Reply #9: "Jobbing The Refs" [View All]

[KharmaTrain]

I recall this term being used 20 plus years ago when hate radio began to incubate. I worked with a talk "consultant" who talked about a new Talk Radio...one that got away from the "Town Hall" concept that I worked with into one of "hot" discussion...finding the most pissed off callers and trying to yank chains. His concept was to turn up the rhetoric to get people to listen...like playing the "hot hits"...to keep the long-winded and older callers off and empahsize angry males. It was the template that now dominates the AM radio dial.

The right wing has long had a strategy of "jobbing the refs" as one once put it...creating the myth of a "liberal media" in the days where an attempt was truly made at even balance in reporting...the constant harranging became a mantra inside the beltway as "reporters" tried to prove they weren't "biased" by kowtowing to the right wing memes and always wary in what they wrote or said as to any retribution from the right wing. This shifted the "discussion" and with it, opened the doors for the right wing dominating both the media and the framing of virtually every issue.

Many profit from the polarizing of this country...to serve a political agenda or to get ratings...and to keep up that polarization one must go further and further out on a ledge. It's like a shock jock...initially he can shock you with lame penis jokes, but after a while that "peters" out and one has to get bolder and "top" the last stunt. This is the same game that the right wing has had to play...and to more of an extreme. As their agenda is debunked, their hypocrisies exposed and their overall popularity in total implosion, they are trying hard to recapture the framing..."top" their "tops"...with the only tools they have...fear and hate.