Right Wing Radio Week in Review: August 24-28

What boycott? As I’ve said all along, the Glenn Beck boycott is backfiring.

First off, the group behind the boycott, Color of Change, keeps targeting big companies – most recently, RadioShack -- that have never had anything to do with Glenn Beck’s FOX News show.

Other advertisers have decided to pull their ads from ALL cable shows, left and right, stripping leftwing media allies like Keith Olbermann with even ad less revenue than ever.

But it gets better: according to the latest ratings, viewers are tuning out the wall to wall Ted Kennedy hagiography and watching... Glenn Beck. He has more viewers now than ever before!

It hasn’t hurt that Sarah Palin is telling her Facebook friends to watch Beck’s show!

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Yeah, Sean Hannity’s been hinting around that he plans to run for public office one day – if it’s "God’s will". My reaction? Please God, no!

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No sooner did Dennis Miller return from vacation that he disappeared again. All this week the show broadcast “Best Of” segments (archives are members only).

However, the good news is that we finally have more details about his upcoming stint as Guest Programmer on Turner Classic movies.

Miller’s segment with Robert Osborne airs October 21. One of the films he’s selected is the criminally underrated, very grown up Dodsworth (1936). Regular listeners to Miller’s radio show won’t be surprised to learn that he’s also selected Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), a flick he references regularly.

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Speaking of guest spots: Rush Limbaugh taped an interview with William Shatner for his A&E program “Raw Nerve.” (Yes, Shatner has his own talk show. Who knew?)

Rush described the experience:

And [Shatner] said, "How do you know? How do you know all the time that you're right?  How do you know?" And, you know, nobody's ever asked me that.  They just assume I'm right.  But he said, "How do you know that you're right?"  And I'm not going to give away my answers or anything here, but it was a largely philosophical thing. Bill Shatner is a very philosophical guy. He can get very deep...

When he wasn’t telling the Federal Government to “leave our penises alone,” Rush had a lot to say about the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy this week – too bad some of what he said was misreported slightly. (Then again, what else is new?)

Limbaugh was quoted at HotAir.com, at the ABCNews.com site and elsewhere saying that the coverage of Kennedy’s death made him “vomit.” Well, that’s not quite true...

It didn’t matter in Boston anyhow, because nobody there got to hear Rush that day: two local stations reacted to the death of their native son by dumping their usual conservative talk radio shows for the day and sticking on liberal hosts, who delivered the expected hagiography of Ted Kennedy.

(In one instance, friend of Kennedy’s gleefully told the host that Kennedy liked nothing better than a good “Chappaquiddick joke"!

(Elsewhere on the dial, liberal radio host Mike Malloy declared on the air that the other Kennedy brothers (John and Robert) had been “murdered by the right wing in this country.”

(That would come as an awful shock to JFK’s assassin, were Lee Harvey Oswald still alive – the young man described himself matter of factly as a Marxist-Leninist on a local Dallas tv show, and had even briefly defected to the Soviet Union! As for RFK’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan hated the Senator for being too pro-Israel – hardly a “right wing” stance; incredibly, Obama’s leftist radical friend Bill Ayers even dedicated one of his books to RFK's assassin!)

No wonder liberals want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine – with on-air declarations like those, no wonder the general public doesn’t want to listen to their twisted programs.

Speaking of which: Rush Limbaugh appeared on Glenn Beck’s TV show this week to express his concerns about the new FCC “Diversity Czar," Mark Lloyd. Lloyd, among other things, is on video praising the “incredible revolution” led by Venezulan dictator Hugo Chavez, who, not incidentally, has a habit of shutting down media outlets that criticize him.

Another guest on Beck’s program -- Seton Motley of the Media Research Center – claimed that Lloyd plans to institute a de facto Fairness Doctrine by basically taxing conservative radio outlets into bakruptcy. Motley said that Lloyd wants to “set up eight pods around the country” that will regulate political advertising and commentary.

Another proposal would be the creation of a station scorecard measuring their “localism” and “diversity” in terms of hiring and programming; Motley says the criteria would be intentionally rigged so that few stations could actually achieve the government’s standards, and would then lose their licenses.

CNS News has been a the forefront of reporting on Mark Lloyd’s troubling background. As they reported on Thursday:

Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd called on fellow liberals to follow the model of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and challenge conservative media moguls and station owners, particularly figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and “a pro-big business Supreme Court aligned” with them.
 
Lloyd made the call in a 2007 article for the liberal Center for American Progress while he was a senior fellow there. (...)

“A pro-big business Supreme Court aligned with Murdoch, Limbaugh, and Zell and ready to battle a progressive in the White House begins to sound a lot like the early years of the FDR administration,” said Lloyd. “Will progressives sound like FDR and commit to creating a media policy that actually serves democracy and promotes diverse and antagonistic sources of news?”

Be sure to visit CNS News regularly and sign up for their FREE daily newsletter – they deserve enormous credit for the thankless job they’re doing, reporting on this issue.

PS: there’s a must-read meditation from Mark Koenig at David Horowtiz’s new NewsReal Blog, about the impact Rush and Glenn Beck are having on the country. As Koenig puts it so well: “America is rediscovering its political roots.”

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Dennis Prager got lots of calls about a subject he predicted would be a barnburner: Why do people put those stupid “My Kid Is On The Honor Roll” bumberstickers on their cars? Some callers explained – and they have a point – that with all the overemphasis on athletics in schools today, these bumperstickers serve to remind others of what school is supposed to be about.

However, temperamentally, I’m with Prager: “Nobody cares!”

He added, “This is like ‘would you like to see my grandchildren’s baby pictures?’ The truth is, I don’t. But that’s another show.”

(Prager’s audio archives are available to premium members only. However, you can tape his shows, and everyone elses', each day for the price of just one talk radio Premium Membership. Learn more HERE -- get a FREE trial, no obligation.)

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Joseph Farah of World Net Daily sat in for G. Gordon Liddy on the very day that Ted Kennedy died. Farah warned listeners that he planned to spend the next three hours telling stories about Kennedy “that will make your hair stand on end. So get ready. Call your friends!”

The show certainly lived up to his promise, for good or for ill. Consider yourself warned! (FREE audio).

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Mark Steyn also weighed in on the life of Ted Kennedy, during his weekly “visit” with Hugh Hewitt:

And when I listen to Orrin Hatch talking about [Ted Kennedy’s] terrific geniality and bipartisan spirit and all the rest of it, I think back to what he said about Judge Bork at those confirmation hearings twenty years ago, and I think actually a lot of the poison in our politics dates from that. I mean, it was an absurd caricature of Judge Bork’s views, it was utterly false in many respects, the idea that Robert Bork is in favor of segregated lunch counters and all the rest of it, I think it was a disgusting act from a disgusting man. But it helps you understand that a man who could behave as he did at Chappaquiddick would think nothing of doing what he did to Judge Bork in 1987.

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A good column by Townhall’s Matt Towery made a timely point I’m ashamed I didn’t think of first: “British release true savage [the Lockerbie bomber] while continuing to ban ‘savage’ talk show host” – a reference to the bizarre UK government travel ban imposed on controversial conservative talk radio host Michael Savage earlier this year.