I am
of course speaking about the Glenn Beck rally this Saturday at the Lincoln
Memorial. The best estimate I could find pegged the crowd at 330,000 people.
What was the media reaction? Chirping crickets - with smatterings of haughty
condescension intermingled with empty charges of racism they don’t even bother
trying to justify.
Let’s
take another case: the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington, DC last year. Crowd
estimates for that event varied from 300,000 to 2 million but the whole thing
has vanished entirely down the mainstream media memory hole as if it never
happened. Think about it! A million people or more marched down Washington in I’m-as-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore
mode and its not deemed significant.
If
the media really were in the news reporting business, you would think they
would make as big a hullabaloo over these events as they did over Louis
Farrakhan’s Million Man March (with about 300,000 participants) or Woodstock
(450,000 attendees). But they are increasingly not in the news reporting
business so they don’t.
Conservatives
love to commiserate among themselves about the ratchet effect – that is, that
big government always expands, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but that
there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Every expansion is permanent.
According to this theory, the best a determined conservative leader can do is
to keep the government at bay. He can’t push it back, but once he’s gone and
the liberals are back in charge, the onward march resumes again.
Well,
the media treatment of these rallies reveals another ratchet effect, one
pushing in the other direction. Every time the media buries a story – the
expansion of shall-issue concealed carry laws across the US in the 90’s, the
Duke rape case acquittal, the Americorp Inspector General scandal, the New
Black Panther voting rights scandal, etc. – they may succeed somewhat in
burying an inconvenient fact, but each time they do, their credibility
diminishes a little bit. The news leaks out and more eyes get opened, the
mainstream media ratings incrementally drop, Fox News ratings incrementally
rise, and Rush Limbaugh’s gets a few more listeners.
This
effect has been going on since the mid 90’s and the evidence for its existence
is now overwhelming. The news departments of the big three broadcast networks
are at historic lows and all are heavily in the red; the New York Times and
Washington Post are almost bankrupt; Newsweek was just sold for $1 (the buyer
overpaid).
The
case of Rush Limbaugh is very instructive. With regard to his ratings, every
month in the past two decades has been his best month ever. He recently signed
a $400 million renewal deal. Yet his negative ratings in public opinion polls
are consistently among the highest of any public figure ever. How to explain
the discrepancy?
Easy.
He has about 25 million listeners. America has 310 million people. Even in its
debased state, the mainstream media still reaches significantly more people
than he does. And the media hate Rush and never pass up an opportunity to slag
him. Their favourite technique is to take something he said out of context. If
the MSM is your only exposure to him, you hate him too. But the truth gets out.
People chance upon Rush on the radio. They discover that they agree with his
views a whole lot more than they do with Katie Couric’s. Each time this happens, Katie’s ratings
go down incrementally and Rush’s go up. The key point here is that once people
switch, they don’t switch back - ever. This is the reverse ratchet effect.
It
has been said that the mainstream media is really the gatekeeper media because
an increasing part of what they do is to keep the gate shut. But they can’t
keep it completely shut all the time. There is leakage. Over time, the leakage
compounds. Until we reach the situation we find in 2010 when the MSM is almost
completely under water.
I
believe that the foundations of the mainstream media in the US have been eroded
so much that the entire US media world is ripe for a gestalt switch. I predict
that in the next two to four years, the conservative media will become the mainstream media - the
default media. And the current mainstream media will become the fringe media.
The
only thing holding that back right now is fear in the corporate world of
consequences from the Obama administration. But if Obama’s popularity continues
to tank and the right takes over Congress and President Obama increasingly
looks like a lame-duck, one-term President, that fear will evaporate by early
2012.
That’s
when it will happen.