if that was Obama's design, it worked out quite well. So yeah, for me the question of, "is he an idiot or is he a villain" has been well and truly answered. He's not an idiot.

I don't know if you're talking about recent history of televised debates or if you're talking about going back to Kennedy/Nixon...

Anyways, assuming for argument's sake that the incumbent generally loses the first debate, one factor may be that the challenger has had to engage in a number of debates during primary season and so is fresher at handling them. I read somewhere that there were 20 Republican primary debates this year. That is amazing.

Obama to me look tired.

Don't blame him, considering what he has been dealing with the past 4 years.

I have a feeling the reason Obama did so poorly in the first debate was that he'd been up the night before talking to the PM of Turkey, since they'd started getting shelled by the Syrians. No doubt there were a whole lot of phone calls made that day to Turkey, NATO, and others on the issue, so I don't think that its unreasonable to assume that they had gone on late into the night.

The incumbent President no doubt would be dealing with a number of issues that a challenger wouldn't have to worry about. They'd also have been in a bit of a "bubble" so they'd be a bit rusty (since an aide who challenged the President probably wouldn't stay an aide for very long) on debating skills.

I just don't understand why the Republicans couldn't stay on topic and hammer Obama on the economy and the budget?

Considering the state of the economy, they could have easily won. But they kept getting distracted by other nonsense throughout the last year... gay marriage, abortion/rape comments, the birther movement, etc.

Was watching this video of Sarah Palin's reaction to last nights events and she seems honestly shocked and confused about whats going on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb_r8lQgG1g

The economy should have been the only issue Republicans talked about this year... they really need to dump the sensationalists and the extremists and focus on actual ideas they have for the country. Simply being the party of 'no' to anything and everything Obama isn't working out well for them.

I don't like Obama much either but the Republicans didn't give me a single good reason to vote for them. They claim to be for smaller government but then they talk about legislating morality... you can't have it both ways.

This mix of religion and politics needs to stop. Barry Goldwater is spinning around in his grave.

They also need to lose this notion that white Christians are the only real Americans. It's never explicitly stated, but you can still hear it in every Palin speech, Limbaugh diatribe or homogenous campaign rally.

Mostly because the Republican plan for the budget is to eliminate taxes on the rich and triple the deficit, and the Republican plan for the economy is to deregulate the financial industry and force the United states into a severe recession every five years and a Great Depression every 20 years through the combination of asinine monetary policy and perpetual austerity.