December 3, 2002

BY WILLIAM O'ROURKE

When Sen. Tom Daschle attacked radio personality Rush Limbaugh for fomenting personal attacks--"people aren't satisfied to hate ... they want to act"--Daschle only underscored the depth of the Republican victory in the midterm elections and the vacuity of the Democratic Party's response.

Talk radio is not the enemy, as Walt Kelly's Pogo would say, he is us. Even liberal journalists (such as Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer) now claim there are "Bush Haters" out there who are the equal of the "Clinton Haters" at their zenith. This is utter nonsense: It's the minor leagues vs. the major leagues.

If liberals have swallowed the right wing's new line--we're just fighting fire with fire--then Rush Limbaugh and the other conservative radio squawkers have won even more than Daschle's unhappy comments demonstrate.

Daschle's sour remarks followed the revelations in Bob Woodward's new book (Bush at War) that Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, sent his friend, Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, a memo-letter after 9/11, offering some free advice as to how the president should act. An obligatory round of scolding by guardians of journalistic ethics has followed, claiming that there should be a line between the practice of journalism and the practice of government.

Ailes, though, is just the most prominent example of a trend that has been in vogue for the last three decades. The preferred route to high-profile media positions (especially in television) has long been through holding high-profile positions first as political consultants.

Ailes was President George H.W. Bush's media adviser, and when Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel, Murdoch put Ailes in charge, since Murdoch wanted to run a political operation. Launched right before the 1996 election, its chief goal was to put a Republican in the presidency in 2000. Ailes just continued his political role in another guise. It's a free press as long as you own one, so the saying goes.

Ailes' memo isn't the first time such partisan behavior has been revealed. John Ellis, a first cousin of George W. Bush, ran the network's ''decision desk'' during the 2000 election, and Fox was the first to name Bush the winner. Earlier, Ellis had made six phone calls to Cousin Bush during the vote-counting.

In the tit-for-tat school, the right wing claims CNN is the "liberal" equivalent, but, other than Ted Turner's once-upon-a-time marriage to Jane Fonda and his colorful personal political views, there is no comparison. CNN was founded a long time ago with the quirky motive of having news broadcasted around the clock and around the world. You don't see a lot of convicted liberal felons spouting their views, denouncing conservatives, on CNN talk shows, the way Ollie North, G. Gordon Liddy and others regularly do on Fox News. Nor is there a stable of leggy blond liberal lawyers castigating conservative opponents for every sin under the sun, and legions of former Democratic officials paraded as program hosts and guests.

Why? Rightly or wrongly, for a long time, liberals were represented in the "mainstream" media. Ranters of all stripes were kept largely to the margins. But the margins have grown. When music fled to the FM band, AM became the fertile soil of talk radio. The mainstream media remained, more or less, genteel. Think of network news before cable; think of newspapers before the ascendancy of the grocery store tabloids. And talk radio was nothing of the kind.

Listeners wanted ''shrill,'' just the quality that Daschle denounces. They wanted loud. And they wanted a place where they would be free to vent their spleens and their prejudices. Unfortunately, as Daschle complains, they do more than ''hate''--they vote. What Jesse Jackson once did for Democratic voter registration, Rush Limbaugh now does for Republican voter participation.

Talk radio is the secular side of televangelism. And both audiences overlapped for a while, the conservative revival under the biggest tent of all, American electronic media. It also had the energizing motivation of being thought unheard, neglected, unfairly treated. Now, talk radio and cable news are mainstream. That success, fortunately, may be their undoing.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2002