STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 30 November 2012

[Demeter]

24. The Right-Wing Media Bubble Cocoons Republicans from Adapting to the New Political Landscape

http://www.alternet.org/media/right-wing-media-bubble-cocoons-republicans-adapting-new-political-landscape?akid=9737.227380.yOqQlR&rd=1&src=newsletter752671&t=8&paging=off

Republicans are responding to their recent losses not by moderating their rhetoric or rethinking their policy preferences, but by retreating deeper into the conservative bubble -- and hardening it lest any objective reality intrude.

In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn approached the idea that villifying half the country as lazy “takers” dependent on the largesse of the makers may not be a way to win over the masses. He wrote, “Maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they need it all that menacing.” But he then rejects the notion and calls for better propaganda. “Conservatives' top priority,” he writes, “should be promoting an alternative—that in a highly competitive, global economy, the only real economic security for ordinary Americans is the security of opportunity.”

Victor Davis Hanson's analysis of the election was representative and equally informative. He wrote that Mitt Romney was an amazing candidate – “a glittering Sir Galahad who, given his impressive horse, armor, and lance, along with his decency and piety, assumed that he could win a joust in a fair charge against the other team’s knight.” Hanson claimed that 47 percent of the population are in fact dependent on government and mocked the idea that the Republican Party might try to reach out to non-white voters. “The only way Republicans can appeal to Latinos,” he wrote, is to “close the border, stop illegal immigration, and allow the melting pot and upward mobility to fracture 'Hispanics' along class lines.”

For Hanson and most of his readers, neither the message nor the messenger were problematic; only the pernicious bias of the traditional media prevented voters from embracing the plans Mitt Romney was going to detail right after his victory. Hanson then, without irony, warned his fellow Republicans of the dangers of falling into the comforting “cocoon” provided by the conservative media...