August 28, 2006

The Pro-War Media's Re-Positioning Problem
by Gary North

Fox News and the other pro-war media outlets are now facing the day of reckoning. The United States is slowly losing the war in Iraq. More important for the pro-war media, pro-war consumers of soap are becoming anti-war.

When a true believer switches sides on a major belief, he does not want to hear people spouting the belief that he has now abandoned. He wants to hear something else. Today, millions of Americans are abandoning faith in Bush's wars.

If those media broadcasters that openly defend this abandoned belief do not change, they will lose market share. People will simply stop listening. But, as I will show, they dare not change.

Johnny-one note broadcasters are especially vulnerable to changing audience tastes. They cannot change their note to match their audience's new preferences. This is bad for advertising revenues.

Because the Iraq war is the dominant issue politically today, the outwardly pro-Republican media cannot avoid it. Like the bums of the month in Joe Louis' era, they can run, but they cannot hide.

One by one, listeners will tune out. Maybe they will turn to satellite radio's ad-free niche-audience music. They will not tune in to Air America Radio, let alone All Things Considered. They will just stop listening to politics. They will turn off Rush Limbaugh's self-proclaimed EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) network.

Day by day, the EIB network is rolling over IEDs. (Read the rest here - click back button to return to The Price of Liberty)

Empire of Debt and Delusion
by Bill Bonner

We have been fascinated by the big, big picture.

You'll recall, dear reader, that we resisted the idea of "empire" for a long time. We denied it. We dragged our feet. We insulted the neocons every opportunity we got. We insisted that America should stick with its old ideals...and mind its own business. Not that the old tattered republic was a perfect country by any means. It was full of bosh and claptrap, but we had gotten used to it. Like watching a favorite old comedy, we knew the punchlines and pratfalls by heart; still we always got a laugh.

But the neoconservatives said we were fools. America was an empire whether we liked it or not. No one chose to turn America into an empire; the role was thrust upon us. We had the last imperial ideology still standing, they said. It was time to stop whining and shoulder our imperial obligations.

Getting to like empire, we found, was a little like eating something new and nasty in a Chinese restaurant. After we got over our initial nausea and revulsion, we found we liked the taste of it. We got used to it. We found it helpful in understanding what was really going on. We found that the neoconservatives were right: looking at the United States as an empire explains a lot. (Read the rest here - click back button to return to The Price of Liberty)

Mark Steyn: It's breeding obvious, mate
Australia and the US can avoid the bleak future awaiting dying old Europe
18aug06