--- kelley <the-squeeze at pulpculture.org> wrote:
> and let's not forget about the ideologically
> right-wing self-help market. bleh.
>
A few years ago, Wendy Kaminer, who is very smart, sort of a roving public intellectual with a law degree, hard to place politically, had a very nice little book demolishing the self-help market. She was hell on 12-step programs.
Some people have berated, or lamented, that the left is stuck on the irrelevant print media, when most folks get their info, or misinfo, from TV and to a lesser extent radio. I suppose it's already been pointed out that getting into print, and even publishing one's own rag, is still conceivably affordable for miniscule left wing budgets. TV, apart from public access cable, is not, same with radio. That's why the stakes were and hare so high with Pacifica, which has ben practucally the only lefty mass media about.
But there's all kinds of communication. One of the secrets of right wing dominance is the rise of Beltway thinktanks like Heritage and AEI, which use the talents of scholars (more or less) to develop policy material that no ordinary person would read, It get discussed via reviews and by having it sold to legislators (or thrie staffs, often municipal or state ones, to administrative agencies, often through revolving door policies of staffing the agencies with folks from those places, and to courts through right wing legal outfits like the Center for Individual Rights (which has litigated, e.g., voucher programs), and right wing legal associations like the Federalist Society. This ids the background against which Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter are operating. if they were all the right had, it would be, not exactly nowhere, but not as dominant as it is.
Does this model provide something the left (which of course lacks the financial resources of the right) cana adapt?
jks
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