Is the Drive-By Media Good for America? (the answer: NO)
“The Mainstream and Conservative Media Are Living in Different Worlds. So Are Those Who Read Them.” — headline, The Los Angeles Times, 4/10/17
“Rush Limbaugh had a lot to do with creating those two separate worlds.” — Ted Koppel, “The Great Divide: Politics in the Age of Trump,” “cbs Sunday Morning,” 3/26/17
The drive-bys are suddenly very concerned that Americans are not all working off “the same set of facts.” That’s their new phrase. But don’t be deceived — they’re not interested in bridging the partisan media divide, or making sure we are joining hands and singing kum-ba-yah around a grand beloved textbook of “shared facts.” No, they’re out to prove that conservative media is bad for America.
A case they’ve been trying to make for decades.
But now Americans’ trust in the mainstream media has plunged to a record low — only eight percent say they have “a great deal of confidence” in television news or newspapers, according to a 2016 Gallup poll. So the media needs someone to blame.
It’s our fault. Conservatives have destroyed the news. As Ted Koppel told Sean Hannity, we conservatives are the problem because we have “attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”
Koppel and his ilk believe you wouldn’t recognize a fact if it came up and bit you. You listen to me solely because you want to hear your bigoted, narrow-minded set of prejudices — “conservative ideology” — preached back at you. And to Ted’s comrades in the mainstream media, your brainless conservatism stymies their mission to give you “the facts.”
The left believes itself to be fact-oriented and evidence-based, and we’re ignoramuses unable to figure out how to brush the one tooth in our heads. Liberalism is just reality. Like the air, and gravity, it’s just what is. There is no other legitimate view. And if you’re too stupid to accept that, and if you insist on your simpleton-level right-wing ideas, you pose a great threat to the nation.
So now the drive-by media pretends to pine for the days when we were all dealing with universally agreed-upon facts. The truth is, they’re actually pining for the days when they decided what you were allowed to know, and what you should think about it. They lost that monopoly starting August 1, 1988, with my radio program.


They can’t explain what happened, other than to insist you’ve been duped. Just as with every election the left loses, it’s not due to them, their policies, or the damage they’ve caused. It’s because you’re a mind-numbed robot who’s been tricked, lied to, fooled, or otherwise manipulated into abandoning what’s good for you. What it really means is that they just don’t know how to compete. After almost 30 years, they still haven’t come to grips with it.
Which brings me to my new theorem that I’ve been discussing on the air. This lust to regain dominance has, over time, caused the media to take over the lead from the Democrat Party itself. In the last 30 years, the media has been “weaponized” to marginalize, intimidate, impugn anyone who doesn’t agree with liberalism. The media has taken upon itself the role of destroying the Democrats’ partisan enemies, Republicans and conservatives. So the media is no longer an arm of the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party is now an arm of the media.
And the evidence supports my theory. According to an analysis done by the Media Research Center, the media is operating as the de facto political opposition. NewsBusters reported on 4/19/17: “As President Trump approaches the end of his first 100 days in office, he has received by far the most hostile press treatment of any incoming American President, with the broadcast networks punishing him with coverage that has been 89 percent negative. The networks largely ignored important national priorities such as jobs and the fight against isis, in favor of [an anti-Trump] agenda … which closely matches what would be expected from an opposition party.”
They claim the facts, but there are no facts. They’re all propaganda, all the time.
The drive-by media has transmogrified into the engine of Democratic Party power, with a virulent anti-Republican, anti-conservative mission. A mission that is clearly perceived by the U.S. public. On April 5, Gallup reported that 62 percent of Americans “see partisan bias in the news media.” In Koppel’s world, this 62 percent is stupidly believing dangerous lies told by conservative media. Which is why conservatism needs to be stamped out.
Which brings me to “The Brian Lehrer Show” on wnyc, public radio, on 4/19/17. Lehrer asked msnbc’s Chris Hayes, “Are we living in ideological bubbles in America now, to the point where people who even might be watching you … are not the same Americans [watching Fox], and vice-versa?” Hayes answered:
“The center-to-center-left of the country consume a whole bunch of different kinds of media … The other half of the country, the sort of center-to-conservatives, basically only consume several different outlets … So they just watch Fox, or they just listen to Limbaugh and talk radio … The only newspaper whose median consumer is slightly to the right of center is The Wall Street Journal. So you’ve got the situation in which half the population’s audience is being divvied up amongst dozens of different entities, and half the population, or 40 percent, basically has three or four entities that have a monopoly on them. And it’s actually profoundly dangerous in lots of different ways, both for I think the conservatives on the right … also for American democracy.”
This is so clichéd. It is the exact same smug, condescending — and uninformed — attitude reflected in the infamous Time magazine cover from January 23, 1995. And for all these decades, they’ve gotten it exactly backwards. People who listen to my program get a full analysis of multiple sides of every issue. It’s how I rigorously explain the preference for conservatism! That’s how I explain the correctness of conservatism, by comparing and contrasting it with the liberal position. And I do it honestly. They don’t even attempt that.
Conservatism is not explained on msnbc or wnyc, except to smear it as a blight on humanity. Conservatives are never treated with respect. They are rarely even acknowledged — other than as a punch line or object of a sneer. Hayes and Lehrer and libs like them are woefully missing the boat: they’re the ideologues, they’re the ones with tunnel vision, they’re the ones with severely limited exposure to substantive information. There’s a reason why these people have no audience. They claim the facts, but there are no facts. They’re all propaganda, all the time. Modern American media is nothing more than the daily advancement of the liberal agenda.
Just think for a minute how wrong they’ve been about everything important. For the last two years, virtually the entire drive-by media misread every significant political data point available to them. They were oblivious to the largest new political force on the modern scene, the Trump voter. They were wrong about the polls, the analyses, the observations, the conclusions — they were wrong about the freaking election, for goodness sake.
So here’s the thing. Not only is the mainstream media not good for America; the media isn’t even good for Democrats. They believe what the drive-bys report, and keep getting shellacked.
The Democrat Party is down over 1,200 seats since 2008. They’ve lost the Senate, the House, the White House. You have to go back to the 1920s to find a period in American history where the Democrats had so little electoral power. The media hasn’t been reporting it. And the Party is in total, utter denial. If you didn’t listen to my show, and conservative media, you wouldn’t have any idea how deep the Democrat losses are.
All their bragging about how fact-based and evidence-based they are is so much claptrap. If they had simply listened to conservatives, and paid attention to our “common set of facts,” they would be right on the money every damn day. And they’d be conservatives.
The Limbaugh Letter May 2017