Jonathan Adler at Volokh brings up the burning issue of the day: when Rush Limbaugh inserts an advertisement for the Heritage Foundation into his radio show by extolling the virtues of Heritage, is he acting improperly? Here’s another question: is weaving a product pitch into a radio or TV show something uniquely Limbaugh and totally new.
For the prosecution you have Stephen Lathrop who says the following (and I quote): “Operating a media outlet without a clear-cut distinction between the paid stuff and the other stuff is not forthright. That’s a problem, because most media consumers are not moral philosophers, not scientists, not lawyers, not educated, really.”
Note the assumption: that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh are not smart enough to know that when he talks about the Heritage Foundation and asks his listeners to go to their website and become members, he’s fooling them into thinking it’s not an ad. The reason for that is that “media consumers” are not philosophers, scientists, lawyers or really educated.
There is a tendency to agree with assertions of this kind. After all, while I was able to see through the BS spouted by the Obama campaign, both in the paid ads and the way the MSM shilled for him, he did win the election. That makes you wonder about the wisdom of the general population. Certainly the members of Limbaugh’s audience also saw through the outright lies, distortions and misleading statements that the media were putting out about Obama, Biden and their opponents which is a testimony to the wisdom of Limbaugh’s audience.
But exactly who were the people who failed to see that Obama was … well, the kind of President he has turned out to be? It turns out that the educated, the professoriate, the lawyers (don’t know about the scientists) were the groups most likely to skew heavily toward Obama, to actually buy into the HopeN’Change pitch; to actually believe that a man could stand up in front of an audience and proclaim that with his election the oceans would recede and the earth would heal and not bust out laughing.
And who were the people least likely to fall for the pitch? The people who work for a living. The “Joe the Plumber” types. The people like my 80 year-old sister who has had experience with rabble rousing con-men in other countries far away and immediately identified the person in the suit with the really sharp crease in his pants. These are the people for whom patriotism isn’t a joke, people who know real from fake and understand intuitively what the “educated” have to have explained to them. Sure, they can be fooled and can be taken advantage of, but they are a great deal wiser – on the whole – than those for whom credentials have become a license to screw things up, big time.
Young Steve Lathrop must be a recent graduate unable to find a job blogging out of his parents’ basement (I kid, I kid). But product placement goes back to the earliest days of radio and TV. Here’s simply one example by the Oprah Winfrey of his day: Arthur Godfrey. So, Steve, my friend (and you are my friend) people in general are really smarter in the aggregate than you give them credit for. It’s one of the reasons that people are now overwhelmingly in agreement that the country’s headed in the wrong direction. There may be no agreement about what is to be done, but they know that what’s being done is wrong. And I suspect that the people who are least likely to think that the direction we’re headed in is wrong are the philosophers, the lawyers, the “educated” (especially those who call themselves Professor). These are the people who are most insulated from reality and, take it from me, reality is the greatest educator of all.
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