DiscussMormonism.com

Just to give you some idea of what passes for "news"in the Right Wing bubble.,,

If you want to appreciate how vast the digital divide is that historically separates conservative failures and liberal accomplishments online, and if you want to add some context to the recent New York Times Magazine feature article on how Republicans' chronic online shortcomings dim the party's electoral chances, just look at how the two camps were marking their time in recent days.

Working with Republicans on Capitol Hill trying to block Chuck Hagel's nomination to become Secretary of Defense, Breitbart's Ben Shapiro recently posted a report suggesting Hagel had allegedly received "foreign funding" over the years from a terrorist-friendly group called Friends of Hamas, but that the payments were being kept secret. The allegation served as part of the right wing's relentless campaign to smear Hagel as being anti-Israel.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy, and AM talker Hugh Hewitt all hyped Breitbart's conspiratorial narrative about Hagel's nefarious connections with Friends of Hamas.

Slight problem. Last week, Slate's David Weigel detailed how Friends of Hamas doesn't actually exist. And as New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman explained, he unwittingly started the Friends of Hamas rumor when he posed the Hagel question to a GOP aide in the form of "an obvious joke." According to Friedman, he asked about both Friends of Hamas and the "Junior League of Hezbollah," and thought that the "names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically."

The GOP aide then apparently shared the Friends of Hamas inquiry with other partisans and Friedman posits that from there it found its way to Breitbart, which published it in the form of "news" under Shapiro's byline. Tellingly, the fact that the scary sounding group doesn't exist didn't stop a right-wing site from pushing the tall tale; a tale that quickly ricocheted across the conservative media landscape and was touted as a Deeply Troubling Development.

It was against that backdrop of routine right-wing dysfunction that the Times published its lengthy article. Author Robert Draper argued -- and many Republican operatives agreed -- that the GOP's perennial online failures have made it almost impossible for the party to communicate effectively with younger voters; voters who have developed a deeply hostile perception of the GOP brand. (i.e. "Polarizing," "narrow-minded.") Draper didn't make reference to the Friends of Hamas debacle, but it could have served as a useful example of how routinely unserious online pursuits have become among Republican boosters.

By comparison, note Monday's news that left-leaning Mother Jones won a prestigious Polk Award for the big campaign scoop David Corn posted online last September about how Mitt Romney, while addressing wealthy donors, disparaged "47 percent" of Americans who "believe they are victims." The blockbuster report, complete with an undercover video, was the fruit of a month's worth of digging by Corn.

The Friends of Hamas farce, coupled with the Polk Award, represent useful bookends when measuring the widening gulf that separates liberals and conservatives online, and how one side has completely lapped the other. (Seven years after its launch, players are still trying to create the "conservative Huffington Post.")

I realize the Times piece focused on "the Republican Party's technological deficiencies," the lopsided battle for a social media edge, revolutionary campaign software, and how senior Republicans are still reluctant to even engage via Twitter. The piece cast a spotlight on how information, and better information, is shared faster and more widely among liberals than it is among conservatives.

But you can't really take what the right-wing media, and specifically bloggers, are doing online and separate that from the GOP's chronic, failed attempts to use the Internet to win elections and bolster its brand. The two are permanently attached.

The truth is, liberals for years bemoaned the fact that conservatives dominated talk radio and there seemed to be something in the DNA of liberal listeners that prevented them from tuning in to like-minded radio hosts endlessly, week after week and year after year. With the Internet, the tables have been turned. Conservatives scratch their heads trying to understand the chasm and why there seems to be a natural disposition on the left to embrace the nonhierarchical style of the Web and turn it into an oversize organizing tool, while so many Republicans simply demurred.

Or worse, they have helped turn the Web into the conservative house of mirrors, as represented by the comically awful and dishonest Friends of Hamas failure.

And talk about déjà vu.

Describing how badly Democrats are outclassing them online, a Republican operative told the Times, "They were playing chess while we were playing checkers."

Sound familiar? It should. "For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000." That's how a GOP aide turned blogger described the party's dire problem to the Washington Post in 2007. That same year, a Weekly Standard writer bemoaned, "We're losing the Web right now."

Not much has changed since then. In fact, according to the Times piece things may have gotten worse for Republicans over the last four years, as Mitt Romney's social media thumping proved. (i.e. 12 million Facebook friends registered for Romney vs. 33 million for Obama.) And specifically, the GOP now faces a grave danger in term of reaching and persuading young voters, who electorally appear to be verging on a generational lost cause for Republicans.

Frustrated GOP activists told the Times that the party's corporate rigidity was to blame for the lack of online innovation and success, and that conservative techies are too focused on making money and not devoted enough to helping grow the cause.

After reading the Times article, Salon's Andrew Leonard noted a different reason for endless GOP stumbles in the face of Democratic successes [emphasis added]:

What's really happening is that Democrats have grasped a fundamental attribute of the digital age -- information is easy to share -- and have understood that the best way to take advantage of this special quality is set up a structure in which "smart people" are allowed to operate freely in an environment where information flows fluidly.

Note the significance of "smart people." And just as importantly, I'd suggest, are serious people. Today online, conservatives often lack both.

Just ask Friends of Hamas.

No comment sub, droops, bcspace, ajax??

David Weigel is a libertarian who used to write for Reason mag. He's still an on-staff editor I believe. He supported Gary Johnson in the most recent election. So is that the conservative news busting the conservative news? It blurs the lines of what one considers conservative and liberal, doesn't it ?

EAllusion wrote:David Weigel is a libertarian who used to write for Reason mag. He's still an on-staff editor I believe. He supported Gary Johnson in the most recent election. So is that the conservative news busting the conservative news? It blurs the lines of what one considers conservative and liberal, doesn't it ?

Here is an exercise for you EAllusion. Go to Google News and do a search on "Friends of Hamas". How many conservative news sources print the story about "Friends of Hamas" not existing?

Ten people you didn't realize were friends of Hamas.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/ten-people-you-didnt-realize-were-friends-hamas

I think EA missed the point. He and people like subgenius are so intent on equating both sides, that they've already conditioned themselves to ignore the stark differences that sets one apart from the other. Analytics' exercise would be a great start, but the point here is that the stuff that makes up the Right Wing "News" is generally accepted with no critical thought or even the minimum or journalistic skepticism. So long as it feeds the narrative they want to create, they'll run with it without a second thought and then within just a couple of hours, it is running like a virus throughout the Right Wing blogosphere and tehse pseudo-news websites like Britebart, CNS, WND, Newsmax, and virtually every source cited by bcspace and droopy. Forget this notion of verifying sources. All you need is some rumor and the Right Wing media outlets pass it off as "breaking news."

But this is hardly an anomaly. Anyone with half a brain, who wasn't too lazy to read Obama's comments in context regarding the "you didn't build that," would have immediately known it was deceptively taken out of context. But the Right Wing news makers have complete faith in the ignorance/stupidity of their audience.

I don't think that internet media or talk radio has much to do with what ideology people choose. People tune in to hear their ideology affirmed, not challenged. Controlling the rhetoric of public education has been part of the liberals success in democracy because you can inculcate people at a very young age. But that's not the biggest reason they're winning. I'm amazed that Democrats were able to win most of the vote with young people while raising their taxes to pay for social security and medicare. Many of these old people live far better than the young peon worker paying their bills. It's also intersting that democrats can win the vote of the electricians union and yet support illegal and mass immigration which undercuts their wages. I don't see how the Republican party can win another election, but MSNBC continues to talk about Republicans for one very important reason. The hatred of Republicans is what unites these strange bedfellows that make up the democratic party. With so many factions in the USA, it amazes me that we still have a two party system.

Kevin Graham wrote:No comment sub, droops, bcspace, ajax??

I don't know about bc, but I'm simply not paying any attention to you anymore. You're no intellectual challenge whatsoever, but you have caused me to do a great deal of running around, checking, polishing up on certain things, and checking sources, and for that, I'm grateful. Going around and around and around with a cross between Michael Moore, Christ Matthews, Kieth Olbermann, and Snowball has reached the point of diminishing returns.




Graham reaches a crescendo at the annual Old McDonald's Collective Farm Symposium,"From each according to ability, to each according to need."

Kevin Graham wrote:I think EA missed the point. He and people like subgenius are so intent on equating both sides

I did no such thing.

Here's a thread where I take Stak to task for doing that:

www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/viewto ... =5&t=16961

I'm making a point that in the very article outlined, the person responsible for uncovering it is conservative. That's because "conservatives" aren't a monolith. There are conservative subcultures that do better and worse on various topics. Libertarian media, of which Weigel is an example, for instance, tend to do well on the issue brought up.

On another note, you've become the liberal equivalent of Droopy.

So what if it was a conservative who busted the story? It was also NBC who busted the story on the drones memo. I guess that means NBC can no longer be considered biased or liberal? What exactly is your point, and how does it pertain to the point I was making? There is a huge divide between liberal news outlets, which operate more like fact checkers than anything else, and the Right Wing outlets, which operate as propaganda machines.

The point, which you continue to miss, isn't that a conservative told us about how the conservative media is acting all stupid. The point is only the conservative media would take a rumor, based on no substance whatsoever, and then run with it like this. It is a tight circle these guys run in, and as soon as some idiot at Brietbart, WND, or Newsmax, says something unsubstantiated, suddenly within hours all the others are repeating it as "news." What's even funnier is that your buddy Paul Ryan took the "news" seriously! We saw a similar incident happen when the same idiot questioned Hillary Clinton about arms sold from Libya to Turkey, based on nothing more than an internet meme that originated with Glenn Beck! You just don't see this kind of stupidity and blatant disregard for facts, on the left.

And way to show you're not giving into simple reductionist thinking, by asserting I'm to be equated with Droopy. I'm sure you meant that as an insult, but I know you don't really believe that. You're still upset that I've managed to do something you haven't; I can allow myself to be persuaded by the evidence, and actually change my mind. I'm still confident this pisses you off.

That's life.