The Goldline fraud case reminds us of this story from last summer. Beware ditto-heads, those opinions spewed may be bought & paid for...
A radio biz guru has said, "Any good host or exec will tell you that he is in the audience acquisition, retention and expansion business, to maximize the value of their spots."
(photo: Sean Hannity bumps it with a trumpet)
Period. It's the money, baby, not the Star Spangled Banner or family values. So if you still think your favorite firebranding, liberty-loving, uber-patriotic talk host does what he or she does, says what he or she says, out of pure love of god, country, and the American way, you're just a dittohead.
Politico reports that top national radio talkers are being paid million$, literally, for right-wing activist lobbying groups whose messages are not only carried in ad copy, but also swirled into show content with only occasional or casual mentions that their messages are bought and paid for by these sponsors.
(photo: Laura Ingraham got dumped)
Freedom Works, is working hard against front-runner Mitt Romney... and guess what? so is Glenn Beck, who got around $1.4 million from the well-financed Republican phony grassroots "tea-party" front guided by Dick Armey.
Mark LeVin (say it the French way, accented on the 2nd syllable, leh VIN, except mispronounce the 'vin' part to rhyme with 'sin') gets 1.2 million for his sponsorship of Americans For Prosperity, a Koch Brothers-funded astroturf tea party organization.
Levin, whose endorsement deal with the tea party organizing group Americans for Prosperity started last summer, was similarly protective of his sponsor last year after President Barack Obama singled out the group in making the case that anonymously funded attack ads were distorting the midterm elections.
“Americans for Prosperity is a magnificent organization that people join voluntarily. You. Me,” Levin said on his syndicated radio show. Obama, Levin continued, “wants you to hate Americans for Prosperity. So if he wants you to hate it, then you should embrace it, and promote it, and support it and join it, because it’s effective.”
The Heritage Foundation, the grand-daddy conservative bullshit delivery system started this in 2008 by buying Laura Ingraham. They dropped her and now gives Rush Limbaugh $2 million and Hannity $1.3 a year to plug membership drives, and to defend the well-financed foundation when it's feeling persecuted (which is most of the time).
(Beck and many other conservative talkers have long been integrating their sponsors' messages into their "entertainment" with their 1-2 punch selling gold at incredibly inflated prices. First he predicts a dog-eat-dog Mad Max world after a collapse of the US financial system, (coming any dy, now) then pitches Goldline products as a hedge strategy. Dittoheads are some of the most gullible people in the world, loyal to a fault and willing to believe anything these on-air hucksters sell, whether it's their loopy politics or gold retailed at prices as much as 5-10X the cost on the real market).
It's working and working real good.
Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new memberships starting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.
There's nothing illegal about this, although old broadcast ethics have been flushed ignominiously down the golden executive toilets of these values-thumping whores.
“I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn’t Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts,” said the leader of one [conservative] group who inquired about ads on various radio shows, but decided they were both too expensive and ethically suspect. “If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth.”
Dittoheads manipulated and their loyalty exploited? Nothing new there, but we think such partisan political activism that's bought and paid for should be daylighted like other political advertising.
There is nothing like this on the left. Liberals have this thing about corporate masters and the First Amendment. If it were ever revealed that, say Randi Rhodes or Thom Hartmann were being paid to mix corporate or political sponsors' messaging into their show content, there hell paid would be a career-ending event.
“The point that people don’t realize,” said Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of the talk radio trade publication TALKERS Magazine, “is that (big time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities – they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in – and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener.”
The radio-consuming, dittoheaded, conservative basemen don't seem to care: with blind trust they eat what's fed to them... and shell out their bucks and assume the positions as directed.
Watch out for more of this in the election cycle as wingers buy more and more of your favorite talk-jock's time between commercials.
Dittoheads deserve to be suckered, but the rest of us must work hard to stop these messages from slopping over to pollute the mainstreams.
OK, I'll bite. I wonder how much total $'s progressive liberal talkshow hosts receive? If you tell me none or whatever, that's BS. It goes both ways.
Posted by: der Moderate | November 04, 2011 at 08:33 AM
“I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn’t Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts”.
The grassroots are flippin' idiots. The act of knowing reality for these intellectual ameba is as likely as pigs flying.
Take der Moderate, for example. He thinks he's a moderate.
Posted by: Hairis Onfire (R) Bellevue | November 04, 2011 at 09:22 AM
Mister Moderato: Show me a liberal talk host who is taking money to fold a corporate or political message into the content of their show... and we'll drum him out of the business together.
Posted by: Vanquish the dogs of sleaze! | November 04, 2011 at 11:29 AM
It depends on what Dr Choch Manana thinks about this. I always follow his logic.
Posted by: StarTheWonderDog | November 04, 2011 at 05:18 PM
Yup, Ed Schultz's in bed with Bio Green Clean and Made In America and some massage chair. I see what you mean.
Norm Goldman's show if self-funded and isn't making any money. Olberman's show isn't even in HD. MSNBC has 'invested millions' to come up with their tag line, "Bend Over".
Then, locally, there's the Dave Ross 'Dux Bed Scandal'.
Yeah, there's the same amount of money changing hands and the same big-money corporations behind both. In equal amounts.
Actually, it's more like the Yankees playing the Mariners. Every so often the Mariners get lucky. The businesses are not remotely similar, though.
Posted by: Frumpus | November 04, 2011 at 05:25 PM
So let me see if I get this right. Syndicated show hosts get bought off to plug a cause, company or organization. Sounds like payola without the records to me. So, how does this get by the Commission that still has payola regulations on the books? This is especially interesting since many of the same broadcasters carrying these shows make their employees sign payola advisories.
Posted by: Cueburner | November 04, 2011 at 08:47 PM
Frumpus, tell me you actually know the difference between advertizing sponsors and organizations that put monetary pressure on talkers to lie.
Posted by: Jovita | November 04, 2011 at 10:43 PM
Frumpus, tell me you actually know the difference between advertizing sponsors and organizations that put monetary pressure on talkers to lie.
Posted by: Jovita | November 04, 2011 at 10:43 PM
Hey Jovita, since you're in a question asking mood, how bout some 'answers' from you. Maybe you can answer this: how is it that 'Big Ed' Shultz doesn't have the courage to go on one of his Alan Greenspan is the devil-helped ruin the economy rants when Ms. Andrea Mitchell is on the set?
Makes him look weak and deferential to power....
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 05, 2011 at 05:51 AM
"Dittoheads deserve to be suckered, but the rest of us must work hard to stop these messages from slopping over to pollute the mainstreams."
I don't consider myself a dittohead - seldom listen to Limbaugh, but to say stop the messages from slopping over to pollute the mainstreams begs the question, what is considered to be the mainstream ?
What I think of as being the mainstreams have long been polluted, even before rightwing talk radio came into existence. Pollution by news media bias since TV came into existence prompted talk radio and was the driving force for all of the conservative/rightwing talk shows popping up since say 1990 - some not making it and new ones came along and some caught on. KVI did not make it as a talk station here, but there's also the rest of the country also - it ebbs and flows, depending on what shows up on the news cycles and the mood of the consumers. This has brought about both balance and polarization at the same time.
Left wing/liberal talk shows have been less successful. My theory is because the 24-7 news networks (with the exception of gasp...Fox News and alternative on-line media) have already discussed the topics in the news that the conservative talk shows use for their listenership. More people on the left have their news/talk fix and rather listen/watch other things than left wing talk shows than those on the right, who want to hear the other side that the news channels do not report, in this case to shield the president and the Democratic Party who most yearn to see the Democrat get reelected President over any GOP candidate, nothing new - just more pronounced and polarized than ever before. When it comes to presidential politics, the news machine aka Mainstreams has readily assumed the role akin to the 12th man at Seahawks games, in fact they also want to be out on the playing field and influence the men in striped shirts.
Unfortunately that is the way the news machine operates (with the exception of Fox News and alternate media sources (i.e. CNS, National Review, Town Hall,com, Newsmax, Breitbart's "Big Three - Government, Journalism and Hollywood and Drudge, etc.). Ah, not to forget the new sources for the under 35 crowd - Comedy Central; Stewart and Colbert and SNL - as big as ever. These shows tend to mock mainly conservative personalities and sometimes liberals. The balance is a good thing, but the polarization can be a bugger.
Posted by: KS | November 05, 2011 at 09:34 AM
KS are you saying that Fox News doesn't want to play the 12th man? Of course, they are owned lock stock and barrel by the Republican party, so they would be more like the team manager I guess!
Posted by: Jovita | November 05, 2011 at 09:47 AM
PSB after checking with the wife here we vote that either a. the sex is hot and Ed duzznt want to ruin a good thing, or b. professional courtesy by not embarrassing a colleague on the air.
Next question son!
Posted by: Jovita | November 05, 2011 at 09:51 AM
Fox is the alternative to the mainstreams. With a Democrat in office, the game is being played on the home field of the mainstreams - their guy. Conversely, in 2004, the game was being played on the home field of the alternatives (Fox) when Bush ran for reelection.
Also, I neglected to mention the alternative media on the left/progressivists financed in part by old man Soros - Huffington Post, Media Matters, the Daily KOS, Sgt.Schultz, Randi Rhodes and the former Air America crowd and to a lesser extent MSNBC. They branch off from the mainstreams and have an anarchist streak, unique to themselves. Anarchists seldom have constructive solutions moreover its each person for themselves, don't get in our way- just sayin.
Posted by: KS | November 05, 2011 at 10:12 AM
Ah yes, George Soros. The man who the right thinks owns every group they despise. You got ONE of those entities right, Media Matters. The rest, uh, no. Especially Daily Kos which is self funded through subscriptions, donations and advertising. I know that as a conservative, you like rules. But in this case, what applies to the Murdoch realm does not apply to the left. Each of those organizations is completely different than the other. And you don't understand what a true anarchist is. Just sayin'
And Sgt. Schultz ( "I see
NOSSINGS!") has been dead a few years. Of course, the back story on Hogan's Heroes is shocking in its own right.
Posted by: Jovita | November 05, 2011 at 10:21 AM
Ed Schulta AKA Sgt. Schultz. If one side (the left) doesn't play by the rules, why should the other side ? Corruption occurs on both sides. BTW, Soros also funds NPR, ABC and other shadow groups - the Tides Foundation, Americans for Progress, Open Society and the progressive media takes many of their cues from them. Dare I say the Occupy Movement is funded in part by Soros organizations - I just did and stand by that.
Posted by: KS | November 05, 2011 at 10:36 AM
PSB after checking with the wife here we vote that either a. the sex is hot and Ed duzznt want to ruin a good thing, or b. professional courtesy by not embarrassing a colleague on the air.
Next question son!
Posted by: Jovita | November 05, 2011 at 09:51 AM
'Professional Courtesy', sounds more like a sweat act Hack who knows he best not upset the apple cart or he'll find himself back to that little radio station in South Dakota. Thought you would hold your side to a higher standard. Turns out they play by the same rules as the right...LMAO
Kind of like a cop who pulls over an off duty cop for speeding and finding out who it is lets him go. Of course, for the other civilians before and after who did the same thing and got a ticket it's little consolation.
Why is Ed Schultz afraid to tell the truth, Jovita?
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 05, 2011 at 11:00 AM
KS
I think you got it right. Big Ed aka SGT Schultz with his 'I see Nothing!!!' schtick when talking about the Alan Greenspan/Fed Policy that should be red meat for him. Instead he has to choke it down, lest Andrea Mitchell get him canned. Too damn funny.
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 05, 2011 at 11:02 AM
PSB - Political correctness cuts both ways. Sgt. Schultz may not like it, but just another case of the truth getting in his way, which we already know he doesn't like.
Posted by: KS | November 05, 2011 at 01:01 PM
Great point, KS
Whatever happened to all that 'speaking truth to power' crap that they spew all the time. LMAO
You'd think someone like 'Big Ed' would be willing to tell the truth and let the chips fall as they may.
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 05, 2011 at 04:49 PM
Go ahead and try to define the OWC movement for us. I'm enjoying it!
Posted by: Jovita | November 05, 2011 at 05:36 PM
Dont get sucked into one of their circular arguments Jovita. Life is too short!
Posted by: sparky | November 05, 2011 at 05:58 PM
Go ahead and try to define the OWC movement for us. I'm enjoying it!
Posted by: Jovita | November 05, 2011 at 05:36 PM
You're the ones who own it, so go ahead and describe the grand plan they are doing to make a positive difference. We're waiting... or are we waiting until hell freezes over ?
Posted by: KS | November 06, 2011 at 12:04 AM
Dont get sucked into one of their circular arguments Jovita. Life is too short!
Posted by: sparky | November 05, 2011 at 05:58 PM
that's 'sparky-speake' for inconvenient facts....
jovita likes to ask questions, i just gave him a question: why is Big Ed unable to speak truth to power when Andrea Mitchell is on the set....LMAO
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 06, 2011 at 05:58 AM
interesting story from David Weigal at Slate. The red meat crowd will enjoy being fed this by the Hot Talk Crowd:
"Herman Cain: "I Am the Koch Brothers' Brother From Another Mother!"
By David Weigel | Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2011, at 2:41 PM ET
Herman Cain finished off his week from hell with a speech to the group that helped make him a politician: Americans for Prosperity. He took the stage shortly after Mitt Romney, and the difference between the two mens' receptions was impossible to miss. The ostensible GOP frontrunner, the guy leading on inTrade, got around one third of the audience to stand up for him. Cain entered to sustained, booming applause, everyone jumping off their chairs.
David Koch was in the front row. Art Pope, another AFP macher and target of stories about his wealth and influence, was sitting in the same section. There was an opportunity here to smack right back at all the reporters writing stories about how Cain was "connected" to Koch. Cain took it. He reminded the crowd about a New York Times story from last night. That piece had tied together Cain, an AFP speaker, and his campaign chief Mark Block, a former AFP organizer in Wisconsin, and Prosperity USA, the shell group that allegedly, illegeally, helped the Cain campaign get started in the start of 2011.
"The article tries to make a case of how close the Koch brothers and I are," said Cain.
The audience started chuckling.
"I'm proud to know the Koch brothers," said Cain. "I'm very proud to know the Koch brothers. They make it sound like we've had time to go fishing together, hunting together, skiing together, golfing together. But just so I can clarify this for the media?"
Chuckling louder now.
"This may be a breaking news announcement for the media."
Here it comes.
"I am the Koch brothers' brother from another mother!"
The room bursted into applause. Koch stood up, and the titantron cameras found him, guffawing along with the front rows.
"I'm their brother from another mother," repeated Cain. "And proud of it! You see, the reason that I'm running for president, folks, is that I want to unite the United States of America, not divide the United States of America."
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 06, 2011 at 06:57 AM
I already answered the question. Asking me again hoping you will get a different answer? Priceless!
Posted by: Jovita | November 06, 2011 at 08:33 AM
I already answered the question. Asking me again hoping you will get a different answer? Priceless!
Posted by: Jovita | November 06, 2011 at 08:33 AM
You call saying it's because Andrea Mitchell is hot is an answer?
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 06, 2011 at 09:05 AM
Preposterous !
Posted by: KS | November 06, 2011 at 09:11 AM
more discussion points for the Hot Talk Crowd
on the topic of violence at one of the OWS protest.
A person found dead.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/11/05/bc-occupy-vancouver-death.html
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 06, 2011 at 01:44 PM
Happy Veterans Day Bla'm. Thank you for your service.
And to all the other Vets who visit here...Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service.
Posted by: sparky | November 11, 2011 at 11:37 AM
why thank you, sparky.
i'm sure Steven sends his regards.
Posted by: Puget Sound Blathers | November 11, 2011 at 01:01 PM
I know I'm not welcome here and I'll be brief and hopefully the Blathermeister will allow this. Thank you Sparky, I always considered you a friend - even tho giving you a hard time. Hope your mom is doing well; sadly I lost mine this year.
Posted by: Duffman | November 11, 2011 at 03:44 PM
Did I tell you about my uncle pouring milk down a storm drain to get sympathy?
Posted by: Desmond Duffney | November 11, 2011 at 04:10 PM