Liberals love to believe that conservatives are closed-minded and incapable of listening to opposing opinions. However, when “mainstream” journalists discuss talk radio and how it’s “bad to America”, you can see that they often have difficulty understanding the other side.
CBS News Sunday Morning on September 16th devoted its entire show to “A Nation Divided.” CBS would love you to believe they don’t like division or are not divisive. That’s false.
Ted Koppel, fill-in host, said: “Tens to millions of Americans get political marching orders via the radio.” How insulting! How divisive is this? Listening to conservative radio hosts is a sign that you are (to borrow a Washington Post insult) “poor and uneducated” and “easy to command.”
Democracy is supposed be about persuasion. You’re not going persuade anyone or unify the nation by saying half of us have been given “marching orders,” from talk-radio generals. It seems like CBS liberals are frustrated at not being able to follow their “marching orders”.
Jim Axelrod was the CBS reporter. Although he is not related to David Axelrod (Democrat strategist), they sound like brothers. He continued with insults: “35 year after the talk radio revolution was over, on the air is often an exercise in off-the-rails.” This is from the Dan Rather Channel, which somehow never got off the rails into fake information.
Brian Rosenwald was Axelrod’s first talk radio expert. His 2019 book on talk radio features blurbs from CNN’s Michael Smerconish and CBS’s John Dickerson. Alterman is the socialist crank who wrote the humorous humor book What Liberal Media?
Rosenwald complained that talk radio had “unquestionably divided Americans.” It has unquestionably hampered our politics.” Rosenwald was then asked by Axelrod “How is that good for America?” He said, “It’s not!” It’s bad news for America. This shows how dishonest this segment is. Only conservatives “harden our politics” and divide. CBS and other liberal channels don’t do that.
Next was Michael Harrison, Talkers Magazine’s “bible” for people who love talk-radio. Harrison stated that America would be better served if liberal talk radio was just as popular as conservative. This is a joke. CBS then reverted to Rosenwald, who accurately compared Limbaughs with Jon Stewart and late-night lefty entertainers. Their polarizing talk, like Colbert’s sneering Trump as Putin’s “cock holster”, didn’t “harden” our politics.
CBS also noted with surprise that NPR is the “one part of the dial that’s liberal turf”. This “attracts large numbers” and is “relatively controlled” to commercial radio which seeks “ever more extreme approaches to attract listeners.”
This is how liberals view NPR. But it’s flat wrong. NPR promoted “In Defense of Looting,” a book that argued that left-wing riots for “racial Justice” should be encouraged and called “rebellions.” NPR brought Anand Giridharadas, a radical-left author, to complain that Joe Biden should not have said in 2020 that “rioting was not protesting, looting wasn’t protesting.”
CBS Sunday Morning has also aired extreme commentary. Nancy Giles, who was a victim of Hurricane Katrina 2005, criticized President George W. Bush and said that if they were all white, their bodies wouldn’t have been left to float on putrid water. John Leonard, a CBS TV critic, compared the Republicans to a “slash and burn Khmer Rouge.”
CBS journalists believe that conservative radio is bad news for America. However, when they compare conservatives with the Cambodian communist crackpots, it’s not divisive. It’s a sweet bag of reason.
