Donald Trump broke the conservative media

[kentuck]

Interesting read:

http://www.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudge-coulter-2016-8

<snip>
Instead, it appears their plan of using friendly pundits to tap directly into the vein of red-blooded Americans sympathetic to their political views has backfired. That has boosted the candidacy of Donald Trump, who last week named Steve Bannon, the former chair of the Trump-friendly Breitbart News, as his campaign's CEO.

"The analogy that I think of is somebody who has a baby alligator in their bathtub and they keep feeding it and taking care of it," said Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin. "And it's really cute when it's a baby alligator — until it becomes a grown-up alligator and comes out and starts biting you."

"There's a certain sense that these guys were empowered, but they were empowered when these guys thought they were on the same side. There was a time when Breitbart was edgy, but on the mainstream of conservative," he said, referring to the website founded by the late Andrew Breitbart. "And people actually thought we were all pulling in roughly the same direction."

"I think that, in retrospect, they really did empower the instruments of their own destruction," Sykes said of the GOP.

...more at link

[kchamberlin25]

1. Aesop

The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagles own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”

[kentuck]

2. Excellent !

Welcome!

[IronLionZion]

3. Welcome to DU!

[HereSince1628]

4. The pet alligator...rethinking just what needs drowning in the bath-tub

[BumRushDaShow]

5. "Breitbart was edgy, but on the mainstream of conservative"

Uh no. They think their persistent bigoted dog-whistling, CT-hugging, fake-news generating, scandal-projecting nonsense directed to the low-information voter was "mainstream"... but the purveyors of RW media's "mainstream conservative" viewpoints gave up, and their ship sailed a long long time ago.

And this was because those who were "mainstream" among the GOP, went right along with a pernicious shift to what amounted to lunatic ranting and raving after they realized their "mainstream conservative" policies were failing over and over, so they embraced LIHOP and now the chickens have come home to roost with the ascendancy of a Drumpf.

[kentuck]

6. Perhaps they were thought to be in the mainstream of conservative thought...

but they were proven wrong.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. IMHO

publications such as "American Spectator" and "National Review" were generally considered the voice of the conservative ("mainstream&quot . Now these have been replaced by the likes of Drudge (although he is an aggregator but does still do some occasional publishing himself), Breitbart, and Town Hall... with sites like Stormfront and Conservative Cave pushing even those entities' views more and more to the extreme right.

[tenderfoot]

7. Rawstory covered this earlier in the month...

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/conservative-radio-host-weve-created-this-monster-of-fact-hating-right-wing-voters/

According to Sykes, any attempts to continue fighting back against misinformation is dismissed with complaints that he has “sold out,” adding, “Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.”

Sykes warned “There’s got to be a reckoning on all this.”

“We’ve created this monster,” he warned. “Look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative talk show hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted with the mainstream media. So we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot has been justifiable. There is real bias. But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there.”

“And I feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping the whirlwind at that,” he continued. “And I have to look in the mirror and ask myself, ‘To what extent did I contribute?'”

He keeps mentioning a "bias" but doesn't cite any instances. Another thing I find interesting is that he doesn't acknowledge that conservatism hasn't worked the entire time they were LYING to their audience.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. "He keeps mentioning a "bias" but doesn't cite any instances."

They consider "bias" as any criticism AT ALL of any of their idiotic policies, and/or their completely fabricated statements that are counter to historical fact (i.e., "lies&quot , and/or of those who promote such.

[JHB]

11. Back in the 80s, after watching several interviews with Reed Irvine...

...founder of Accuracy in Media, pretty much the granddad of conservative "media watch" groups that actively "works the refs", it became obvious to me that "liberal media bias" boiled down to "failure to cheerlead a conservative agenda".

This guy Sykes in the OP continues that. He speaks admiringly of Andrew Brietbart as "in the conservative mainstream", as if Breitbart.com wasn't always a sewer and didn't always promote outright frauds in the service of the conservative movement.

[BumRushDaShow]

12. I probably still have some tapes of Irvine and AIM's crap

from the many panel discussions they had on CSPAN (where CSPAN insisted on continually showing the likes of AIM, with little coverage of the distaff side by FAIR -"Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting&quot - notably during the run up to the Gulf War.

With Breitbart and their "crack reporter" (James O'Keefe) to feed them manufactured stories, they essentially hijacked the "conservative" messaging methodology, not by finding ways to improve the sales pitch for the policies of the right, but by attacking the left using unethical and illegal means. Again most likely because the policies of Reagan were found to be a complete FAIL upon a post-mortem.

And since Reagan has now essentially been thrown under the bus by them, I am waiting patiently for them to declare that Reagan had once been a Democrat, and that is why he was actually a RINO!

[JHB]

10. Say, Charlie, how many frauds would Breitbard have needed to promulgate...

...before you would disown Andrew from "the mainstream of conservatism"?

Apparently two outright frauds were not sufficient to discredit him in your eyes.

Actual investigation of O'Keefe's allegations about ACORN turned up deceptive editing of the tape and no wrongdoing by ACORN staffers. And he never wore that infamous pimp outfit during the visits to ACORN offices, despite his claims. Britbart hosted those tapes, promoted them, and they made him a conservative media darling.

The Shirley Sherrod tape was also deliberately edited to create the impression that she used her job to discriminate against white people. Andrew was OK with that, he promoted it.

Well, of course, promoting frauds in the service of conservative wins is mainstream conservatism, isn't it? Isn't one of your pundit colleagues, John Podhoretz (contributing editor for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard and columnist for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post) , in "the mainstream of conservatism" as much as you are?

John Podhoretz Verified account
?@jpodhoretz

This Planned Parenthood video drip-drip-drip is the first time anyone has properly followed the Andrew Breitbart playbook since his death.

Sorry, Charlie, Trump isn't the gator problem, his voters are, and you're one of the owners of the baby-alligator-in-a-bathtub farm. You helped feed those gators, and now they're biting people you didn't want bit.

Or to quote "the mainstream of conservatism", You Built That.