Snark Too Far

Yes, the fact that the MountainGoat Report and this blog care enough about tolerance to monitor the hatred in a community neither of us lives in appears to be reason enough for Graham to question the substance of the material we find there.

I have refrained from ad hominem attacks on Idaho bloggers in the past because I don’t believe those types of attacks gain me or anyone else any ground. Unless I see a blatant misrepresentation of facts, I will give a blogger the benefit of the doubt on how he or she attained those sources and that the sources are indeed credible.

First of all, I was being a bit snarky, as bloggers are and sometimes we go too far, and I think the snark was over the top. Let me go ahead and explain what I meant.

I don’t doubt that Bryan Fischer said what he was quoted as I saying, I don’t doubt the credibility of what Tara and MGR quote. I wasn’t saying they were unprofessional but less professional than a professionally run media smack website.

However, effectiveness and pointlessness are something that I have to offer my honest opinion on. People may not care for my podcasts, but if anything else, its money. However, the focus on Zeb Bell is one of those bizarre things I’ve ever seen.

Shocking revelations are posted constantly about the Zeb Bell show on MGR and the Political Game. I don’t know Mr. Bell, never listened to his program and quite frankly don’t have a whole lot of interest in it. There are a lot of good radio hosts out there, I don’t have time to listen to them.

The case of the Zeb Bell obsession is bizarre. He hails from the Twin Falls area on 1230 KBAR out of Burley, Idaho which has about the population of Wasilla, Alaska. (And to think the liberals told us small towns didn’t matter during the Presidential election…) KBAR is ranked as the 18th most popular radio station in the Twin Falls area with a 1.7% rating. That means of all the people in the Magic Valley listening area that have their radios on, 1.7% are listening to KBAR. Now, it may be double that during the Zeb Bell show. There could be 5,000 folks listening or 1 of every 300 people in the state of Idaho.

Now, this doesn’t say anything against Zeb Bell. However, for two people from hundreds of miles away to get obsessed about every word said on a local call-in show is a little sad.

It also shows a lack of understanding of the medium. A talk show host is an entertainer and sometimes proveceur who tries to engage his listeners by stoking a fire. Oftentimes, there’s an element of satire and there’s also element of straining against the constraints of political correctness for the sake of it. I don’t know Mr. Zell’s show, but understanding how talk show hosts work, I pretty much ignore all the back and forth on the blogs about. While talk shows are clearly more substantive, many of them are to conservatives what slam poetry is to liberals.

Of course, the most ironic part of Tara’s argument is that this is being done for tolerance. However, being posted for the consumption of Idaho leftists in big, bold over-arching posts claiming that Zeb Bell is the spokesman for all conservatives (did I miss that election?), Bell’s words are being shown to liberals with the effect of widening and deepening the ideological divide, quoted in such a way as to confirm smug liberal stereotypes and make liberals hate conservatives more. The very thing she accuses Bell of doing (fostering intolerance and division), she’s doing by taking only the most inflammatory words of the man up on the Internet to score points on political opponents.

I feel that it’s a pointless excercise, but it’s certainly their right to do it.