an immersion in right wing media

[basilosaurus]

Frank Rich, NYMag, immersed himself for a week of all kinds of right week media, during the RNC, and notes the despair about the party and Romney. Interesting, but long, read.

nymag.com/news/frank-rich/right-wing-media-2012-9/

an excerpt

You don’t have to agree with these people’s politics to see they have a compelling beef. They are true believers in a minimalist American government. They see Obama’s economic record as a golden opportunity to throw him out. They helped propel Ryan, a dogged champion of conservative ideals, onto the national ticket. And they saw all of that jeopardized by a Republican National Committee and Romney campaign that muted and dumbed down the message in its tightly disciplined, highly scripted game plan to win over the tiny and elusive percentage of American voters who hold no strong views at all. It’s no wonder that the only authentic moment in the convention was also its only improvised one. When Clint Eastwood implicitly inserted the words “Tell Romney to fuck himself” into the mouth of his imaginary “Obama,” he tapped, however artlessly, into the raw id of the right as nothing else in the convention did all week. For an instant, his off-message and off-script gesture of profane disrespect for the president captured the grassroots anger that went largely unacknowledged by the mainstream press and Fox alike.

Since Eastwood’s turn was perhaps the most replayed video of the entire convention, it may have done damage to the convention’s “more in sorrow than anger” political strategy—assuming that strategy was sound. On November 6, we’ll learn if the party Establishment and Romney campaign knew what they were doing by striking that pacifist tone, or whether the angry voices on the right who opposed them can say, “I told you so.” We’ll learn as well whether the Republican Party is on a path to revive the Reagan revolution or, as the blogger Doug Mataconis has it at Outside the Beltway, in a self-destructive tailspin mirroring that of “the Democratic Party in the wake of the Vietnam War.” Either way, I finished the week with sympathy for true believers on the right who are far more divorced from their own political party and the nation’s culture than even those on the left who are perennially disillusioned by Obama, the Democratic hierarchy, and their own journalistic Establishment. That anger is certain to rage long past Election Day, and if I learned anything in my week strolling around the conservative mind, it was that anyone who sticks to an exclusive diet of lamestream media is missing the news.

[IIOY]

Interesting and not altogether surprising. I follow many of the individuals named in this article on Twitter and their disappointment is broadcast every single day. The libertarians in particular despise Romney.

IME the comments about conservative pundits' use of, or failure to use, social media to the extent that liberals do is very true.

[ESF]

I think it's interesting but I think the same thing can be said about the left. I think there's a big disconnect between what most true liberals believe and want, and what people think the left believes. I read the NRO on occasion, and the way they describe liberalism or liberal support for Obama often misses the mark completely.

Also, I love how he excluded Brooks, Sullivan, and Frum from his repetoire. That cracked me up because even though the three are all very different from one other, it definitely seems like both liberals and conservatives like to claim that those three belong to the other side. It's interesting though because Frum and Sullivan write for the Daily Beast, which I'd categorize as sort of moderate libertarian, and that is one web publication that seems to have figured out a way to look very hip, cool, and snarky. If that site can do it, surely other conservatives in the media can figure it out.