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Matt Zencey

Matt Zencey joined the Daily News as an editorial writer in 1985 and was named editorial page editor in May 2007. He has won several. "Best editorial writing" awards from the Alaska Press Club and was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University. He lives on the west side of Anchorage, where he enjoys the best weather in town and easy access to the Coastal Trail. E-mail Matt at mzencey@adn.com

Frank Gerjevic

Frank Gerjevic has worked at the Daily News since 1978, where he's been sports editor, copy editor, reporter and columnist. He's been an editorial writer since 1998. He began his newspaper career with the Anchorage Times in 1975. E-mail Frank at fgerjevic@adn.com

Rosemary Shinohara

Rosemary Shinohara is an editorial writer who has lived most of her life in Alaska. She has spent most of her career as a reporter or editor at the Daily News. She covered construction of the Alaska oil pipeline, the Legislature, schools and urban affairs. She has also been an editor for NPR's All Things Considered, and has written for the Associated Press. E-mail Rosemary at rshinohara.com

Talk radio: Dittoheads vs liberals

Posted by editorial_views

Posted: May 7, 2008 - 11:01 am

A caller said he had trouble finding the on line version of today's controversial Alaska notebook, which lampoons both liberal and conservative talk radio. Here it is:

Liberal talk radio

I don't know the real reason liberal radio talk show host Aaron Selbig was sacked from KUDO-AM. Maybe it was the lousy ratings. Maybe it was that he dared go where the station's offstage masters at IBEW didn't want him to go.

I do know this: Liberal talk radio is a lousy business proposition.

And there are good reasons for that.

No. 1 -- Liberals have minds of their own. Unlike Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads, they don't respond like Pavlov's dogs when the master rings their emotional bells.

Liberals operate higher up the brain stem than most talk radio listeners. Liberals use their heads; conservatives go for the gut. (The term "liberal" in liberal arts education doesn't mean getting politically indoctrinated; it means thinking for yourself.)

Second, liberals have real jobs during the day. Jobs that require using their brains. They aren't sitting around in T-shirts and boxer shorts all afternoon, beer in hand, yelling from the Barcalounger, "You tell 'em, Rush!" Liberals aren't stickin' it to the man by goofing off at their dead-end jobs and listening to rants on the radio while munching fatty snacks jimmied out of the company vending machine.

Most commercial talk radio listeners are looking for entertainment, not enlightenment. They enjoy a rhetorical circus. They don't care if facts get in the way of a good argument.

Liberals have a reality-based view of the world. And let's face it -- reality is soooo B-O-R-I-N-G.

Liberal talk radio is a great sedative. If I'm having trouble getting to sleep at night, I can slap on the headphones, cue up a podcast of NPR's "Talk of the Nation," and I'm off to dreamland in no time.

The popularity of right-wing talk radio would be irrelevant, just a quirk of the American communications market, if it weren't for the political implications. Dittoheads can be stampeded into mass action that frightens politicians who might otherwise do the right thing.

For this sad fact of American life, I blame the educational system. Students these days just don't learn to think for themselves.

The biggest sign of trouble in American education is not low test scores. It's not abysmal graduation rates. It's the continuing commercial success of right-wing talk radio.

-- Matt Zencey

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14 May 9, 2008 - 6:00pm | lunatech

Mr. Zencey

This article only helps confirm that Liberalism truly is a mental disorder. However, maybe the article was intended as comedy! If so, not too bad, it does put out some hilarious conclusions, but even as comedy,I only give it a 4 out of 10 score.

13 May 8, 2008 - 11:50am | PlayAlong

Its the combo

Yeah your right. We are conditioned for entertainment and seek it out, well most do.

I think right-wing radio has combined entertainment with a good dose of ideological
right wing politics and made a pretty tasting stew.

Another characteristic is most people who listen ARE the choir.

12 May 8, 2008 - 11:11am | moyerpj

I wonder

if working for an agenda driven and failing newspaper is a real job? Thanks Mr Z, for reminding me why I cancelled my ADN subscription last year.

May 9, 2008 - 12:02am | CingRed

Me too..

Stopped my subscription two years ago and I couldn't be happier about not contributing a dime to this sort of ignorance. Thanks for validating my decision.

11 May 8, 2008 - 10:51am | akgen

opppsy, now ya did it...

I know a guy, who called his girlfriend militant because "she stuck up for herself, every single time we argue ... ".

When I heard him call her a martyr, I just had to ask why? He yelled "BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T DRINK ENOUGH !".

When she broke off the relationship, I saw him blubbering over his usual mixed drink complaining that "she had too much of a mind of her own..." (his words, not mine). That was over a decade ago.

This past winter, I had the opportunity to wait at the airport with her. We conversed for nearly two hours. She felt Alaskans do not like it if you tend to think for yourself. "Your supposed to draw lines in the snow...your supposed to stay on your side of the line, no matter how yellow the snow gets.." she says.

When we boarded the plane, she whispered "ya know, snow melts and it turns to mud... and lots of Alaskans don't like mud. It mucks up the lines drawn in the snow."

10 May 7, 2008 - 10:13pm | Makabit

I'm curious what Mr. Zencey considers a dead end job?

taxi drivers?
bus drivers?
truck drivers?
airport workers?
hair dressers?
grocery store clerks?
drama queens that write for a living?

May 9, 2008 - 6:24pm | rfn

If we judge by the New York Times

experience, I'd say "journalist" meets the specification.

Oh, wait! Make that "reporter". They kept all the "creative writers".

9 May 7, 2008 - 9:09pm | biglake78

I listen to Kudo

most every day and don't see a problem with this column

8 May 7, 2008 - 9:01pm | thompsonl

Matt Zencey

Matt, You meant every word you wrote, nice try playing it off as tongue with Dan this afternoon. This is one person that does not believe you and it is everything your publisher wanted you to say. Shame on you and shame on Dan for letting you get off the hook so easy. Your paper is sounding more like a tabloid every day. Lee

7 May 7, 2008 - 8:33pm | aknauta

conservative talk radio

One fundamental truism is the total lack of understanding by liberals of talk radio. They are used to watching television which is controlled by 3 liberal institutions and thus neatly control what the "news" IS each day, straight from the Democratic Party line.
Unfortunately for them radio was opened up to anyone who wanted to broadcast. This came at great cost because liberals tried hard to prevent open broadcast of programs by anyone who was willing to buy the time. So now normal Americans can say what they want on the radio and the liberals are furious. Tough Darts.
Communism appears to work efficiently when it is the only philosophical ruling mechinism allowed by law. However the big problem with communism is that it eats it's people. Eventually there is no one left who believes in the anti-human system and it decays quickly. Democrats (Marxists) are just infections waiting to die in the corruption of the populace.

6 May 7, 2008 - 8:24pm | tlamb775

Sounds like sour grapes

"...The biggest sign of trouble in American education is not low test scores. It's not abysmal graduation rates. It's the continuing commercial success of right-wing talk radio."

Priorities, Priorities. You could have saved the planet with less print to really get to your point.

Zencey go have another latte. Dittoheads? How about Conservatives vs. Liberals.

5 May 7, 2008 - 3:51pm | Confederate

Way to go Matt!

Wow, Matt baby! Hard day at the office yesterday? Needed to release a little stress, or to much 1080 Air America radio, which was it?

Perhaps you should get together with Lauesen and both have a good cry on each others shoulders?

Your little rant wasn't just ignorant, misinformed and misguided. It was just plain STUPID. Thanks for confirming what all of us boxer wearing, beer swilling, under educated, no job, snack food munchers knew all along. Bet your boss is just beaming with pride.

A pen in the wrong hands can be more dangerous than a sword.

4 May 7, 2008 - 2:35pm | Finnian

To Slam Schools is to Slam Liberal Agenda

You blame the educational system for the sad fact of american life in which students just don't learn to think for themselves...

Just remember it's a liberal educational system - totally.
It's the liberals that run the schoools and the unions the teachers belong to.
It's liberals that control the texts students use, determine the curriculum, and disciplinary agenda.
If the educational system is failing, you have only liberals (yourself) to blame.

That students for so many years have fought against and resisted the liberal indoctrination agenda should be a message to you, the teachers unions, and the acedemic society that fails to live in or accept the real world.

Try to get yourself outside the Liberal agenda - try to recall that journalism isn't about libralism, it's about truth and information.
Liberals seem to have been having difficutly with both concepts over the past 30 years or so...

Don't mark me conservative, mark me as moderate...
That or an ultra conservative with streaks of radical liberalism...

3 May 7, 2008 - 1:54pm | TheSdog

Zencey

You are painting with a wide brush and an inaccurate one at that.

With the risk of being called a racist, the statistics do not back you up.

The African American and Hispanic populations tend to be Democrat voters which in most cases means liberal. They also have higher unemployment rates and lower education levels then the general population. This also is a wide brush but is statistical fact which completely blows your theory out of the water.

Have you listened to Obama supporters in interviews? They all say he is for "change" but when asked what that "change" is they have no idea how to answer it. There is no great thought going into it. His supporters are the biggest group of lemmings this country has seen in a while and they make "dittoheads" look like rocket scientists.

This editorial is right out of the left wing elite gamebook. It could have been written by any liberal arts professor. And by the way, professors have no idea what reality is. Reality is not staying in a sheltered academic environment your whole life like most professors. They live in a world where they think theory actually can be applied all the time.

Incidently, it is that kind of sheltered thought that runs NPR.

I tend to go all over the dial and listen to various people. You need to hear a variety of things. You also need to be adept enough to cut through the bias and find out what is useful.

Radio is about entertainment. The problem with NPR is the snore factor but when you do not really have to compete for ratings it is what you get.

The problem with many of the left wing radio personalities is they come off way too bitter. They come off as way too easily offended. You may disagree with me but they are always coming off like they are trying to seriously personally hurt someone. The anti-Bush rhetoric in this country is over the top. It is well beyond anything ever hurled at Bill Clinton.

The other problem for liberal radio people is people already have an outlet for liberal thought. It is called the mainstream media. No one wants to hear the same thing you read in the papers or see on TV spun again by Ed Schultz. The success of Rush and his ilk is because they are the alternative.

Your last couple of statements are out of left field. The left wing has been trying to control thought at universities for decades. They have squashed any speech that opposes their views. They often use buzzwords like diversity just as you did with all of your "race awareness" blog posts.

There is little doubt that the real problem in the educational system is the attempt to indoctrinate our youth with liberal thought. You should be happy, polls all show that teachers and college professors and just about everybody else in the education system leans left. This needs to be addressed before you try to silence right wing radio.

2 May 8, 2008 - 9:35am | rfn

And that unprecedented success

is sucking up an awful lot of advertising money that, in a fair world, would be the rightful and exclusive property of the print media!

You're right that the problem is not with graduation rates or suchlike. It's with the sad fact that political fundamentalists of both stripes start believing all of what they hear and all of what they read.

Talk radio has the valid excuse of being intended to entertain. Print, on the other hand is supposed to inform.......

Truly distressing when so many folks confuse entertainment or indoctrination with information.

In retrospect, it now appears the whole thing may have been a ploy to try to snag a little publicity without having to pay for it. It certainly hasn't been news content that has attracted any attention in recent months, so why not test The Barnum Theory? Only took a day to prove it works. At least insofar as getting attention is concerned. Now whether that translates into circulation/advertising numbers....well, that'll take a little longer to establish.

If there's enough time before the NYT-style layoffs.

1 May 7, 2008 - 11:20am | fishspotter

Dude..

You so don't get Rush..

And that's quite OK when looking at the big picture....

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Talk radio: Dittoheads vs liberals