Columbia Journalism Review

Vitriol.  2. caustic or hostile speech, criticism, or feeling.

Most progressives I know pay little attention to conservative talk radio.  We don’t listen to it, therefore, it is easy enough to put it out of our minds as if it doesn’t exist (kind of like CAFOs…).

But tens of millions of people do listen and their thinking is influenced by the vitriol of these “shock jocks.”  Conservative talk radio validates and affirms small-mindedness and creates an election-swinging size pool of horribly disinformed voters.  Obama said during the campaign that Fox News alone was costing him 2% of the vote. 

If you remain unconvinced, please read this excerpt of an article by Columbia Journalism Review – click on these links to read the whole thing.  It is also posted at Media Channel.

Few people who did not regularly tune in to the vast, churning combine of bellowing radio hosts, yapping bloggers, obnoxious Web sites, malicious columnists, and the slashingly partisan Fox News have any idea of just how vile and venomous were the attacks leveled at Obama.

Leading the way was Rush Limbaugh. An estimated fourteen to twenty million people tune in to his show every week, and he treated them to nonstop character assassination, calling the Democratic candidate the Messiah, a revolutionary socialist, a liar, “Osama Obama,” a man with a “perverted mind” who wants to destroy America and the middle class, a front man for terrorists who wants to turn the country into a version of Castro’s Cuba or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

According to Michael Savage (eight million listeners), “Barack Madrasah Obama” was “hand-picked by some very powerful forces both within and outside the United States of America to drag this country into a hell that it has not seen since the Civil War.” [apparently not counting the past eight years of hell of the Bush administration…]

Laura Ingraham (5.5 million listeners) spent her nights fuming over Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah, Ayers, Wright, ACORN, and, in the campaign’s final days, the “racist-terrorist” Rashid Khalidi. She urged listeners to call a toll-free number with any information they might have about the “terrorist party tape” that showed Obama at an event honoring the Palestinian professor.

In light of Obama’s victory, one might be tempted to let it all pass. That would be a mistake. For the effects of that campaign remain with us. What’s more, the campaign itself is still going on.

(click here to read the entire article at Media Channel).
 

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