Sometimes thoughts bounce around my head for a week or so and I let them simmer. Maybe I'll add some spice to my inner dialog, really come at a subject matter with some pointed condescension, or maybe I'll mellow on it all, maybe from reading or hearing some mitigating perspective I hadn't thought about and I just let it go.
This topic I ain't letting go, but if only I can convey it on pixels, like I rehearse it to myself, I could really lay into some red meat.
I've said for years, basically as soon as I got out of doing it myself, that going to any one, or a limited field of personalities on air, or in pixels transforms the practitioner into a suppliant being that has basically given up on experience and education as a personal quest, and has accepted living the angst and fallacies or whomever it is that holds the attention.
Tracing the human condition back eons, one will not struggle to find thinkers who have placed into the vernacular words such as esteem, integrity, empathy, ethos and a host of other that were meant to aid one another when discerning honest actors from malicious ones.
Personal ethos is my current pet. Its defined as a framework of moral behavior. Something an individual constructs within his mind to aid oneself in discerning whether that other person is a good person too. Its personal -- my good guy might not be your good guy, but when you have an ethos, at least you become less prone to associating with a crowd that isn't holding the same values and morals as yourself.
I don't know what the ideal personal ethos is. Heck, its not even required to have one, although its rather important when you hold responsibilities.
My contention is that the medias who practice a variation of angering the audience, pointing fingers at villains, romancing a past and pushing anxieties about the future, while extolling how smart the audience is for just being a part of our crowd, but not theirs, are just a commercial enterprise that having earned a profitable balance sheet, a proven model, are never going to change. But they also won't tell you what the bull shit coming out of their mouths is either!
Its all a commercial enterprise, capitalism in the guise of a personal ethos. But it is not a personal ethos. Those programs, plenty of which call themselves conservative, are selling you as a consumer their business model. The model in this context is built on proven audience capturing schticks, that would not survive many personal ethos that place honesty, integrity, and empathy high on the list.
They should rightly be called consumer talk radio, not conservative talk radio, if labels meant anything, and no one should rightly replace their personal ethos with a commercial model.
Does that make sense?
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