[ale] Off topic - And now, Arizona (and now, BEYOND)

[Larry Johnson]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 5:03 AM, Paul Cartwright <ale at pcartwright.com>wrote:

> On Fri July 9 2010, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> > If your right wing friends spend all their time watching Hannity you
> > need a different selection of freinds.
>
> what do your friends listen to, Air America?
>

There isn't really any equivalent mass media noise machine on the Left.  One
thing to realize is that the core of the Right in this country is relatively
homogenous (mostly consisting of whites in the South, West, and Midwest --
supplemented by a small contingent of Libertarians) , while the Left is a
fragmented set of small interest groups.  You do get crossovers (I'm a good
example of that, an older white southerner from a working class background)
but region, background, race, and income are pretty decent predictors of
political beliefs.

Limbaugh has a built-in mass audience.  It's like a huge echo chamber in
that most of what he's saying are just repetitions of what they already
believe.  This sort of thing isn't just a right wing foible.  The Left
listens to self-reinforcing stuff too, but it's really scattered all over
the map.  So I can't tell you what the Left as a whole listens too, but I
can point to my own habits, modest fellow that I am.

I get most of my information by reading, not by listening to the radio or
watching TV, but I enjoy NPR.  I also listen to the right wing entertainers
(Boortz, Hannity, Medved, et al) when I'm forced to drive.  As for reading,
aside from professional development stuff and manuals I read the New Yorker,
and online I read FiveThirtyEight.com, Wonkette (because it's funny),
and the Huffington Post (in that order).

Things like Air America are doomed, because they make the mistake of
assuming that success in the media consists of a series of techniques,
rather than an evaluation of exactly what medium is suited for one's
audience.

Hence Limbaugh, Beck, and Drudge work for the right.
FiveThirtyEight.com and Jon Stewart are more appropriate for the Left.

Larry


-- 
"I see design standards that don't tell you how to come up with a good
design (only how to write it down), employee evaluation standards that don't
help you build meaningful long-term relationships with staff, testing
standards that don't tell you how to invent a test that is worth running."

                                     Tom DeMarco
                                      Slack
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20100710/d938a867/attachment.html