Someone recently said: "Cable ratings in the weeks leading up to the election gave every indication of the Republican victory, and once again they proved to be right on the nose."
I will not take issue with what was said in this instance and I will say that the statistics are undoubtedly accurate, yet the reasoning and conclusions are flawed.
In a 70 year old Bob Hope Movie, Hope plays Lawrence and the following dialogue takes place.
Lawrence: "You live here?"
Montgomery: "Yes."
Lawrence: "Then maybe you know what a zombie is"
Montgomery: "When a person dies and is buried, its seems there are certain voodoo priests who ... who have the power to bring him back to life."
Carter: "How horrible!"
Montgomery: "It's worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring."
Lawrence: "You mean like Democrats?"
Nothing has changed in the intervening years.
The Republicans "hold" the poorest hand yet you would never know it.
From a media perspective, the Republicans represented by those pillars of virtue and honesty like Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly Rush Limbaugh and such have commandeered spotlight on the stage of broadcast and print appearances and none of them are particularly devoted to the cause of "TRUTH."
The Democrats "...You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do..."
For whatever reasons the Democrats have had a compelling story to tell yet they do not tell it.
Bush ordered the war in Afghanistan
Bush ordered the war in Iraq
Bush organized the biggest national debt increase in our countries history.
Bush left our country in the worst recession in over three quarters of a century.
Bush violated our constitution many times
And Bush did many more discernible bad things,
For the most part the Democrats say NOTHING about the Bush failures. Republicans are now taking the position that Bush can no longer be held responsible for the economy or wars that we are in now that Obama has been President for a year.
Wow!
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are hardly the spokespeople for the Democrats, yet who else is there to jump up and down about Obama inheriting the virtual disasters from eight years of a Republican Presidency?
The Republicans speak loudly with a powerful "single voice" while the Democrats do not have a media clue.
As a television executive I wonder about the ratings success of American Idol and Deal or No Deal. The answer was and is that people choose to watch them for whatever the reasons. The "WHY' about this does not matter. The Fox News Channel is a "comedy show" of sorts that does appeal to a certain audience. Yes that means something but I am not exactly sure what.
It is wrong in my opinion to come to political conclusions as to America's voting proclivities based on the entertainment programming that they watch and it is wrong to come to conclusions based on ratings for the Murdoch controlled outrageous Fox News.
In my hardly ever humble opinion today's truth is that the Democrats continue to tell their story ineffectively, while the Republicans manage to effectively sell their own horrid story to Americans. Obama "sells" brilliantly, but who else speaks regularly for the Democrats.
CNN and MSNBC are tanking in the ratings not because the "liberals" are abandoning them but probably more because for whatever reason people in general do not like watching their programming. People are voting with their remote controls and are simply choosing other stations. I am politically to the left of Leon Trotsky and I find that the programming on MSNBC and CNN to be less then desirable for me. What does this prove? Absolutely nothing.
Television executives continue to try and determine why people will watch certain programs and they have not for the most part succeeded in doing do. After 50 years in television I have concluded that I don't know why people watch what they do. Having said that, I would guess that they watch Fox in greater numbers then MSNBC and CNN not necessarily because of their politics but rather because of the "entertainment value" of Fox.
It is of course easy to come up with reasons for this yet for me William Goldman say it best "In Hollywood, no one knows anything."
Goldman also wrote in The Princess Bride: "True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops"