Hate Radio Hollows Out America

[babylonsister]

Hate Radio Hollows Out America

By Jay Diamond
September 17, 2009

Editor’s Note: The election of the first African-American President has unleashed an ugliness on the Right and within the Republican Party that now confronts the United States with a new political crisis.

It is a battle over whether facts and decency have any chance in a political/media system dominated by distortions and fury – amplified by hate-mongers and opportunists in the powerful right-wing media – as media activist Jay Diamond observes in this guest essay:


For months radio lout Steve Malzberg screamed 10 times a day that "Folks, Barack Obama HATES! this country and his WIFE HATES! this country."

And when for over 10 years, every day, Sean Hannity couldn't survive a fact check in the average kindergarten class, and when he violated Abner Louima with the equivalent of a verbal plunger after Louima had been worked over with a physical plunger, that was nothing else but Vile Poison.

Prior to low-brow, right-wing, dishonest, and hate-fueled talk radio, the political culture of our country would have prevented Joe Wilson from screaming insults at the President of the United States in the midst of an address to a joint session (or anywhere else).

This culture of relentlessly dishonest and utterly ignorant pure hate which is ubiquitous all over low-brow, right-wing radio is nothing other than poison, even though right-wing apologists try to cosmeticize this swill as merely "entertainment."

These transparently political apologists are no doubt descended from those fine folks in ancient Rome who made the case that throwing Christians to lions was also merely "Entertainment."

While it is possible to do a radio program that is truly entertaining, honest, intelligent, funny and informative, doing that requires some amount of ethics and talent and diligent application, and that does not describe the low-brow, right-wing, hate-fueled, dishonest and power hungry slobs who bleed pure poison all across our public spectrum.

Employing the most ugly and persistently untruthful political slurs about crucial public policy questions along with ugly and false personal character assassination in furtherance of a bigoted and feudal political agenda that could never exist on the merits absent their relentless tsunami of calculated lying, would not in any rational environment be considered even remotely as "entertainment."

more...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/091609b.html

[Faygo Kid]

1. All true.

They are relentless and single minded, all reading off the same playbook.

These are scary times.

[DesertFlower]

2. very scary. nt

[zbdent]

3. I find it hilarious that what passes for Republican political discussion has used

the Jerry Springer (TV) Show as its model ...

[applegrove]

4. Very scary they use a euphemism for their intellectual poison. I wonder if anyone in "the

base" ever thinks about being mislead or does it just never occur to them that they could be being played with.

[troubledamerican]

5. "Oh PLEASE. Don't take it so SERIOUSLY"

That's what DEMOCRATIC fucktards told me from the beginning of Limbaugh through the 1990s.

That's what DEMOCRATIC fucktards tell me now about Christianist Fundamentalist fascists in the Pentagon, Cheney Sleeper Cells in the State Department, Likud psychopaths who want to bomb Iran, Wall Street sociopaths who believe they can collapse the U.S. dollar without harming themselves & their families, and about complicit DLC "leadership" that weeps about "violence coming" while they stuff their pockets with lobbyist cash & kills reform from within.