2-20-2007
Reader reaction makes job fun
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from one of my fans saying that I was the cause of the GOP downfall in the last election.
Wow! I didn’t think The Daily Star had that great a subscription base or that my column had that many readers and had such a powerful impact.
Here’s some of what was said to me in the e-mail: "It’s gratifying to see how much your bellicose right-wing ravings did to your beloved GOP in the last election.
In fact, I’d like to think that your brain-dead vitriol and partisan propaganda are precisely why you backward conservatives took such a thumping ..."
See why I love writing this column so much?
I guess it is necessary for me to say it yet one more time: Republicans lost their majorities simply because they strayed from their conservative voter base and conservative values.
Many of the Democrats who won ran with conservative messages and platforms. The war was only a part of the reason for losing both houses. You just have to look at Joe Lieberman’s overwhelming victory and stop listening to CNN interpretations.
All of the evidence points to the fact that conservatives are growing in number day after day. Let’s look at talk radio.
Conservatives dominate. The top five talkers and their respective listening audience are conservatives, from No. 1 Rush Limbaugh to No. 5 Laura Ingraham.
On the other hand, liberal talk-show hosts fail miserably time after time. From Clinton to Cuomo and the latest failure, Al Franken, they just can’t even hold a small audience.
Ever hear of Randi Rhodes or Thom Hartmann? Of course not. Their liberal listening base is probably 1,000 or fewer.
While conservative radio is expanding rapidly, a whole liberal radio network, Air America, with its entire line-up of liberal hosts, has had to file for bankruptcy. Quite an embarrassment wouldn’t you say?
Come on, liberals, show us conservatives how to start and maintain a successful talk show. I know you have all sorts of excuses for the above failures, and you are quite adept in ignoring hard-core facts as a part of your arguments.
Another area of liberal failings is cable TV. I was listening to Wolf Blitzer and CNN leading up to the president’s State of the Union speech while I was in the Los Angeles.
Blitzer had negative things to say even before the speech was made. He honestly thinks he is an unbiased reporter! His negative, partisan rantings are being listened to less and less.
Once again, I must share the facts with you. Fox News Channel, considered a conservative-leaning station but much more unbiased than our friend Wolf, recently became the most-watched cable-news station in the country.
CNN, on the other hand, went from first to third and is now behind MSNBC. Which one is going in the right direction?
How about newspapers? In 2004, the New York Post, a conservative newspaper, was the seventh-largest newspaper in the country. In the 12-month period ending September 2006, it had risen to fifth, leaping over two liberal rags, the New York Daily News and The Washington Post.
The Post is only 70,000 subscribers behind the Los Angeles Times and 380,000 behind The New York Times (as negative and biased a paper as I have ever read). I force myself to read the online versions of both just to get the wrong spin on political events.
Also, the New York Post’s subscription base increased by 5.13 percent over the six-month period that ended Sept. 30 while the Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the N.Y. Times subscription base declined 3.31 percent, 8.02 percent and 3.50 percent respectively. In addition, the N.Y. Times share price has dropped 25 percent over recent times.
Oops, there are those facts getting in the way again.
Lastly, let’s look at conservative authors. Whenever conservative authors such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin _ all hated by the liberal left wing _ come out with a new book, it automatically hits the best-seller lists. I wonder why that is.
So, all in all conservatives _ don’t despair. Two things will happen. First it will be shown that the Democrats are devoid of ideas and will have to settle for harassing committee hearings rather than leading the country in a positive direction.
Secondly, I think the Republicans got the message and will realign themselves with their conservative base. The sad and dangerous fact is that it won’t take place until the 2008 elections.
The best part is the Democrats’ failures are going to give me plenty of fodder for future columns. Also, my fans, like the one I mentioned above, will get even nastier as they become more and more frustrated with the facts.
Did I mention how much I loved writing this column?
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Tom Sears is a professor of accounting at Hartwick College in Oneonta. He can be reached at SearsT@hartwick.edu. His column appears every other week.