In response to several conservative posters’ assertion that media has a liberal bias I will consume nothing but right wing media for the next ten days. I will leave behind the world of National Geographic, NPR and The New York Times and immerse myself in conservative news and opinions. I hope to gain a different perspective on the election and attempt to balance the scales of bias in news reporting. Below is a catalog of media I will consume: Book Atlas Shrugged Internet The Drudge Report TownHall National Review Redstate PJ Media TV Fox News Radio Rush Radio Film 2016: Obama's America I will chronicle my experiences here in the coming days. If you know of a good conservative news source, please post it and I will add it to my list.
Plus, I don't think you can find much actual conservative media. When I hear the term "conservative," I think of guys like Reagan, Goldwater, George Will, William F. Buckley... The people who claim to be conservatives now are something else entirely. Those old school conservatives were a libertarian (small "l") breed of republican with religion being only a relationship between them and their god (not to be evangelized). Fiercely anti-communist. I haven't listened to Limbaugh very much, but I think he was considered an old school conservative when he first started out. I can't vouch for what he talks about these days.
No, I think neocons were in between (timeline) the reagan type conservatives and the religious ones that we have now
Personally, I think you're skewing to the extreme. I don't know that I would say listening to Rush would equate to reading a NYT article or that watching a news show on Fox (vice O'reilly or Hannity or something) would equate to Huffington Post Op-eds. I imagine that if I spent a week listening to Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann before watching Religulous and Fahrenheit 9/11 it wouldn't give me a better sense of what Obama supporters are thinking and would probably do them injustice. But I like your premise and am interested in the results.
RealClearPolitics aggregates news from a variety of sources, but tends to have more conservative links than liberal. You get some nutjobs from both sides, but you also get some mainstream stuff that more accurately reflects the two camps. It's one of the sites that I visit regularly. Ed O.
[video=youtube;SdA9GDmfyd4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SdA9GDmfyd4[/video] [video=youtube;ytMwSuAP3XM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytMwSuAP3XM[/video]
^ And Denny just goes to HuffPo to see what hand-painted wallpaper Gwyneth Paltrow can't live without.
Actually, I go to HuffPo so I can see what really unhappy people post about to each other. Seriously. They weren't happy when Bush was president, and they're not happy with Obama, either. About 90% of the posts are whining and complaining about something. The articles posted by staff are nothing but hit pieces on one republican or another. This is good, too: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/pollster/
These are the recomendations I got from conservative people I asked. We live in an interesting age where the media is increasingly fragmented and viewers can surround themselves with programming that falls right in line with their own views, be they on the right or the left. My experiment’s purpose isn’t to understand the mindset of the average Romney supporter; it’s to gain insight into the narrative created by the right (far right?).
I think this is misguided or not well explained. Romney only got 25% of the vote in the primaries. The far right (right?) aren't the average Romney supporter. It's more like there are a lot of republicans willing to hold their nose and pull the lever for him. I'm not even sure you'll get a good view of the republican party's elements from that reading list. Very little of it is religious conservative. Not much tea party in it either - and I think the tea party is a really big force in all of politics. Atlas Shrugged isn't a (modern republican) republican kind of book. The old school conservatives might have been in tune with her philosophy. Republicans drifted pretty far away from the old school conservatism, to the point I don't recognize it anymore. That said, I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged. If you read it with an open mind, you might get why it is called the 2nd most influential book in history, behind only the bible.
My objective is not to see what Republicans or Romney supporters think. Some posters here stressed that the media has a liberal slant and I want to hear the message I’m missing. There may be some religious or tea party elements in the media I’ll consume. I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s only a 10 day exercise. I’m not going to cover the full conservative spectrum in that time frame.
