by Chris Black
“Local” news reporters are among the most contemptible; almost all “local” news stations are owned by large conglomerates like Cumulus, Townsquare, iHeart, or are “affiliates” of national networks.
They posture as “local” but mostly all report the same nationally-curated crap.
If you’ve ever lived in a “red” programming market, you’ll know that any station owned by these companies basically acts as a subversive force on the local culture.
iHeart and ABC News are never going to allow anything transgressive on their assembly line.
You basically have to seek out underground citizen journalism and “outside the beltway” publications that aren’t owned by these companies if you want any actual local reporting.
The worst is when these phonies host call-in shows where they dutifully ridicule any caller who manages to sneak a dissenting opinion past the screener.
Doesn’t happen often, but the hosts become audibly upset when it does. You can hear the anger in their voices.
People who work in this industry are unimpressive and dim, almost without fail; being handed a curated list of stories and talking points makes them feel important and sharp, so when somebody goes off-script they take it with personal offense.
The real redpill on talk radio is that the call-ins are intended to be stupid by design as a way of bolstering whatever narrative the show is pushing.
Some programs make a big show of “inviting disagreement,” but this is merely a set-piece meant for the host to just over-talk the dissenters.
If somebody brings hard facts, the host will just say stuff like “I dunno about that one there bud” in his 90-IQ Fred Flintstone voice.
I am forced to conclude that talk radio is essentially a form of psychic terrorism with a dual-purpose depending on the intelligence of the listener.
For the dim, it’s comforting containment.
For the mentally curious, it’s akin to Chinese water torture.
Living in a “red state” teaches you some hard lessons about how clueless your average GOP voter really is; although they may superficially recognize that “The Left Has Gone Insane,” GOP voters have a deep naivete that permeates their entire understanding how our political system works.
In the online “dissident space,” we more or less take it for granted that the institutions are totally corrupt and functionally perverse, that the media misrepresents basically everything, and that the idea of democracy is more or less a farce.
But your typical GOP voter in “red states” is, at best, mouthing the words along to observations like these.
They’ll turn on Dan Bongino or the local Boomer Talk Hour and listen to screeds about how The FBI Is Corrupt and Joe Biden Is The Most Corrupt President In History and all the rest, but then pivot to talking about the election.
It’s like there’s no functional understanding of how bad things actually are.
They still believe in our elections and in the legitimacy of the institutions.
The stuff about “corruption” is just empty words for them, a set of dopamine-generating slurs they can hurl at Democrats they dislike and not much more.