Right Wing Media: congratulations Rush Limbaugh on three full years of sobriety!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Right Wing Media: congratulations Rush Limbaugh on three full years of sobriety!

flatbus: Sep 19, 2012

Thundercracker posted:

I've always wondered why the left wasn't able to replicate the same thing. If SA is to go by the ultra-left isn't short on incoherent rage. Why is there no leftist version of Rush calling people unamerican?

I'd like to think the left is better than lying to get what they want. Also, SA is by no means ultra-left, but the rage voiced by posters every now and then is pretty coherent.

I'd like to ask what can actually be done about all this spin. There's this common pop-psychology trope I see posted every now and then that facts don't matter, and a poster brought up Gramsci who studied this exact phenomenon in the 30s - why working class Italians were spending their hard-earned money on bourgeois newspapers, and why they were going with fascists and capitalists rather than communists. The framework of hegemony, and presenting the interests of the elite as coincident with that of the subalterns, describes modern-day right wing media very well. But now that we know right wing media is doing this and we can catch them red-handed, no one seems to care. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the right wing media machine and how can the weak points be exploited?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2012 19:52

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 21:18

flatbus: Sep 19, 2012

Posting my question from last page here for reference.

flatbus posted:

The framework of hegemony, and presenting the interests of the elite as coincident with that of the subalterns, describes modern-day right wing media very well. But now that we know right wing media is doing this and we can catch them red-handed, no one seems to care. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the right wing media machine and how can the weak points be exploited?

I Am The Scum posted:

One of the wisest moves the right wing ever did was create and foster the notion of left-leaning bias in the media. This is the perfect outlet for inevitable cognitive dissonance. I will explain briefly.

Every conservative will inevitably realize the following two ideas:

1. As a conservative, I like conservative ideas/policies/politicians.

2. The latest headline shows that a particular conservative idea/policy/politician is flawed.

These two ideas are clearly in conflict, at least slightly. Now, as rational creatures, we'd like to believe that item #2, the very clear evidence that the conservative idea is bad, will indicate that the person's feelings about the idea (item #1) were flawed. It would be easy for the individual to conclude that maybe the ideas just weren't as good as they initially thought. Maybe we can make them work by changing other things, or perhaps the circumstances were wrong. It's not a big concession. No big deal, right?

But this rarely happens. Instead, they find a flaw in item #2. But how could that be? Well, clearly there is a massive liberal conspiracy throughout all of American media. Never mind the fact that you can't actually find any real evidence of bias. Never mind the fact that there are plenty of examples where the media was distinctly not biased for the left, such as when Romney was unanimously declared the winner of the first debate. It just has to be true!

Part of the problem is that politics in this country is treated as a sport. Admitting that there is actual, factual evidence out there that would make your side appear as though it is not 100% in the right is like sacrificing yards. The attitude displayed in political discourse, from the water cooler to the White House, is nothing like what you would see from someone who was honestly trying to reach an accurate conclusion.

It's not an intellectual exercise. It's a show. And this country loving loves it.

I don't have any ideas on how to fix it, though. Sorry.

I was thinking about the question a bit more and this is what I think is important about Fox News. Truth and fact-finding can be intuitively reduced to the M�nchhausen Trilemma that an empirical fact which someone else tells you, that you haven't experienced, really boils down to an appeal to authority, and by dressing up as that authority you can invent the axioms which frame discourse and truth. It also helps the right that, contrary to economic assumptions, people are irrational and would rather side with their tribe than what's true.

I'm going to posit a theory that tribalism and adoration of their ideals is what keeps people going as conservatives even when the politicians they vote for harm their constituents. From my personal experience, people don't care whether what they say is right or wrong until it comes around and they see it affects themselves. Up till that point, it's all fun and sports. Because the turnaround for the effects of voting is long and indirect in a representative democracy (one day's action propagates to what appears to be irrelevant or unintended effects later on), there's no visceral connection from political decision to state action, which creates an area for politics to turn into spectacle. By that reasoning, it's an inefficient bureaucracy that's causing this problem.

As you can see I'm floundering here because I just ended up blaming representative democracy, which seems a bit absurd. I'm thinking off the cuff so the proportion of hogwash is going to be high. Looking forward to better analysis from more even-keeled goons.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2012 21:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Right Wing Media: congratulations Rush Limbaugh on three full years of sobriety!