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: Althouse

"The conservatism of talk radio only partly overlaps with institutional conservatism, that of right-wing Washington think tanks, magazines and the Republican Party itself."

"By the early 2000s, it had embraced a version of conservatism that is less focused on free markets and small government and more focused on ethnonationalism and populism. It is, in short, the core of Trumpism ? now and in the future, with or without a President Trump.... If you visit a carpentry shop or factory floor, or hitch a ride with a long-haul truck driver, odds are that talk radio is a fixture of the aural landscape. But many white-collar workers, journalists included, struggle to understand the reach of talk radio because they don?t listen to it, and don?t know anyone who does.... Because of the ocean of content, one must listen to it at great length, a daunting task for anyone not already sympathetic with a host?s conservative views....  Each show has its own long-running inside jokes and references, a kind of linguistic shorthand that unites fans and repels outside examination.... By 1963 President John F. Kennedy was so worried about what an aide called this 'formidable force in American life today,? which was able to ?harass local school boards, local librarians and local government bodies,? that he authorized targeted Internal Revenue Service audits and the use of the Federal Communications Commission?s Fairness Doctrine to silence these pesky conservative broadcasters. The result was the most successful episode of government censorship of the last half century. Conservative broadcasters have never forgotten it, and it is a key reason that a conspiracist mind-set has such a grip on listeners. Since 2003, Rush Limbaugh, who got his start working in radio as a teenager in the mid-1960s, has mentioned the Fairness Doctrine on nearly 150 episodes. He credits the rise of talk radio to the lifting of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by the Reagan administration."

Full post as published by Althouse on October 09, 2020 (boomark / email).