- Anderson, Brian C.
South Park Conservatives.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2005.
ISBN 0-89526-019-0.
-
Who would have imagined that the advent of “new
media”—not just the Internet, but also AM radio after
having been freed of the shackles of the “fairness
doctrine”, cable television, with its proliferation of channels
and the advent of “narrowcasting”, along with the venerable
old media of stand-up comedy, cartoon series, and square old
books would end up being dominated by conservatives and
libertarians? Certainly not the greybeards atop the media
pyramid who believed they set the agenda for public discourse
and are now aghast to discover that the “people power” they
always gave lip service to means just that—the people, not they,
actually have the power, and there's nothing they can do to get it back
into their own hands.
This book chronicles the conservative new media revolution of the past
decade. There's nothing about the new media in themselves which has
made it a conservative revolution—it's simply that it occurred
in a society in which, at the outset, the media were dominated by an
elite which were in the thrall of a collectivist ideology which had
little or no traction outside the imperial districts from which they
declaimed, while the audience they were haranguing had different
beliefs entirely which, when they found media which spoke to them,
immediately started to listen and tuned out the well-groomed,
dulcet-voiced, insipid propagandists of the conventional wisdom.
One need only glance at the cratering audience figures for the old
media—left-wing urban newspapers, television network news, and
“mainstream” news-magazines to see the extent to which
they are being shunned. The audience abandoning them is
discovering the new media: Web sites, blogs, cable news, talk radio,
which (if one follows a broad enough selection), gives a sense of what
is actually going on in the world, as opposed to what the editors of
the New York Times and the Washington Post
decide merits appearing on the front page.
Of course, the new media aren't perfect, but they are
diverse—which is doubtless why collectivist partisans
of coercive consensus so detest them. Some conservatives may be
dismayed by the vulgarity of
“South Park”
(I'll confess; I'm a big
fan), but we partisans of civilisation would be well advised to party
down together under a broad and expansive tent. Otherwise, the bastards
might
kill
Kenny with a rocket widget ball.
January 2006 