American Thinker: Talkers fill GOP leadership vacuum

The Old Media are in a breathless tizzy over Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk show hosts. These high-profile voices of the Right speak to ever-larger audiences. They provide a logical and devastating criticism of the leftist agenda of the Obama Administration on a daily basis. So, Old Media asks: Are these conservative talkers the new leaders of the Republican Party?

The answer is yes, by default.

The Republican Party has a defined structure of local, state and national leaders. As a precinct committeeman and local party chairman, I am part of this structure. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is working diligently to communicate the conservative message. However, Steele is hampered by a media reluctant to shine their light on an African-American conservative success story. More importantly, Steele is constrained by a party apparatus dominated by non-conservatives.

Limbaugh et al suffer no such constraints. They are free to broadcast conservative principles in their own unfiltered style. The desire of liberal lawmakers to restrict their access to the public airwaves is proof of their influence and importance to the conservative cause. The talkers are not a danger to America — they are a threat to the liberal media and political monopoly.

A common refrain from the base is: Why aren’t Republicans doing anything to stop the Democrats? Of course, most are voting against liberal proposals such as higher taxes, higher spending and bigger government. The problem is that Republicans are the minority party in a representative democracy.

Between elections, the only way to stop the majority party is to threaten their majority status. This is achieved by generating ample issue-oriented public outcry that worries the most vulnerable of the majority party legislators. However, you can’t beat something with nothing. So, you have to channel that public outcry into action.

This is where the Republican Party is failing. They are not connecting with the town hall dissenters and Tea Party protestors. Some Republican elected officials even act embarrassed by these citizens turned activists. The liberal media immediately highlights these embarrassed Republicans to marginalize the protestors. Rather than pushing them away, the Republican Party should be recruiting these folks. These citizen-activists need a channel for their energy and passion and their natural home is the Republican Party. Protests are for publicity, elections determine government policy.

So, where does the ignored and derided would-be citizen-activist turn? Logically, to those they hear every day confirming the correctness of their beliefs – Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the thousands of other conservative talk show hosts trumpeting their cause. Many a host is asked: What can I do? Sadly, the answer is never to contact your local Republican Party.

The Republican Party ignores this ample public outcry at its peril. However, more than political irrelevance and election defeat is at stake. America will pay the much higher price.

h/t Freedom’s Lighthouse

You and I are nothing but Klu Klux Klan members. This according to the world of Garofalo.

h/t Freedom’s Lighthouse

The media coverage of our economy has bordered on the absurd over the last nine months. If Bush were President the media would be outlining how bad the economy is, but with Obama they promote a recovery. Mark Levin has the truth by the numbers:

“They would not listen, they’re not listening still,

“Perhaps they never will.” — Don McLean, “Vincent”

Radio and TV commentator Glenn Beck was mentioned three times in separate opinion columns on the same day and in an article the next day in The New York Times, possibly a record for someone who does not hold elective office.

Oh, and then there’s this week’s Time magazine cover. He’s everywhere. Beck is also the Left’s latest explanation for what is wrong with America. Many on the Left believe that if conservatives would just get out of the way, shut up and allow liberals to re-create America in their image, we would all be better off. But those loud-mouthed cable TV and radio talk show hosts keep uneducated, God-worshipping, flag-waving, NASCAR-loving, country music-fueled trailer trash riled up and prevent their brave new world from being born.

The articles, essays and columns about Beck, and so many others on the Right, drip with the condescension conservatives have come to expect from liberal elites who think because they went to the “right” schools they are better than everyone else.

I had not met Glenn Beck, so last week I visited him in his high-rise Manhattan office. His walls are decorated with black-and-white photographs of people he clearly admires. There are entertainers like Red Skelton and a young filmmaker named Walt Disney. You could watch Skelton on TV and view Disney movies along with your wife and kids, knowing you’d never hear a bad word, including a bad word about America.

Beck has an old Admiral black-and-white TV an aide says they are trying to “make work.” When it did work, it carried programs worth watching, including news broadcasts by real journalists like Edward R. Murrow, whose photo hangs on a wall close to Beck’s office.

Is it Beck who is stirring the pot or has the pot been stirring for some time and it is he, and a few others, giving the masses a voice? Maybe it’s the leadership vacuum in the country that has thrust Beck and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin (1 million of his latest book sold) and others to the forefront. If Republicans were behaving like Republicans, perhaps there would be less perceived need for them.

If the Left bothered to hang out where conservatives do and take seriously their concerns about a country to which they pay taxes and for which many of them, or their parents, or children have fought, maybe they would understand what has so many upset.

Pollster Frank Luntz understands. In a recent column for The New York Daily News, Luntz reports on his interview survey of 6,400 people, the results of which appear in his new book “What Americans Really Want … Really.” Luntz discovered that people are angry with the government because of the lack of accountability by our leaders and a lack of progress on anything meaningful in Washington.

The “absence of accountability,” he writes, “ranks No. 1 in the hearts and guts of the average American. Washington spends billions to bail out big business and then can’t explain where the money went. Washington spends $800 billion on a stimulus package filled with earmarks and pork projects. And now Washington is trying to create a trillion-dollar health-care experiment when over 85 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care just as it is.”

As Professor Harold Hill put it: “Make your blood boil? Well, I should say.”

Luntz continues: “This could be forgiven, perhaps, if those elected officials from Washington exhibited even an ounce of respect for the voters who pay their salaries. But the combination of a political class that ignores those with whom they disagree and a business class that ignores the very real suffering of the working class (if they are, in fact, working) while pocketing million-dollar bonuses has convinced the public that no one cares.”

Glenn Beck seems to care and that’s why his ratings are now challenging the godfather of cable, Bill O’Reilly.

I ask if he fears being transformed into another “Lonesome Rhodes,” the politically corrupted main character in Budd Schulberg’s classic film, “A Face in the Crowd”? Beck tells me I am not the first to warn of such a possibility. He says he isn’t worried about yielding to that temptation. Beck believes in God and doesn’t think government is Him. And he’s going to his son’s ball game the next day.

That explains Glenn Beck. Any questions?

Cal Thomas at Townhall

While attending Chicago’s 9/12 Tea Party, I ran into this frequent talk radio caller who had much to say about our current government. If you listen to the Mark Levin Show you will probably recognize his voice.

He is from Hungary, but was lucky enough to escape that communist country, ultimately coming to the United States. This background gives him a unique perspective on our democracy and the threats posed by President Obama and the Democrat Congress.

Talk radio did not form his beliefs, yet it has given him a meaningful sense that he is not alone. He knows his hosts and regularly listens to Mark Levin, Bill Bennett, and Rusty Humphries.

I can not say that this video was slickly produced, but it is captivating. Please pardon the rookie nature of this video.

I just returned from the Chicago Tea Party Protest in Millennium Park. The locale was the same one that President Obama used as a backdrop for his 2008 victory speech. Like that event, this one was all about freedom. This is Obama’s Chicago, but there was not a counter-protester in site. No ACORN; no unions; no victims of our current health care system; just hundreds of well dressed, well behaved American patriots.

President Obama’s Millennium Park Address contained soaring rhetoric and implied great pride in America. Today’s protesters demonstrated a different kind of patriotism. While Obama’s pride was for a country with the wisdom to elect him, theirs was a pride grounded in the principles of our country’s founding fathers and in those who have sought to live up to the promise of our Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

The hand-held signs found throughout the crowd convey this pride and the determination to protect that which makes America great. Most of the signs were handmade and few, if any, were held by more than one protester. This was a grassroots affair. No soaring rhetoric; no professional organizers, no talk show hosts, and very little media.

I will be posting many more pictures from the event, but this set is about true American patriots.

Lorie Byrd : Becoming the Mainstream Media – Townhall.com

As a college student back in the stone ages, one bumper sticker I always saw plenty of when attending Republican events said “CBS is Rather Biased.” Well, it wasn’t the stone ages, but it was during the Reagan years, which now seems in so many ways ages ago. The point is that conservatives have complained about media bias for decades.

An egregious example of media bias just played out in the Van Jones story – one I believe highlights a major shift in the mainstream media. First though, a bit of background is worth considering.

Conservatives have not only complained about media bias, but for many years have attempted to achieve balance in the mainstream media in various ways.

Watchdog groups like Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center have identified, tracked and catalogued liberal media bias hoping to shame those in the mainstream media into at least attempting the appearance of balance. Alternative media have emerged to do some of the reporting those in the mainstream media have refused to do, at times even forcing those traditional news outlets to cover the stories themselves.

Rush Limbaugh’s incredibly popular syndicated talk radio show was one of the first big successes for conservatives trying to get their message past the mainstream media. More recently, the rise of the internet and Fox News Channel have enabled stories ignored by the mainstream media to reach a mass audience.

One hope conservatives have had all along was that those in the mainstream media would be shamed into covering stories that those in alternative media exposed. That hope has unfortunately seldom been realized.

With the commercial success of Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel, conservatives hoped those in the mainstream media would see the market for a conservative viewpoint and would add that perspective to their coverage, or at least tone down their liberal slant. If shame didn’t work, maybe the power of the profit motive would. Evidently some things are more important to NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and MSNBC than money, and those things are not truth and fairness.

As those network news organizations hemorrhaged viewers, Fox News Channel grew to not only be the number one cable news channel, but to often outperform its cable rivals several fold.

If those in the mainstream media had been smart they would have hired some young and hungry reporters determined to find the truth, regardless of the associated political ramifications. They might have hired editors and producers who would make it a point to review their work with a critical eye, looking for bias. They might have at the very least tried to hire a few people with conservative leanings to let them know what their conservative readers, listeners and viewers might want to see covered. That didn’t happen though, at least not often enough to note.What is happening now is something those in the conservative movement might not have ever dreamed possible. Although the goal of reforming the mainstream media has not been achieved, something more amazing has. In some ways the outlets conservatives hoped would provide balance to the mainstream media, are becoming the mainstream.

Something happened last week that underscored this phenomenon. News outlets like the New York Times and NBC and ABC evening newscasts refused to cover the revelations surrounding President Obama’s “green jobs” czar, Van Jones. When those revelations of Jones signing a 911 “Truther” petition, calling Republicans a—holes and claiming white polluters were poisoning black communities reached the point that Jones was forced to resign, some of those news outlets had to cover the resignation. What should cause them embarrassment and damage any shred of credibility they have left as reliable news sources is that many of them had neglected to inform their audiences of any of the events leading up to the resignation.

As Andrew Breitbart put it, “For most people in this country, the resignation was the first they had heard of Van Jones. For this sin of journalistic omission, there’s institutional media blame. Bias is too tame a word for the utter shamelessness on display: Only Republican scandals – real and imagined – matter.”

Blogger Kim Priestap said that since Fox News was the only media outlet to cover Van Jones’ radicalism, some in the conservative community say that shows Fox is the mainstream media and the other broadcast outlets are the fringe. The numbers certainly point to that.

Fox News regularly beats its cable news competitors. Glenn Beck’s show on Fox (which heavily covered the Van Jones story) recently saw its audience exceed 3 million viewers – and that is for a show that airs at 5 p.m. EST when most viewers are still at work.

Beck repeatedly draws more viewers than all his cable news competitors combined. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC was so outraged by Beck’s coverage of Van Jones’ past that Olbermann put out a plea to readers of the liberal Daily Kos blog to dig up dirt on Glenn Beck, his producer, and Fox News President Roger Ailes. I guess when Olbermann’s attempt to claim Fox News was not the top rated cable news channel because they were not a real news channel didn’t work, and since beating Fox in the ratings by actually reporting the news to viewers is not an option for the truth-challenged Olbermann and his colleagues at MSNBC, hoping to dig up some dirt on the competition must be the last, best option.

Refusing to report news about the background of a man in charge of billions of taxpayer dollars was bad, and made even worse since that news was already appearing all over the internet and on the highest rated cable news channel in the country. But when leading cable news pseudo-journalists like Olbermann, and even respected news legends like Tom Brokaw, attacked those who dared to tell the truth about Jones’ past, they furthered the idea that Fox is the mainstream and they are the fringe.

Fox News, talk radio and internet news sources are not just in competition with CNN and MSNBC. They are still vastly outnumbered by not only national newspapers and network news, but also even some content that appears in non-news programming. In that respect, Fox and alternative media are still in the minority, but a trend is growing at record speed. That trend is for those seeking news to head to sources like Fox News, talk radio and the internet. That would make those sources the mainstream. It almost boggles the mind. Conservative thought has always been the mainstream. Maybe the country’s choice of where they get their news is finally following.