(Opinion) Every few months someone tries to silence me by getting me fired by my radio show. It’s not effective because I follow the rules and work for a company that values their product over the complaints of malcontents.
But instead of picking up the phone, calling 1-866-494-WVNN, and challenging me on the air, they want to make me disappear from the conversation. This is hardly a new thing. Rush Limbaugh has been targeted for years, but he is still on the air and still making $40+ million dollars a year.
I am not Rush, and this week I was the victim of another silencing technique: Whining to Twitter:
Why this matters: “Pansy.” As in, “buck up, weakling”. That was the sin. Apparently, it’s a slur against homosexuals and not a general statement of weakness.
I should have said “snowflake” or implied one of these people was a child molester as one of them did to me. Were any of them actually offended?
Of course not. The goal here is to take your enemies off the battlefield. General Robert E. Lee can’t surrender to General U.S. Grant if Grant is removed for being a drunk monster feeding his soldiers into a war machine. Twitter isn’t President Abraham Lincoln and Grant was delivering, so he stood by him. Twitter is different, they don’t make any money off me, they just want to minimize hassle and proactively silence people.
Plenty has been made about the politics of those Twitter chose to silence.
Regardless, this stuff works, sometimes too well…
This image from Think Progress isn’t telling the whole story. Advertisers are continuing to shy away from political content because they are tired of the back and forth sniping of the rival brands and listening to people complain about where they spend their money. Breitbart has had similar problems.
Back to talk radio for a moment. Yes, Rush lost advertisers, but most just stopped advertising on political talk radio altogether. Again, Rush survives, but since the #StopRush movement started national liberal radio hosts Ed Shultz and Randi Rhodes have disappeared, while Thom Hartmann and Mike Malloy have gone to a subscriber-supported model. You don’t know who these people are and that doesn’t matter. Schultz predicted liberal hosts would be “collateral damage“.
This should stop, you don’t have to boycott your enemies or demand an advertiser ignore them because you disagree with them.
Whether you are a liberal or a conservative, there is no reason to report your enemies to Twitter, there is no reason to scream at advertisers.
Fight the battle in the marketplace of ideas. If you can’t handle that, just block them or look away.
The details:
— News/Talk radio was the #1 radio format of 2017, with a better year than 2016.
— The #StopRush movement took credit for more than 140+ advertisers pulling ads from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. This number is completely absurd and made up of people who never advertised at all.
— Most of the #StopRush Tweets to advertisers came from 10 Twitter users, but still scared advertisers away from the format.
— Similar methods have been used against Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity advertisers, with some effect, but Bill O’Reilly was forced out over sexual harassment and not political opinions.
Dale Jackson hosts a daily radio show from 7-11 a.m. on NewsTalk 770 AM/92.5 FM WVNN and a weekly television show, “Guerrilla Politics,” on WAAY-TV, both in North Alabama. Follow him @TheDaleJackson.
