Right Wing Radio Week in Review: July 13-17

by Kathy Shaidle | July 18, 2009 8:57 am

Dennis Miller returned to the airwaves on Monday, after his vacation in Japan. Not a moment too soon — I was going through withdrawal.

On Friday, Miller had on Steven Crowder, the young video satirist whose short video expose on Canadian "health care" I posted here earlier this week. (To those uninformed snarkers in the comments here, remember that Crowder — like me — grew up in Canada, and I can assure you that his video is chillingly accurate. The problem with "studies" and "statistics" is that Canadians have been heavily pressured and propagandized for three generations to dutifully tell pollsters that our "health care" system is excellent; it is a point of warped national pride because the Canadian "identity" is centered around nothing more than "not being American". Talking with a person like Crowder, or amongst themselves, however, they complain mightily, as you can see.)

Meanwhile, someone in the mainstream media finally shifted themselves to review radio talk show host Mark Levin‘s mega-bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto[1], which is coming up on three-quarters of a million copies sold this year (in hardcover, no less).

Bob Hoover, the editor of something called the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, dismissed the book as a mere collection of "reworked talk show scripts."

Most of you are laughing right now, because you know — since it is mentioned in every (conservative) review of the book — that the contrast between Mark Levin’s "shut up, you dummy!" on-air persona, and his baroque anachronistic prose style in Liberty & Tyranny, is startling, to say the least.

And of course: talk shows don’t have "scripts…"

Why the average person trusts their daily papers for "the news" is beyond me.

Anyway: speaking of bestsellers, one of Mark Levin’s conservative radio colleagues is having an even better year, in terms of numbers:

"It’s a good time to be Glenn Beck[2]," reported the latest issue of Talkers Magazine[3], the industry’s "bible." "The Premiere Radio Networks and Fox News Channel talk star lands on this year’s Forbes Celebrity 100 tally of the biggest money makers. Beck comes in at #8. Rush Limbaugh sits at #23 this year and Sirius XM Satellite Radio talk host Howard Stern came in at #34. Also, Beck’s latest book, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine[4], hits 1.2 million copies in print and tops the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists."

Following up on his two-day guest hosting gig for a vacationing Limbaugh, Mark Steyn returned to his usual stint on Hugh Hewitt,  just hours after California Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer (in Hewitt’s words) "let her inner racist out" — on video no less. Steyn observed:

Yes, it’s interesting. Barbara Boxer, she slaps down a senior military officer for having the impertinence to call her ma’am, and she punches his lights out for that, rhetorically, because she obviously feels she’s being condescended to, that this officer only sees her as a woman. And yet the minute she sees a black guy sitting in front of her talking about energy, she starts quoting the NAACP at him, as if you can only balance one negro’s view with the view of a more acceptable negro. I mean, this is the kind of grotesque, racial politics in which the contemporary Democratic Party is marinated. It’s basically a kind of progressive apartheid where as long as you remain the house pets of liberalism, you’ll be regarded as an approved spokesperson of your identity group. But God forbid you should ever have a dissident free thought of your own that doesn’t conform to the role they’ve allotted you as the approved identity group pets of their party.

The Pence-Walden Broadcaster Freedom Amendment may have been derailed, but for now, conservative talk radio is still thriving. More and more FM stations around America are switching from music to talk, with many taking on the Talk Radio Network roster of Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage and other right-leaning hosts.

On the web, World Net Daily has partnered with Radio America (home of talk show hosts Roger Hedgecock and G. Gordon Liddy), to offer live streaming of those radio shows and others.

Also on the web this week, the venerable conservative media watchdog group Accuracy in Media launched its own podcast at Blog Talk Radio, called "Taking AIM," with an impressive roster of guests including Frank Gaffney.

Not to be outdone, AIM’s liberal rival Media Matters also forayed into world of the web and talk radio, while somehow managing to miss the point with their show’s very title.

Media Matters evidently thought it awfully clever to dub their new show — "a daily video product that will round up the most noteworthy examples of hateful rhetoric, offensive commentary, and conservative paranoia on talk radio" — "Two Minutes Hate."

While acknowledging that they lifted the show’s name from a feature in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the too-clever-for-their-own-good folks at Media Matters clearly didn’t "get" that in the book, the nation’s dictators broadcast images of trumped up "enemies of the state", which images "citizens" are then obliged to boo (in the style of British music hall pantomime audiences) to prove their loyalty to their unelected rulers. Failure to take part in the "Two Minutes Hate" leads to arrest and torture.

Somehow it escaped the attention of Media Matters’ extravagantly funded brain trust that by compiling clips of "evil" conservative radio talk show hosts into out of context sound bites and naming this new feature "Two Minutes Hate", it is Media Matters — and not the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks they so despise — who is playing the role of brainwashing bullying overlord.

Wow.

You know, I vaguely remember a time with Big Left was smarter than this, or at least not so irony-challenged, don’t you?

(Learn how to record your favorite conservative talk radio shows, so you’ll never miss one again, and how to save money on those annual premium membership fees so many radio programs now offer.)

(KATHY SHAIDLE blogs at FiveFeetOfFury[5], now in its ninth year.)