Blogs v. Talk Radio: Accuracy

Tara Rowe at Political Game writes about the damaging inaccuracy of talk radio from a man who is unemployed and listens to talk radio:

Due to his location, this man listens to a majority of talk radio on KBAR, a Rupert-based AM station, as well as The Savage Nation and all things Rush on various talk radio stations. He’s not a man I would consider to be up on current events or even one I’d expect to have a solid understanding of foreign policy. I was right, almost. Yesterday he described to me the situation in the former Soviet republic Georgia and what it means to the United States.

Brace yourselves:

Russia invaded Georgia for the same reasons we invaded Iraq: ethnic cleansing, oil, and global terrorism. The only difference is that in a handful of days the Russians have killed more people in Georgia than we have in five years in Iraq and somehow their actions and the number of casualties are not a problem for them, yet they continue to oppose our war in Iraq.

Georgia invaded the southerners (referring to South Ossetians) for ethnic cleansing, Russia invaded Georgia for invading their own people, and Russia will continue to fight until the threat against democracy (i.e. terrorism) is no longer and their oil interests are protected.

If Russia does not retreat the United States will be forced to enter a “super war” in an effort to protect the world from Muslim terrorists and to ensure that oil prices do not continue to rise because of instability in yet another Persian Gulf country. The region of the world responsible for 9/11 will not go unnoticed by the Bush administration…

For a long while I’ve understood how damaging hate speech is on talk radio, I just never realized how damaging misinformation on talk radio is until now.

Now, first of all, one must say that not all talk radio is good, the same way not all blogs are good. I’m open the possibility that Michael Savage is actually pretending to be a conservative, that he’s a far more sinister version of Stephen Colbert. However, what Tara has done in here is use the poor unemployed dude as proof that talk radio listeners are misinformed zombies. It’s kind of like she used a reverse appeal to authority. This guy’s a loser and uninformed, therefore most talk radio listeners are. It depends on the show. Her attack would be as valid as saying, “I know an unemployed guy who reads liberal blogs all day and he thinks 9-1-1 was an inside job to bring aliens to Earth.” Have I proved blogs are dangerous misinformers?

Did Tara’s friend get this from Rush? Let’s go to the transcript:

This Russia and Georgia thing, it’s clear, this was long planned to time with the Olympics. It’s all about NATO. It’s about keeping Georgia out of NATO. Vladimir Putin is KGB and nobody ever leaves the KGB. McCain was right about this. This is KGB and there’s a great piece, Victor Davis Hanson today has a fabulous analysis of this. He stole my own words before I uttered them, so I can’t accuse him of stealing my words. What this is is the Russian nation once again feeling pride. They have felt snubbed ever since the Cold War ended. And some might say, and I wouldn’t disagree with it, but I don’t care, it’s not a big factor, we weren’t the most gracious winners. We plucked Ukraine away from them. We snubbed them in a number of different ways. We did send some people over there to try to teach ‘em democracy, that snubbed ‘em too. They’re feeling pride, as Victor Davis Hanson says, as they go into Georgia and South Ossetia and start murdering innocent civilians, you’re not going to see Russian citizens marching in Moscow with “No blood for oil signs.” You’re not going to see the Russian citizens demanding humanitarian aid. The Russian citizenry is going to stand up and applaud because they got their national pride back. The Putin government is sending a message, too. “You can’t stop us. Only by our good graces are we going to stop. You can’t stop us from bombing any pipelines.”

Note: Rush didn’t say it was all about oil. Didn’t call for a superwar.  Agree with his analysis or not, it’s not what Tara’s friend got. It might be alleged that he got it from some other radio hosts, but as someone whose actually listened to good talk radio hosts, I’ve heard several hosts including Rush, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin get into fights with callers who are out there either way and they argue.

The leftosphere doesn’t exactly have room to throw stones. For example, last week, many liberal bloggers continually inferred that Brandi Swindell hypocritically asked for money to pay off the City of Boise for her legal fees while she had thousands of dollars lying around for a trip to China. This was blatantly inaccurate and could have been discovered by reading the Idaho Statesman piece which stated:

Swindell’s trip to China was funded by the National Clergy Council, of which Schenck is founder and president.

Swindell didn’t have money for a trip to China either. She was able to go because the National Clergy Council paid for the trip. Still, comments proliferate on liberal blogs about this somehow being tied to the money sent to cover the legal expenses when all one would have to do is read the Statesman to find out that this wasn’t the case.

Given the misinformation that from the leftosphere and that no attempt is made to correct factual errors in the narrative, the phrase, “Get the beam out of your own eye” comes to mind in regards to blanket criticism of entire catergories of information sources coming from that quarter.

UPDATE

Fixed a grammatically confusing sentence. Alan questioned my statement on Michael Savage:

Also, Savage is a far more sinister comedian than Colbert?

Essentially, yes. I think it’s possible (not 100% certain, just a theory) that Michael Savage is a comedian and that every episode of his show is his own private joke. Back in the day, Savage was a far leftist and is now far to the right. Listening to his show is almost like a parody of conservatism.

You add to that fact that he lives in San Francisco and gave $5,000 to Jerry Brown’s Attorney General campaign and I’ve got good reason to suspect his sincerity.