How Podcasts Could Reverse the Influence of Talk Radio

During his thirty-year career, Martin Luther produced 544 separate books, pamphlets, or articles, slightly more than one every three weeks. He was responsible for over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets by German presses in the 1520s, the master of the possibilities that the Gutenberg press had unlocked.

That changed religion in the West. The Protestant Revolution shifted power from church to state.

In 1987 the Reagan Administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine that meant broadcasters were no longer obligated to dedicate programming to public interest or to represent opposing points of view. This was a boon to conservative talk radio. Between 1987 and 1992, the number of talk radio stations in the country rose from 240 to 900, and Rush Limbaugh came along, the master of advocacy reporting.

That changed politics in the US. From 1931 to 1995, Democrats had controlled congress 30 out of 32 sessions. After the rise of talk radio, Democrats controlled the House in only 2 of 12 sessions. The 2018 election made it 3 out of 13.

The 2018 election was the first post-podcast election. It was a blue wave. Obviously there is a lot more going on than podcasts (in the same way that a lot more was going on in politics after 1995 than talk radio) but the long-form of podcasts might do for wonky politics what talk radio did for conservative politics, giving an edge to the folks who take longer than 4 minutes between commercials to make their point.

News Warp Up for the Week

I was going to post about the plausible reasons why Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but my list includes only one item: he got Cheney to leave office without any violence. (It's not hard to imagine a scenario in which Biden would have given his acceptance speech with his skin sprinkled with bird shot.)

Communication major Sarah Palin's comments about the value of the dollar now leap straight from Facebook to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, analysts are scratching their heads about why the traditional media is floundering.

And speaking of journalism that makes you wonder who they have not laid off at these papers, Bloomberg has a headline, U.S. Trade Deficit Unexpectedly Falls as Exports Rise. Given that the trade deficit = Exports - Imports, it would only be unexpected if the trade deficit fell as exports rose. This headline is akin to "Residents Surprised to Find Streets Wet After Latest Rain Storm."

NASA scientists had an interesting idea: turn cameras into high-speed projectiles and aim them at what you want to photograph. Their good idea of smacking two spacecraft into the moon as a means to photograph it did not work too well. Curiously, the crashed cameras have yet to return any pictures. This could still change photography, though. Imagine news conferences in which every photo session looks like the incident in which Muntazer al-Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush. Instead of throwing rice at weddings, guests may just throw disposable cameras at the lucky couple. As if celebrities don't hate paparazzi enough already, just wait until they adopt the latest from NASA.

Rush Limbaugh may buy the St. Louis Rams. [The rich and poor just have different toys, Martina Navratilova says. "The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football."] If he does, the team will be easy to defend against. You can hear the defenses they face look at each other before every play, shrug and say, "What do you think? They'll go right again?"

There is a conservative effort to expunge the Bible of its liberal tendencies. In this version, Jesus still heals people but charges for his services.

News from Week One of the Obama Era

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh.

On a related note, Pastor Rick Warren warned gays to quit lusting after each other.

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Caroline Kennedy dropped her bid for Clinton's Senate seat. Apparently, being a part of America's most famous political dynasty was not enough to compensate for the speaking style of a nervous high school student, a refusal to give up her privacy, and a disinterest in politics.

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President Obama has decided that the best way to rectify the madness of the Bush administration is to pass a trillion dollar stimulus package while cutting taxes for 90% of Americans. Spending money like a drunken sailor while slashing taxes. Hmph. Now why didn't Bush think of that? This should change everything.

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Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich continues to give Blagojeviches everywhere a bad name. He claims to be the victim of a plot to raise taxes. I would try to make fun of this but that would be like painting over a Van Gogh to make it look better.

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The Apple Macintosh turns 25 on Saturday. Still the only computer to be first marketed as a smart toaster, even Wozniak expressed surprise at the product's enduring success.

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One of Nigeria's biggest daily newspapers reported that police implicated a goat in an attempted automobile theft. In a front-page article on Friday, the Vanguard newspaper said that two men tried to steal a Mazda car two days earlier in Kwara State, with one suspect transforming himself into a goat as vigilantes cornered him.

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Timothy Geithner was confirmed as Treasury Secretary this week. Geithner's disinterest in paying taxes was apparently no obstacle to congressional approval for him to head the IRS. In his defense, Geithner said that it was not as if Defense Secretary nominee William Lynn carries a gun. When asked by a confused Max Baucus what relevance this had, Geithner squinted his eyes shut and, witnesses claim, began to baa.

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Republican Party leaders have confessed in private to utter confusion about how to define themselves. With the collapse of communism as a sure enemy and the Democrats now offering big tax cuts and the poor marketing response to their plan to rename minorities as "magic Negroes," Republicans are now floundering through an identity crisis.

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Sources close to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts explained why he stumbled in his delivery of a mere 35 words for Obama's oath of office. "He was more than a little befuddled when he found himself face to face with Obama," they explained. "No one had told him that Obama is black."

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And this blogger is 3X happy. Not only is Dubya gone and Obama in, but the folks in politics are still providing "can you believe it?" material for our amusement. At least we're getting something for our tax dollars. And this might just be proof that as we approach the perfect society, we'll still have politics. How do I know this? Because a perfect society has to include humor and really, doesn't the existence of humor argue for the persistence of politics?

Hope Yet for the Republican Party

A beautiful thing happened on the way to the Republican nomination. The loudest voices in the Republican Party of the last couple of decades have been, uhm, obnoxious, shrill, and unyielding. And now these thought(less) leaders are being ignored by the majority of primary voters.

Ann Coulter has done well for herself. She doesn't have the looks to be a model, the wit to be a shock jock, or the intelligence to be a political pundit, but she's somehow turned these 3 short comings into a package that looks to most like a piece wood lying flat on the ground yet is sold to rabid fans as a three-legged stool. She is so upset about McCain gaining the nomination that she has threatened to vote for Hillary. (Which would be like a Muslim threatening to become an Episcopalian .) Rush Limbaugh, too, denounces McCain as "not a real conservative" and has been urging listeners to vote against him.

In spite of all this, McCain is the one serious Republican candidate left standing.

The shock media stars have problems with McCain because, among other things, he is against torture, is for the constitution, and feels that we ought to begin creating some alternatives to oil. That shock media stars would try to make this sound shameful is a confession of how far they've gone to prostitute good policy to good ratings. That McCain would emerge as the clear front runner in spite of their rants suggests that average Republicans have now realized that these shock media stars don't care about the world of average Republicans but care, instead and only, about ratings and book sales.

This is good news. For the foreseeable future, Republicans are going to have some - maybe lots - of influence. If saner voices prevail, this influence might stop being so pernicious. It'll be a great day when our neighbors and coworkers of the conservative bent stop letting the likes of Rush, Ann, and Michael Savage tell them what to think. Wanting a smaller government does not have to equate to hatred towards anyone who is different. If the Republican Party does not want to become irrelevant and obsolete, it will clearly embrace and trumpet this simple truth.

Barack and Conspiracy Theory Time

News flash. Barack Obama attended a Muslim madrassa in Indonesia. This is a source of great excitement among the right-wingosphere. (I've decided that I may as well add -osphere to everything - it sounds so 21st century.)

Here's the prediction about how the Barack Obama conspiracy theory will finally be spun. I can just hear Rush Limbaugh passing this along.

"Folks, I don't know if this is true or not. I don't know if the rumors about Barack Obama basically being a Manchurian candidate, a sleeper cell candidate for Muslim extremists, are true or not. I do know that these kinds of rumors make me nervous. I mean, what do we know about this guy? He was a nobody two years ago!" And like that, Obama will lose 10% in the polls. If it were property Rush were defacing he could be charged with vandalism. As it is, it's just considered politics as normal.

There are at least two really wonderful things about a conspiracy theory. One is that the lack of evidence to support it simply reinforces just how insidious and powerful is this conspiracy. And two, even though a conspiracy theory makes it sounds like the bad guys are in charge, it at least reassures people that someone is in charge. Things aren't actually unpredictable and difficult to understand.

The model of media as something that discovers facts and then reports on them is so old school. As our right-wing talk show hosts are about to show us once again, it is so much more cost-effective to just create your own facts.