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A common thread of the right-wing talkers in the wake of something like this (Dr. Tiller, US Holocaust Museum shooter, Pittsburgh ambush, etc.) is that there just simply no way that they bear any blame at all for anything their listeners or readers do.
Okay, then... does advertising work?
We as members of a modern technological society, are bombarded nearly every second of every day with advertising. This page probably has some kind of ad on it, unless you're a donor and have turned the ads off. Cars, trucks, beer, television shows, movies, accountants, hospitals, electronics companies... they all have TV commercials, billboards, embedded and pop-up internet ads, print advertising, and sponsorship of major sports and political events right there on the field of conflict.
Does this advertising work? Would you buy or sell stock in, say, Burger King if they issued a press release saying there were going to stop advertising completely and just lower their prices a bit? How about Ford or Toyota or Coors or Paramount Pictures or Samsung?
Would you buy stock in a company that had a great product but who's board of directors said "we're not going to waste a dime on advertising"?
You would probably sell the stock if you had it, and not buy it if you didn't. By doing this, you tacitly admit that advertising does work on the overall population and can influence the masses.
So, then the words spoken by people in the media are influential because they are a form of advertisement. John McCain advertised himself as a patriotic maverick, George W. Bush advertised himself as a compassionate conservative, the Iraq Invasion was advertised as a war on the people that attacked us and to protect us from future attack. Saxby Chambliss advertised his opponent as some sort of terrorist-cuddling pacifist, and during the inter-war period some 80 years ago an election was won by some savvy psychopath that advertised his opponent as a "practicing homo sapien" and his wife as a something along the lines of "being a proud thespian".
It works. It works. It most definitely works, or else Madison Avenue wouldn't spend billions of dollars annually on doing it. If it didn't work, there wouldn't be battalions of psychologists and analysts and researchers and people with advanced degrees in marketing in expensive office buildings working thousands of hours a year to make the advertising!
9 of the top 10 talk-radio hosts are conservatives. Some of them also have television shows. All of them have websites. And on those radio and television shows they have dozens of guests a week who advertise opinions, false or selective facts, tall tales, rhetoric, and their take on theories about politics or economics or psychology or social interactions or whatever. The pitch books and websites and rallies that all advertise a certain worldview.
They can't claim they have no influence when a RW nutjob opens up at a mall or ambushes police officers or mails fake anthrax to a Senator. It's there. It is nebulous, but it is most definitely there.
If we can't show smoking or lack of seat belt use or women's breasts or happy, well-adjusted gay people on TV because it influences people, then what the RW talkers do influences people as well.
It influences them every day, directly or indirectly. It sets the tone and the talking-point for discussion at work, at home, in the car, on the train.
For then to try to deny it is for them to tell their advertisers "don't spend money on MY show; nobody listens to me".
Remember that.
;-) vvvvv Oh look, another advertisement!!! vvvvv;-)
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