Culture Clash
NEW YORK — The left's near-monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information is skidding to a halt. The transformation has gone far beyond the rise of conservative talk radio, which, since Rush Limbaugh's national debut 15 years ago, has chipped away at the power of the elite media to set the terms of the country's political and cultural debate. Almost overnight, three huge changes in communications have injected conservative ideas into the heart of that debate.
The first seismic event was the advent of cable TV, especially Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel, now in its seventh year. Watch Fox for a few hours and you encounter a conservative presence unlike anything on TV. The channel has prominent liberals on air, too, but to find out what conservatives are thinking, this is where you turn the dial.
Fox's ratings, already climbing since the station's 1996 launch, really began to rocket upward after Sept. 11, 2001, and blasted into orbit with the second Iraq war. And not only conservatives are watching. A June 2002 Pew Research Center study showed that of the 22% of Americans who got most of their news from Fox, 46% called themselves conservative, slightly higher than the 40% of CNN fans who did so. Fox is thus exposing many centrists (32% of its audience) and even liberals (18%) to conservative opinions they would not regularly find elsewhere on TV news.
But cable news isn't the only place where conservatives feel at home. Lots of cable comedy, while not traditionally conservative, is fiercely anti-liberal. Take "South Park," Comedy Central's hit cartoon series, whose heroes are four crudely animated and impossibly foul-mouthed fourth-graders named Cartman, Kenny, Kyle and Stan. Now in its seventh season, "South Park" attracts nearly 3 million viewers an episode.
Many conservatives have attacked "South Park" for its exuberant vulgarity. Such denunciations are misguided. Conservative critics should pay closer attention to what the show so irreverently mocks. As its co-creator, 32-year-old Matt Stone, sums it up: "I hate conservatives, but I really
In one brutal parody, made during the 2000 Florida recount fiasco, Rosie O'Donnell swept into town to weigh in on a kindergarten election dispute involving her nephew. The boys' teacher dressed her down: "People like you preach tolerance and open-mindedness all the time, but when it comes to middle America, you think we're all evil and stupid country yokels who need your political enlightenment. Just because you're on TV doesn't mean you know crap about the government."
