Examing Extreme Talk

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why dont you kill me?

Joe & Mika's radio show, a lead-in to Limbaugh on WABC, competes directly against Glenn Beck's on WOR in New York City.

In August Beck's former TV boss, CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein, asked his show producers to avoid booking talk radio hosts. "Complex issues require world class reporting," Klein is quoted as saying, adding that talk radio hosts too often add to the noise, and that what they say is "all too predictable."

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Meanwhile in Minnesota, the outgoing Republican Governor and would be Presidential contender took a stand on the nonexistent.

Beck would approve.

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Remember Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech (”Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”)?

In November 1964, in the current context of the Johnson/Goldwater campaign, historian Richard Hofstader examined "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" as a longstanding phenomenon. His essay in Harper's Magazine also inspired this article in Wikipedia.

Harper's revisited the subject in August 2007, when Scott Horton cited then current examples, but further explained:

In Hofstadter’s view this “paranoid style” was not necessarily right-wing, or the province of the G.O.P. Moreover the G.O.P. had arisen and been nurtured as a counter-movement to one of the earliest manifestations of the paranoid style, a political movement derided by Abraham Lincoln and called the 'Know-Nothings'.

But at the time Republicanism was a liberal movement.

The head of the Rand Corporation blames America's increasing politic polarization on "new media."