Commentary on Talk Radio Stirs Up Its Base

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's media columnist Tim Cuprisin wrote last week about the recent, strong backlash against some big-name national right-wing talk show hosts.

Not surprisingly, some intemperate name-calling came Cuprisin's way on his "Inside Radio and TV" blog from the talkers' angry devotees.

My, how the worm has turned for the talkers and the ditto-heads (I am using this description of Limbaugh's passionate listeners somewhat generically, fyi).

For years, conservative talkers had a pretty free hand to rip and mock whomever they wanted, as liberal responses were inchoate and ineffective.

But now there's a functioning echo chamber on the left and it seems that the right's big boys have frail egos and weak chins.

I've heard Limbaugh and Savage suggesting that free speech as we know it (even in this era of rightist government snooping and other Constitutional abuses), is imperiled by the left's talker attack.

The squawkers' grandiosity aside, the ironies in the brouhaha aren't hard to miss.

Noted Cuprisin on his blog:

"The bottom line on my point in the column is that the opponents of conservative talk radio, spearheaded by Media Matters, have adopted the talk radio strategy of attack, attack, attack. I didn't attack Limbaugh or O'Reilly or Michael Savage. I simple said I don't have a lot of sympathy, since their style of discourse is being turned on them."

My take on this:

Right-wing hosts like Michael Savage (real last name "Weiner"), Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are getting weaker because their mean-spirited, high-decibel rants of war, more war and anti-liberal anger, anger, anger have turned cooky from cocky.

The permanent Republican Majority, which supports talk radio, is crashing to earth because of the endless war in Iraq.

And disintegrating because the Federal Government under the GOP can't do what most people really want from it: a stable foreign policy, bridges that don't fall, and health-care costs that don't skyrocket.

In other words, O'Reilly, Savage and Limbaugh (and I have suggested elsewhere on this blog, even some of our local talker mini-me's) are receiving true feedback, getting back some of what they have been dishing out.