Blame The Conservative Media

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg portrays the fringes of contemporary conservatism and the fantasies about "death panels," Obama's Kenyan birth, and his Marxist, Communist, Fascist identity:

This sort of lunatic paranoia--touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism--has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism's hands and feet, but its heart--also, Heaven help us, its brain--is a "conservative" media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership.

They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful--they all routinely liken the President and the "Democrat Party" to murderous totalitarians--but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism--the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

The mini-clash between Michael Steele and Glenn Beck was an example of what Hertzberg is talking about. And, given that conservative media figures have promoted anti-Obama rallies on their shows (even Fox's news coverage has a symbiotic relationship with the tea parties that seems to go a shade beyond the similar relationship between every news department and every event it covers, as Fox reported on the locations of scheduled tea party events in April, but did so with apparent glee), Hertzberg's thesis seems on the mark.

This is not meant to single out conservatives, but, if the advent of cable news saw a blurring of lines between news and commentary, there's now even less distinction between news, commentary, and activism.