Five Points

What About Imus? And Beyond?

Why would you take down a liberal talk show host? Jeff Katz asked about the Imus controversy recently. "This is a brilliant tactical move," he said, because they can hold up the carcass of a liberal host and show they were committed to silencing any broadcaster who says something objectionable. "This is a great way for them to start" re-establishing the Fairness Doctrine he said.

Matt Mittan however disagreed, saying that the free market, not the government, decided to remove Imus. Rosie O'Donnell is off as well. [I wasn't aware of that ...] Advertisers responded to consumers' rejection and pulled their dollars. Katz said it wasn't the market that took O'Donnell off, it was ABC. Bill LuMaye said it wasn't the market in Imus' case either, but extortion by the same "poverty pimps" who are seeking to "bar code" everybody and pit groups against each other. "Although the free marketplace should determine things, I don't think that happened here."

Curtis Wright asked why aren't we speaking out more? Why did last November happen? "What I'm worried about is we're going to continue to do it," he said. "I'm more concerned that the product is going to stay the same, rather than asking what we should be doing. Whatever we're doing may be bringing in some dollars, but it's not working. With only 31% of the people in North Carolina voting, we're not inspiring them."

Nathan Tabor's question is whether the organization of the liberal left isn't overrunning the conservative viewpoint. There is consistent, closed-ranks "swarm" behavior from the Moveon.org, Al Sharpton side of the spectrum. What have we done in the last two years to change the failure of education in North Carolina? There is no unified voice in North Carolina to truly make a difference. "When an issue like this comes up we need to be working on a unified voice" to respond. "The conservative message gets lost in the woods because we're all standing around by our own campfires."

Mittan said the message has been getting out, but problem for the Republicans has been failure to deliver for conservative, Constitutional ideas.

Ric Martinez saw the Imus issue as a victory of racial politics, and said that conservatives cannot win at racial politics because we are not "diverse". He said there was only one black conservative who had enough intellectual gumption to answer Sharpton et al, and no one knows about Niger Ennis but Sean Hannity. Wright said that conservative media is not pointing out the line-by-line problems in the credibility of some of the "poverty pimps" as LuMaye called them. He said if it were someone on the right side, the liberal media would press the point every day.

posted by Hal @ 8:25 AM