Tag: Conor Friedersdorf

Almost no one remembers Bill O’Reilly’s searing attack on Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio hosts. But it happened. “These idiots,” the most popular conservative tv personality in America said. “I mean, they’re misleading you. They’re lying to you.” As he explained it, “most talk radio is conservative-dominated ideologues; Kool-Aid drinking idiots.” They’re rich guys with “big cigars,” he continued, causing many to believe he was singling out Limbaugh. “Walk away from these liars, these right-wing liars,” he warned. “Walk away from them! They’re not looking out for you.”

The response was swift.

Talk radio’s Mark Levin, a volatile man as prone to sudden, unexpected outbursts of anger as O’Reilly, hit back. “These blowhards,” he said. “You get arrogant, stupid people who get paid a lot of money to be on radio and TV to be arrogant and stupid. And one of them… is on the Fox News Channel, my favorite cable channel. And he has a fledgling radio show that has no ratings, and he’ll be off radio soon because he’s a failure. It’s the non-factor: Bill O’Reilly.” He went on to call O’Reilly a “moron, phony journalist” who is “utterly unencumbered with information.”

Amazing, right? Even titans of right-wing media believe that other titans right-wing media are disingenuous hucksters! As someone whose been making that same critique since around 2008, when that exchange took place, I can’t help but chuckle at all the times I’ve been denounced by conservative bloggers for pointing out the very truths spoken by O’Reilly and Levin: that high profile conservative entertainers regularly violate the trust of their conservative fans. Limbaugh does, in fact, mislead on a weekly basis; O’Reilly is, in fact, curiously unencumbered by facts on occasions when they get in the way of something that he “knows” to be true.

It’s just that conservatives don’t usually admit that about their entertainers. It would benefit the rank-and-file to hear about it when someone “on their side” is cynically or carelessly feeding them bad information. But conservatives who know better often stay silent. The truth is willfully suppressed. 

That last bit is the most difficult to prove. Plenty of conservatives admit, off the record, that the right is hurt by the surfeit of false or misleading information broadcast everyday in right-leaning media. Almost all are reluctant to speak up. Some conservative reformers know that their vital ideas won’t get a hearing among an already skeptical rank-and-file if they criticize certain right-wing icons, or else doubt that criticizing them is a worthwhile project quite apart from its consequences.

Why waste time on blowhards?

Others would like to speak up, but don’t want their careers to suffer, or to wade through a week’s worth of vicious emails, attacks from bloggers that border on libel, and other unpleasantness.

Who can blame any of them?

In aggregate, however, their individual decisions ensure that hucksterism goes mostly unchallenged, that the most popular conservative entertainers aren’t pressured or shamed into dispensing better information, and that the rank-and-file operates at an ongoing information disadvantage. (For an example of that information disadvantage and its consequences see November 2012.)

What Bill O’Reilly said about conservative talk radio in 2008 was brave, insofar as he was offering a critique he believed to be important and true, even though multiple incentives aligned against him doing so. It would’ve been big news, and might’ve had a huge impact if, hours after uttering that critique on his radio show, he would’ve said the same thing on his Fox News show, a vastly bigger platform. I’d never given much thought to why the conservative entertainer backed down and aborted his critique, and had long since forgotten about the whole intra-conservative spat. But Joe Muto, a former Fox News staffer who has just published a tell-all book, claims he knows the rest of the story. Here’s the relevant excerpt, as it’s posted over at Salon:

The cigar and private jet stuff was a thinly veiled swipe at Rush Limbaugh, someone O’Reilly has never liked, but also a figure who had a lot of fans at 1211 Sixth Avenue, including Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity. When word filtered to the Second Floor that O’Reilly planned on repeating some of his radio rant on the TV show that night, the order came back quickly: Absolutely not. But O’Reilly put his foot down. Neither Stan Manskoff nor Bill Shine could dissuade him, and it took a phone call from Roger himself to put the matter to rest.

Bill took the call in his office, politely but insistently pleading his case to Ailes, but Roger held firm. Bill reluctantly agreed to toe the party line, excused himself from the call, gently hung up the receiver, then loudly yelled a string of expletives that could be heard all over the seventeenth floor. But after he got it out of his system, he spiked the Limbaugh reference from the TV show.

So there you have it.

If his account is accurate, it’s the quintessential illustration of rot at the core of conservative media. O’Reilly, a broadcaster with more clout than any other on-air personality at Fox News, and one of the most prominent conservative pundits in America — a guy who wrote a book titled, “Who’s Looking out For You?” — thinks, or at least thought, that America’s most popular conservative entertainer, Limbaugh, lied to and misled his conservative audience, and that he was doing harm to his listeners and America itself at a moment of crisis. O’Reilly basically said so on the radio. He reportedly wanted to say so on television, too. But Roger Ailes wouldn’t let him.

Rather than risk the consequences of disobeying, O’Reilly reportedly censored himself. Perhaps he thought Ailes had the right to determine what airs on his network. Or that the disagreement wasn’t worth losing his hefty salary, or his ability to daily broadcast a television show he believes to be valuable. If the anecdote is accurate, it nevertheless stops short of revealing O’Reilly’s motive, and that’s okay, because I’m not here to insist that this is a demonstration of farsighted prudence, servile cowardice, or something in between. All I’m saying is that conservatives who regard Limbaugh as a destructive force, right up to the most powerful figures in the movement, can always find lots of reasons to back away from criticizing him. And that helps explain why, over the years, Limbaugh has become a less responsible broadcaster, and a bigger liability to conservatives: he’s never been reined in by peers, who seldom criticize him in a way ties his intra-conservative prestige to broadcasting defensible content.

Having known several journalists on the left and right who’ve criticized powerful people “on their own side” without untold millions to fall back on, I’d personally have more respect for O’Reilly if he followed up on his 2008 critique. Lord knows talk radio hasn’t changed, and his words, though prompted by a disagreement over the financial crisis, were general. But I fear that no one who shares my instincts on these matters would’ve made it to a prime time show on Fox. Ailes is a smart man, and presumably a good judge of who won’t cross lines in the sand that he draws. So the status quo persists, where the only people willing to tell rank-and-file conservatives the truth about their favorite entertainers are people rank-and-file conservatives don’t trust.

Today, O’Reilly is eager to convey this message: there’s no feud with Limbaugh. Does he protest too much? Or is he no longer upset by the way talk radio daily abuses the trust of its audience?

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/on-the-brink-of-a-feud-with-rush-limbaugh-bill-oreilly-backed-down/276449/

Leak investigation, meet Bieber fever.

A national security official in the Obama Administration has emailed the good folks at Lawfare to defend the idea that Fox News correspondent James Rosen broke federal law while reporting.

Consider the analogy he or she uses:

The Department of Justice did not claim that the Fox News reporter in the Stephen Jin-Woo Kim case committed a crime merely by publishing classified information. According to the Government’s filing… the reporter in question actively asked people with access to classified information to break the law by providing him classified information he could publish. He used false names and “dead drop” email accounts to do so. In other words, he wasn’t someone to whom a whistleblower came to disclose information; he was actively asking people to violate the law, and enabling them to do so. Remember, there’s no doubt that–assuming Mr. Kim is the guilty party–he violated the law if he disclosed properly classified information to a reporter.

Let’s look at an analogy. If a reporter finds Justin Bieber’s private diary on the street and publishes it, that’s journalism (of a sort). But if she pays someone to break into Bieber’s house to steal the diary, hasn’t she has aided and abetted, or conspired in, a crime, even if her intent is to get material to publish? That’s exactly what the Government says happened here–a reporter soliciting, and aiding and abetting criminal activity.

I’d like to fix the analogy so that it better reflects the ethical issues at play.

First off, the reporter doesn’t pay someone to break into Bieber’s house. Instead, he pays someone who is already permitted access to the diary, but sworn to secrecy — an assistant who scans its pages into digital format for storage — to leak. That alone would still be wrong, of course.

But we aren’t through.

In the more accurate analogy, Bieber’s job involves wielding extraordinary power on behalf of all Americans; everything he writes in his diary is work-for-hire and bankrolled by the American people, who own it; he has sporadically abused his authority in the past; and recent abuses were only discovered when his assistant passed US Weekly a series of diary pages detailing the pop star’s illegal spying on Americans, his systematic torture of foreigners, and his security detail’s lethal attack on paparazzi! Also, Bieber’s job contract with Americans specifically notes that reporters are to help keep him accountable, and that no one can abridge their freedom to do so.

If all that were factored into the analogy, then it wouldn’t be misleading to compare the behavior of Rosen to a reporter who paid someone to steal away pages from Justin Bieber’s diary.

None of which is to say that Rosen’s judgment comes off particularly well in this case…

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/is-reporting-on-state-secrets-like-stealing-justin-biebers-diary/276109/

A 2010 Rasmussen survey found 24 percent of voters associated themselves with the protest movement. Today the figure is 8 percent.

As the Tea Party peaked, I told NPR’s Guy Raz that the protest movement was a 2010 phenomenon, and would fade unless its membership supplemented its presence in the streets with a clearer idea of the policy changes it sought. Ensuing months offered evidence that I was right. The Tea Party could never square its demands for smaller government with the desire of its membership to hold Social Security and especially Medicare sacrosanct. Its electoral wing failed to put forth any viable candidates in the 2012 primaries and was scarcely mentioned at the RNC. But even I’m surprised by the decline in support that Rasmussen is reporting based on a recent telephone survey of voters. Back in 2010, the polling organization found that 24 percent of voters identified as Tea Party members. In its most recent poll, only 8 percent of voters identify with the Tea Party and just 30 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of it.
  
I’ve frequently pointed out the Tea Party’s flaws, but I still regard this as bad news. The Tea Party is the only faction in the Republican Party that is at all concerned about civil liberties, as evidenced by Rand Paul’s lonely Senate efforts to safeguard the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. And while I think Tea Partiers made a fetish out of intransigence at the expense of compromise that would’ve delivered at least some policies sought by their constituents, it isn’t as if the post-Tea Party Republican Party isn’t every bit as bad on that metric.The establishment assimilated the movement’s pathologies, but not its refreshing, anti-insider populism.

Would I encourage rank-and-file conservatives to attempt a rescue of the movement?

In theory, I want a pro-civil liberties, fiscally conservative, dissident faction to survive in the GOP, but how can I encourage people to remain Tea Partiers in good conscience when in practice it largely means helping well connected conservatives to line their pockets? In a recent post, I pointed out that Dick Armey got an $8 million pay package when he left FreedomWorks, a Tea Party affiliated nonprofit. It sure seemed like he was being paid to keep quiet rather than revealing information that could destroy the organization, but perhaps not, given what he told Media Matters:

Former FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey says the conservative outlet that helped launch the Tea Party paid Glenn Beck at least $1 million last year to fundraise for the organization, an arrangement he said provided “too little value” for the money. 

“The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air,” Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. “I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.”

Armey, who left the organization this past fall after a dispute over its internal operations, said a similar arrangement was also in place with Rush Limbaugh, but did not know the exact financial details.

The Tea Party isn’t entirely captured by the Inside-the-Beltway huckster complex, but the ties are close enough that every earnest donor runs a risk of having a portion of their hard-earned contribution siphoned off. In Washington, lots of leeches get fat on the idealism of the grassroots. In a world where an idealist can help a friend run for city council or donate mosquito nets or make micro-finance loans or sponsor a church mission to build houses in a third world country why risk helping to pay for Beck’s next mansion? Especially when the folks running things have so mismanaged the Tea Party’s image that former members are abandoning it in droves.

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-tea-party/266972/

The Bill of Rights offers much smarter, more effective ways to safeguard liberty than preparing for armed insurrection.

In National Review, Kevin Williamson argues that nearly everyone calling for gun control either doesn’t understand or refuses to address the actual purpose of the 2nd Amendment. They talk, he says, as if there’s no legitimate reason for an American to have military grade weapons, as if the 2nd Amendment protects mere hunting and home security. “The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions,” Williamson writes. “There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny.”

Walter E. Williams makes a similar argument in his Townhall column. “There have been people who’ve ridiculed the protections afforded by the Second Amendment, asking what chance would citizens have against the military might of the U.S. government,” he writes. “Military might isn’t always the deciding factor. Our 1776 War of Independence was against the mightiest nation on the face of the earth — Great Britain. In Syria, the rebels are making life uncomfortable for the much-better-equipped Syrian regime. Today’s Americans are vastly better-armed than our founders, Warsaw Ghetto Jews and Syrian rebels. There are about 300 million privately held firearms owned by Americans. That’s nothing to sneeze at. And notice that the people who support gun control are the very people who want to control and dictate our lives.”

What do I think about this relatively common argument within the conservative movement? For now, I’ll refrain from answering. If you’re looking for considered objections, read Matt Steinglass in The Economist. In this item, we’re going to proceed as if the arguments above are correct – that there is a real danger of the U.S. government growing tyrannical; that the people must preserve checks on its power; and that the Framers best understood how to do so.

I respect that general reasoning.

What I can’t respect are the conservatives who invoke it during political battles over gun control, even as they ignore or actively oppose so many other important attempts to safeguard liberty.

Their inconsistency is incoherent.

Let me explain at greater length what I mean.

Even if we presume that the 2nd Amendment exists partly so that citizens can rise up if the government gets tyrannical, it is undeniable that the Framers built other safeguards into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to prevent things from ever getting so bad as to warrant an insurrection. Federalism was one such safeguard; the separation of powers into three branches was another; and the balance of the Bill of Rights was the last of the major safeguards.

If a “2nd Amendment solution” is ever warranted, it’ll mean our system already failed in numerous ways; that “solution” is also easily the most costly and dangerous of the safeguards we have.

It would probably mean another Civil War.

Yet the conservative movement is only reliable when it defends the 2nd Amendment. Otherwise, it is an inconsistent advocate for safeguarding liberty. Conservatives pay occasional lip service to federalism, but are generally hypocrites on the subject, voting for bills like No Child Left Behind, supporting a federally administered War on Drugs, and advocating for federal legislation on marriage. (Texas governor Rick Perry is the quintessential hypocrite on this subject).

And on the Bill of Rights, the conservative movement is far worse. Throughout the War on Terrorism, organizations like the ACLU and the Center of Constitutional Rights have reliably objected to Bush/Cheney/Obama policies, including warrantless spying on innocent Americans, indefinite detention without charges or trial, and the extrajudicial assassination of Americans. The Nation and Mother Jones reliably admit that the executive power claims made by Bush/Yoo/Obama/Koh exceed Madisonian limits and prudence informed by common sense.

Meanwhile, on the right, The Heritage Foundation, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and sundry others are more often than not active cheerleaders for those very same War on Terror policies. Due process? Warrants? Congressional oversight? You must have a pre-9/11 mindset.  

It’s one thing to argue that gun control legislation is a nonstarter, despite tens of thousands of deaths by gunshot per year, because the safeguards articulated in the Bill of Rights are sacrosanct. I can respect that… but not from people who simultaneously insist that 3,000 dead in a terrorist attack justifies departing from the plain text of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth amendments, and giving the president de-facto power to declare war without Congressional approval.

The conservative movement has a broad, textualist reading of the 2nd Amendment… and nothing else.  

I don’t understand a subset of the rank-and-file either.

If you’re a gun owner who worries that gun control today could make tyranny easier to impose tomorrow, I get that, and if you worry about federal excesses generally, I have no argument with you.

I think law-abiding Americans should always be allowed to own guns.

But if you’re a conservative gun owner who worries that gun control today could make tyranny easier to impose tomorrow, and you support warrantless spying, indefinite detention, and secret drone strikes on Americans accused of terrorism, what explains your seeming schizophrenia?

Think of it this way.

If you were a malign leader intent on imposing tyranny, what would you find more useful, banning high-capacity magazines… or a vast archive of the bank records, phone calls, texts and emails of millions of citizens that you could access in secret? Would you, as a malign leader, feel more empowered by a background check requirement on gun purchases… or the ability to legally kill anyone in secret on your say so alone? The powers the Republican Party has given to the presidency since 9/11 would obviously enable far more grave abuses in the hands of a would be tyrant than any gun control legislation with even a miniscule chance of passing Congress. So why are so many liberty-invoking 2nd Amendment absolutists reliable Republican voters, as if the GOP’s stance on that issue somehow makes up for its shortcomings? And why do they so seldom speak up about threats to the Bill of Rights that don’t involve guns?  

In the National Review piece I quoted at the beginning of this article, Kevin Williamson approvingly quotes “the words of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story — who was, it bears noting, appointed to the Court by the guy who wrote the Constitution.” Here’s the quoted passage:

The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

Conservatives love to invoke passages like that while defending a broad individual right to bear arms. Do they ever notice that its third sentence says, “It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace”? They love to invoke Madison. They are seldom if ever guided by his warning to the Constitutional Convention:

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.    

The conservative movement may be right or wrong about any number of things, but it doesn’t agree with Joseph Story or James Madison when it comes to the best way to safeguard liberty.

It’s time to admit as much.

I believe in an individual right to bear arms, and I have no problem with Americans who advocate on behalf of that right. If the feds start rounding up innocents to slaughter I have no problem with an armed citizenry fighting back. But folks who want to guard against a tyrannical government are foolish to focus on the 2nd Amendment while abandoning numerous others for fear of terrorism. The right to bear arms is the costliest liberty we have, in terms of innocent lives lost as an unintended byproduct; it is very unlikely to be exercised against the U.S. government in the foreseeable future; and its benefits are less important to securing liberty than habeus corpus and due process, as the experience of other free peoples demonstrates. I understand why people advocate on behalf of the right to bear arms, despite its costs; I don’t understand why so many behave as if it is the most important safeguard against tyranny to maintain.

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/the-strangest-conservative-priority-prepping-a-2nd-amendment-solution/266711/

The talk radio host is the voice of a coalition totally oblivious to how its racially-charged rhetoric sounds.

Rush Limbaugh is confused.

He just can’t understand why the Republican Party has so much trouble with blacks, Hispanics and women. Here’s how he put it on his nationally syndicated radio show, channeling the way that a lot of conservatives are feeling after looking at the demographic breakdown of Election 2012:

We have achieved, brilliant, highly accomplished African-Americans, blacks, Hispanics, you name it, throughout the Republican Party. They serve in office. Many of them are CEOs. It doesn’t count. It doesn’t count in the media. It doesn’t count in the Democrat Party [sic]. It doesn’t count with Obama voters about whom it is said that stuff matters most. It doesn’t count. Why not? Why, putting it somewhat coarsely, why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Condoleezza Rice?  Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Marco Rubio? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Suzanne Martinez?

How is it that Michele Bachmann, a highly achieved woman, barely, barely ekes out reelection, and Jesse Jackson Jr. at the Mayo Clinic going through everything he’s a going through, wins in a landslide? I could throw these examples up to you all afternoon. Why don’t those people, why don’t the Marco Rubios, the Allen Wests — what a great man.  What a great American. Allen West, what a great role model. Clarence Thomas. Herman Cain. None of it counts. Don’t tell me the Republican Party doesn’t have outreach.  We do.  But what are we supposed to do now?  In order to get the Hispanic or Latino vote, does that mean open the borders and embrace the illegals?  I want you to think about this.  Is that what this means? Is that what the Republican establishment means?  We’ve gotta reach out to Hispanics, is that what they mean? If we’re not getting the female vote, do we become pro-choice?  Do we start passing out birth control pills?  Is that what we have to do?

There’s no single way to make the Republican Party more appealing to blacks and Hispanics. But talk like this never ceases to amaze me with its incredible lack of self-awareness. Just what is it that Republicans like Limbaugh have to do? Here are a few useful changes that the most popular conservative entertainer in America could make to stop turning off so many black voters:

1) Stop saying things like, “Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Condoleezza Rice?”

2) Stop the shameless race-baiting, like telling listeners, “Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,’ and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white.”

3) Understand that when you commission a song called “Barack the Magic Negro” for your radio show, the average black person is going to take offense. And that if you pretend to be surprised when they do take offense, no one will believe you.

4) If you (or any other famous conservative) gets a gig doing commentary for a professional football league, probably best not to use the forum to air your pet theories about how the media coddles black quarterbacks because it is made up of guilty whites who want them to succeed.

5) Another thing you probably shouldn’t say is, “Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.” Admittedly, you didn’t say this on an NFL telecast, but it’s actually offensive in any setting.

6) Any gains you may make in the black community may be jeopardized if you once again muse, “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”

7) As you try to understand Obama’s presidency on your show, it may be a good idea to avoid reading pieces with titles like “Obama, The African Colonial” aloud, then concluding that Obama is “more African in his roots than he is American” and is “behaving like an African colonial despot.”

8) Given your track-record of quotes like the ones previously discussed, it’s probably best to avoid jokes such as, “Barack Obama has picked up another endorsement: Halfrican-American actress Halle Berry.”

9) When a black politician makes an earnest attempt to grapple with race in America, it’s perfectly fine to disagree with substantive points that he makes, but certain kinds of demagogic reactions might be unwise.

For example:

“Typical white person”? What does this reveal finally about Obama? He is not transcendent on race. Obama is telling us he is a black American first and an American second. Typical white — his grandmother, who raised him, is a typical white woman? And that these kinds of inordinate fears are bred? I have a question: I wonder how white college students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are feeling these days. I wonder if they are nervous walking down the street, and they see a couple of black boys dressed in baggy clothes with their hats on backwards swaggering toward them. I wonder how they feel. I wonder if it makes them fear that they’re going to be shot in the face for their ATM cards and their PIN numbers. Obama, do you think there might be reasons here rather than this being inbred?

10) If you have a track record like that, and then insist that it’s liberals who are obsessed with race, people will not believe you.

If I might address conservatives generally now: I don’t want to argue about whether Rush Limbaugh is a racist. Let’s presume for the sake of argument that he isn’t. It remains the case that he said everything I’ve listed above. And that’s just what I could pull together and verify in 20 minutes. Imagine how many sound-bytes Democratic opposition researchers would come up with if the GOP ever started making inroads in the black community but still associated with Limbaugh.

How could that nonsense be defended? 

To be clear, Limbaugh doesn’t speak for all Republicans — not even close.

And he is but a small part of the GOP’s demographic problem.

Still, every time a new Republican president is elected, Limbaugh gets invited to the White House. Conservative think tanks lavish him with awards. Republican politicians are eager to appear on his show, where they talk to him like an old friend. And among rank-and-file conservatives, Limbaugh is easily the most popular voice in America. Given all that, how can it possibly surprise anyone that lots of black people perceive the conservative movement as a hostile entity?

Perhaps it is actually far less hostile than they imagine. Surely you can see why many think otherwise.

Take another very popular conservative entertainer, the late Andrew Breitbart. I’ve spoken with him enough times to gather that he bore no personal animosity toward black people. Nevertheless, he was most famous for turning Shirley Sherrod’s touching story of racial redemption into a firestorm that got her fired, all so that he could try to prove a gathering of older folks at an NAACP meeting were racist. Again, this isn’t the time to argue the finer points of the matter. I’m just saying it doesn’t take much to understand how the average person would perceive that.

Or Don Imus’ remarks.

Or countless others from obscure conservative radio hosts all over the country.

There will be plenty of talk in coming weeks about the Republican Party, the conservative movement, racial demographics, and whether they’ll inspire significant changes in policy or philosophy.

That conversation is more important than this one.

It would still be prudent for conservatives to take some advice that seems blindingly obvious, but apparently isn’t: Stop letting prominent voices of movement conservatism get away with saying things that are a) actually just racist; b) demagogic race-baiting; or c) so obviously tone-deaf that anyone with common sense can see how terrible it would sound.

Why is that so hard?!

This isn’t a call to embrace mindless political correctness, or to implement a full scale amnesty, or to cave on issues like affirmative action. This is so much easier! Just stop associating with people who deliberately play on America’s racial anxieties for profit! Given the contours of America’s racial fault lines, doing so is always going to turn off blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and a lot of whites. The crazy thing is that movement conservatism is more likely to totally change its position on numerous public policy issues than it is to disassociate itself with the poisonous Limbaugh.

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/the-gop-must-choose-rush-limbaugh-or-minority-voters/265002/

Display copy in American broadsheets is oppressively boring — and reflective of a deeper attitude that contributes to their declining fortunes.

On road trips, including the one I took recently between Tampa, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, I habitually buy a local newspaper every time I stop to buy gas, food, or coffee. As my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta can attest, the result is frustrated muttering about the product. For various reasons, I think local newspapers remain important to American democracy, and that their waning readership and influence is likely to coincide with more corruption, absent steps to mitigate their decline that aren’t being taken. On the other hand, look at the headlines.

Why are they so oppressively boring?

The banality on display won’t be apparent if your notion of newspaper heds comes from The New York Times. Elite broadsheets turn out some good display copy. But neither is my frustration aimed at obscure newspapers in tiny towns largely unknown to the broader world. Each day, the Newseum updates its Web site with images of the front pages from 800 newspapers worldwide. Perusing them, here are a selection of front page headlines from September 10, 2012.

I defy anyone to get through these without skimming:

• Bills Wait Congress’ Return (The Atlanta Journal Constitution)

• Romney Talks Health Fix (The Tampa Bay Times)

• Day’s Light, Leaves Signalling Noticeable Shift to Autumn (Arizona Daily Star)

• As Vote Nears, Camps’ Rhetoric Sharpens (The Miami Herald)

• Price of Maintaining WTC Memorial Is Questioned (The Fresno Bee)

You’re having trouble already, aren’t you?

And these are A1 stories. Here are some more:

• Homeless Authority Holding Course Through Re-Assessment (Savannah Morning News)

• For Swing Voters, Tossup For President (The Chicago Tribune)

• In Nashua, Aldermen Don’t Agree on Panel (New Hampshire Union Leader)

• Believers Called on to Vote with Faith (The Charlotte Observer)

• Congress Returns Briefly (Pittsburgh Tribune Review)

• In Post-9/11 America, Resilience Is Ongoing Project (The Dallas Morning News)

• Original Marble Counter Reinstalled in Courthouse (The Bloomington Herald-Times)

• Insurers: Redo Annuity Law That Helps Elderly (Orlando Sentinel)

These are but a small sample of boring headlines from a single day in this country.

The question isn’t whether you’d pay 50 cents to read those stories; it’s whether you’d agree to slog through them if paid $15. Yes, there are reasons why some of these headlines aren’t better. Some of the stories just aren’t very interesting. And ink on paper imposes space constraints.

But the reasons don’t ultimately matter when there are alternatives available. Most newspaper readers formed the habit of buying them before Web headlines,Twitter teases, Facebook likes, and other ways to discover content. What are the chances anyone else would buy a newspaper on the strength of headlines like the ones I listed? I’d put them at approaching zero.

Boring headlines are just one of many problems afflicting newspapers. Still, they seem symptomatic of a broader attitude that makes much of the content contained in their pages needlessly dull. The writers are often capable of writing better copy. The photographers almost always get more interesting images than make it into print. But the prevailing ethos combines a suicidal insistence on staid neutrality with an aversion to anything provocative even within those bounds.

Please, broadsheet editors, free your staffs to be more interesting! A different feel might cost you a few stodgy longtime readers. But let’s be honest, you’re going to lose them to the grave soon anyway.

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/an-exasperated-plea-to-newspapers-more-exciting-headlines-please/262188/