Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

Nate Silver has written a great article on how talk radio killed conservatism.

Starting from his Tuesday interview with John Ziegler, a documentary filmmaker and former radio talk show host who built the website HowObamaGotElected.com, Silver's simple questions over polling used in his dicumentary caused problems. [In brief, a Zogby poll Ziegler used extrapolated how voters came to back Obama based on slender evidence –interviews with just 10 Obama voters.] Ziegler had a meltdown during interview.

"John Ziegler is a shining example of such a conservative. During my interview with him, Ziegler made absolutely no effort to persuade me about the veracity of any of his viewpoints. He simply asserted them -- and then became frustrated, paranoid, or vulgar when I rebutted them."

Noting that Ziegler got his start in radio, Silver noted the origins of talking without being held accountable:

"Moreover, almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they're in the process of doing something else."

And if you're going to ramble on the airwaves you need to keep your audience fired up. And how do you do this? Silver notes that it's about stimulation, rather than persuading someone with debate or facts:

"The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren't persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! "Drill, baby, drill" wasn't persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn't persuasive, but she sure was stimulating!"

And who is better at stimulating than Fox?

"FOX News is unusual television, really, in that almost all the stimulation is verbal, and almost all of it occurs at the same staccato pacing as radio. You could take tonight's broadcast of Hannity & Colmes or the Factor and put it directly on radio and you'd lose almost nothing (not coincidentally, Hannity and O'Reilly also have highly-rated radio programs). That wouldn't really work for Countdown, which has higher production values, and where the pacing is more irregular. It certainly wouldn't work for the Situation Room -- or moving in a different direction, the Daily Show."

The Republican echo chamber is unique and powerful. Talking points are repeated with loyalty. The problem is America has moved forward:

"The failures of the Bush administration have woken the country up; conservatives now need to find a way to communicate with people who are actually paying attention."

One of my favorite bloggers, Oliver Willis, writes about his experience with conservatives and their "perception of reality":

"I experienced this myself in conversation with one of my regular conservative readers who argued with me that Barack Obama running ads attacking Sarah Palin over abortion was a sign of weakness… for Obama. The problem is that the Democratic position on abortion - access with restrictions - is far closer to the mainstream of American thought than Sarah Palin’s - the outright banning of abortion. But if you watched Fox News and listened to talk radio you would think just the opposite.

I also noticed it on con blogs and Free Republic when the polls all indicated that Sen. Obama was headed for a significant victory over McCain. It wasn’t that the campaign was being run poorly or that Obama was doing well. Nope, the polls showing Obama in the lead were clearly a sinister plot by the liberal mainstream media to convince the American people to vote for Obama (or, because the pollsters were in blue states their results couldn’t possibly be accurate). That’s crazy talk, and yet it was a mainstream point of view for the right - reinforced by their media. It’s a lot like people in a cult who simply can’t step out of their cult-world and review things objectively."

If this were any other topic, let's say sports, and you were as wrong as the Conservatives have been with reflecting the thoughts and attitudes of America, you would have been fired years ago.

Source: fivethirtyeight.com