On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 7:59 AM, Bob in Jersey <[email protected]>wrote:
> Speaking of HuffPost, Sarah O'Brien blogging there appears to believe the > Feds can do to Rush what some thought it could do to Imus... directly act > to toss him from the air, and revoke a supposed personal licence much as > she herself claimed to have obtained in the 80s... [Seth] Really!? > > http://goo.gl/yPhoN > This is the kind of over-reaching that ensures that no matter how self-destructive conservatives get, liberals can never really establish a dominant position in the American ideological topography. There is another piece on HuffPo that illustrates the same point (see below). I am not against all boycotts and picket lines (physical or virtual), but I do think that, strategically, these should be reserved for the really big issues (if you are not sure if your issue is big enough, look around and see if someone like Martin Luther King, or Caesar Chavez, is leading it). Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot, and making his idiocy more plain for common folk is a good idea. But trying to get him banned from the radio waves is not just stupid, it is self-destructive - as are the boycott efforts. Inevitably, the result is not just to keep people like Limbaugh and Imus off the air, but to narrow the range of content that is on the public air. The same people who will might refuse to sponsor Limbaugh will one day refuse to sponsor 30 Rock, or The Simpsons, or The Colbert Report. We (liberals) hate (or should hate) Limbaugh, not because we disagree with him, but because he tries to create a small and narrow universe in which anyone not like him gets marginalized and demonized. It seems obvious that we should have no interest in doing the reverse. "According to a memo published by the industry website Radio-Info.com<http://www.radio-info.com/news/when-it-comes-to-advertisers-avoiding-controversial-shows-its-not-just-rush>, at least 98 advertisers -- including big names like Ford, GM and McDonald's -- have indicated they want to avoid "environments likely to stir negative sentiments." (SNIP, to the memo itself) "They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/10/talk-radio-losing-advertisers_n_1336634.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HP%2FPolitics+%28Politics+on+The+Huffington+Post%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
