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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Conservative media need a literary voice |
| 2013-03-09 |
| A large excerpt: But do read the whole thing In Athwart History, Buckley writes about politics, of course. But he also writes about sailing, Beethoven, "what to do about sloppy dress," the role of beauty in politics, skiing, rock and roll, and Catholicism. He did profiles of Malcolm Muggeridge, David Niven, John Dos Passos, Evelyn Waugh, Churchill, and Princess Grace, among others. Buckley could also push back against his own side, as when he criticizes Ann Coulter for what he saw as her excessive defense of Joseph McCarthy. Let me give a specific example of the price I think the right pays for not fostering talent that can produce honest and poetic long form journalism of the type that Buckley practiced. This summer is World Youth Day, the semi-annual gathering of hundreds of thousands of Catholic youth from around the world. With a new pope and the Church at a particularly interesting point in its history, it is an event that cries out for a competent, literate and soulful journalist to tell the story. The event takes place this year in Rio, a dynamic city that lends itself well to journalism. But for the Weekly Standard or Breitbart to send such a journalist would mean an investment in the future, like a record company executive putting resources into a talented but not famous band. And the conservative media has no interest in such an investment when Ben Shapiro kneecapping Piers Morgan is where the action is. Who wants the next Hunter S. Thompson when Hannity's ratings are so good? So here is what will happen with World Youth Day. Major media like the Washington Post and New York Times will cover the event, but the reporters doing the coverage will view the event through the prism of liberal orthodoxy. Conservatives will then react to the liberal coverage, and complain about there not being enough conservatives in the media. They will then find the next Michelle Malkin, and promptly make her a star on Fox. For a fraction of the price of creating a new conservative star, you could send an actual writer to Rio to do the story that the New Yorker will not. But then, for many conservatives it's more fun, not to mention lucrative, to throw tantrums. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #5 Procopius - you show up BEFORE the gunfight with a knife, very silently... |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2013-03-09 10:21 |
| #4 War is not a theater for nice guys (War is an extension of politics by other means). You don't show up to a gun fight with a knife. Regardless of what you would like it to be, negative campaigning does work. As long as the party in opposition is more concerned about appearances rather than truly wrestling power from those exercising it, no amount of purchase of print or telecommunications will suffice. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2013-03-09 09:21 |
| #3 For a fraction of the price of creating a new conservative star, you could send an actual writer to Rio to do the story that the New Yorker will not. And then, who would read them, besides us, if nobody in legacy media published them? Junkiron sees the demand side with his comment and makes a good point. But the supply side is all the left needs to control to stop things anyways. The left controls everything in the education industry except a few religious schools. They control the entire entertainment industry. They control the entire news industry outside of a wan resistance from Fox. The best writer in the world is useless unless his writings are in a venue that can reach millions easily and consistently. The left will not allow this to happen and will stop at nothing (and I mean just that - no tactic up to and including violence is off the table for preventing a literate and persuasive conservative voice from reaching the general public) to prevent a writer good, bad, or otherwise from being able to reach an audience. The nearest we came was Breitbart and he was taken out summarily. It is a poor workman who blames his tools. Mainstream publications and visual media are off the table for the center/right, that horse has already left the barn, and so we must use the tools we have - talk radio and the Internet - to get the job done. People like the author of this article are delusional if they think sending a literate reporter to a Catholic conference or any other event has the potential to make a difference to the millions of LIV's who get all of their news from legacy media and will therefore never be exposed to the reporters' writings because said writings will never be put into any of those places. As time goes by and older people die off, the 'net will predominate more and more as an information stream. We thought it would be further along than it is right now, and our timeframe was off. That doesn't mean that the principal was wrong. We need to be more patient. The wait may be excruciating, but at some point the tools we have can be used to get the message out and people will respond. Going after legacy media is a fool's errand. If Buckley were a young writer today nobody outside the blogosphere would have heard of him despite his talent because the left is much more effective nowadays at blackballing center/right authors than they were fifty years go. Why doesn't The New Yorker publish Sowell or Mead, who are as eloquent as Buckley was? Why was Stephen Den Beste never a correspondent for NPR? If you send any of those guys to a conference to do some reporting, where would they publish or broadcast that could reach LIV's? If "stars" on Fox or talk radio or the blogosphere are all we have to work with - and they are - then let's make the best of them instead of foolishly dreaming we can wrest control of legacy media from the left. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2013-03-09 05:34 |
| #2 IMO, what conservatives need to understand is that they're in a fight for their (and their children) lives. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-03-09 05:08 |
| #1 In a world where 80% of high school graduates cannot even read the captions in the comic section ? |
| Posted by: junkiron 2013-03-09 00:50 |