[hermit22]

I know I'm late to this discussion, but I'll chime in regardless.

First, tw, Undertoad's right. You can't instantly dismiss anyone who listens to talk radio as ignorant. You can, however, dismiss anyone who gets all their information from only one source as irresponsible.

On the other hand, though, I think Daschle is, to an extent, right, although he may have gone a bit far in claiming that threats on his life were Rush's fault. The conservative whining about the liberal media is a lie, propagated by their own manipulation of the media. It may have been liberal at one time, but, taken as a whole, I believe it would be really difficult to show it as such today. You can't even really claim the NY Times shows this - anyone remember their utter hatred of Gore?

See, here's how modern media works. Journalists are pressed for deadlines, so when they see something mentioned somewhere, they have a tendency to present it as fact (over-generalization, I know) without doing any real fact-checking. This 'fact,' then, gets picked up by national media, and spread throughout our system. It becomes institutionalized regardless of its plausibility. Occasionally, it gets debunked, but more often anyone doing the debunking becomes a voice in the wilderness. This is what you're talking about, slang, with your 'smoking gun' (even though you claim to hate that term). Conservatives (and, I think, to a lesser extent, liberals), whose think tanks are well-funded, prominent, and seemingly omnipresent, realize this. So they release a few press statements about an issue - let's say...the so-called 'death tax'. They come up with a few talking points about the issue, release it to the public, and get interviews from the release. In this manner, they are able to raise awareness on the issue. They speak in vague and pejorative terms, and those terms get transferred into the media. Suddenly, the average American thinks they're going to be affected by a tax that only, and just barely, hits the top 2% of the population. And so the facts don't become conventional wisdom, the vague half-truths and lies propagated by some think tank and capitalized on by the media do. The media is there to sell - I think, in most cases, it doesn't care about one side or the other. Some exceptions, most notably Fox News, have an obvious bias.

I think this is all a backlash from the 60s and 70s. Conservatives learned the feminist deconstructive techniques and started to apply them to their own theories. Liberals, on the other hand, went kind of dormant. They figured that things were trending their way, and they didn't have to bother to worry about trying to set the national agenda, not counting on the conservatives' sudden ability to do so. Daschle's comments were an attempt to point this out, and he is pretty justified in doing so. Democrats can't set the agenda right now because conservatives have the monopoly on controlling the media (that's taking it a bit far - it's not quite a monopoly, but it is a disproportionate amount of strength). If the 'conservative media' gets echoed enough, that will become the conventional wisdom.

Besides, I don't blame Daschle. Ever listen to Rush lay into him? I personally think the guy's a fat, deaf buffoon, but a lot of people don't agree with me, and think he's the complete opposite (well, eyes and his own admission would confirm that he's overweight and is losing his hearing). So when he goes into an extended metaphor comparing Daschle to the devil, people listen, and start to accept it as fact. Daschle has the right to respond to that, but to make the connection between the threats and the commentary leads us down a dangerous path into free speech territory. Democrats should come up with a different way of trying to gain some foothold on the national agenda.