KJL at The Corner [1] says:
There is something deeply unAmerican about the Center for American Progress’s plan for dealing with the Left’s inability to compete on talk radio — we have an editorial on it today, here [2].
But you see, I’ve been calling the left unAmerican for some time now. And catching hell for it, too. But its actions like these on the part of the left that caused me to label them so. Example…The article she refers to says, in part:
Remember Jim Hightower? We didn’t think so. He was the former Texas state official who was, for a few minutes, the Left’s great hope for a liberal talk-radio host to challenge the domination of Rush Limbaugh. It didn’t work out. Neither did former New York governor Mario Cuomo, another failed radio talker. And neither did, most recently, Air America, the attempt to build an entire network of liberal talk.
Nothing has worked too successfully for liberal political talkers. Rush, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, among others, are as dominant as ever. The only thing that has changed is that liberals now seem less interested in challenging conservative talk radio in the marketplace than in strangling it with government regulation. And that presents a much greater threat than another misguided attempt to find the liberal Limbaugh.
…
Surveying 257 stations owned by the top-five commercial station groups, the report’s authors found the unsurprising news that 91 percent of total weekday talk programming is conservative, and just nine percent “progressive.” Rather than attribute that imbalance to the generally conceded superiority of conservative programming — most radio professionals would tell you that Rush Limbaugh is simply better at what he does than any of the liberal opponents who have tried to compete with him — the report finds a deeper, more sinister case. “The gap between conservative and progressive talk radio,” it concludes, “is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system. ” According to Podesta’s Center, those structural problems can only be solved by government action.
So seeing that what they’re selling isn’t being bought by the American people, their solution is to regulate it to death. I submit to you, that the polling data coming back from the ratings services as regards the comparative number of listeners, for each type of radio show, is ultimately a measure of where the heart and soul of the nation is. So, what we’re seeing here, is democrats working in precisely the opposite direction of what the American people want. Gee big surprise… that I would call them UnAmerican. They themselves provide the proof.
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