Gotchyer GOPropoganda on the AM Radio

Hello, Be afraid, be very afraid-eo
We gotchyer GOPropoganda on the AM radio.

Linked here is an excellent article from Milwaukee Magazine by a former WTMJ Radio news director which outlines wonderfully the methods and manipulations deployed by rightwing radio: http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=24046

Those of us who don't count ourselves among the initiated noddinghead indoctrinants of this medium won't be surprised at all by this; those who are will simply choose to ignore it completely or stick it in a corner of their brain where it won't interfere with the machinations of their concrete belief system. But it does provide and interesting insider perspective with real people and real examples.

I have only one critique on the piece. While the author rightly points out how the hosts play on their listeners reptilian fears and their sense of righteous victimhood, he completely misses another avenue of mass mind management they employ, the ego.RWR listeners get their egos stroked on a regular basis. They are incessantly instructed in how they are better than "those people", how they are the bedrock of Merica the greatest nation ever in the universe!. Unlike those other people they are self-reliant, they got where they are all on their own, they don't need nobody else, they are rocks, islands. And so day after day they nod their heads in self-congratulation as they tool on down the public thoroughfare in their ostentatious SUVs. Fear and ego, one need only add greed to make the stool stand, but that's a topic for another day.

I know because I used to listen too. But then I engaged the critical thinking skills that I got from among other places, my public school education and realized they were trying to deceive me, to enlist me as a foot soldier in the War on Reality. So I went AWOL from their boot camp (figuratively, unlike our fearless flightsuit).Of course they don't lie outright, that would be too obvious. So they use the tactics above in concert with half truths and information taken out of context. Of course the intent (deception) and the desired outcome (manipulation) still make it in fact a lie.

Which is why I will not listen anything at all on stations like WTMJ and WISN, they are not serving the public interest as is their charge, quite the contrary. Oh sure from time to time I still get curious and tune in to El Snortbo or one of his clones to see what are the Rovian ganda-bytes of the day. But I always tune them out again at the first easily discerned deception or commercial, so my sessions are exceedingly brief.

Unlike the author though, I'm optimistic. I think the scales are finally falling from a lot of people's eyes and that the power of RWR lies to hold back the realities that are coming to pass from the failures of an extreme and deeply flawed belief system are on the wane. Which leads me to close with renewed confidence in the truth of my axiom:

If you must lie to advance your thoughts, your thoughts are not advanced.