For more than two decades, the domination of talk radio by the conservative movement has completely confounded the best and brightest of the American Left. Attempts to compete in the free market have utterly failed despite Leftist hopes for Al Franken and Air America.
The Left has now apparently thrown in the towel, at least in terms of fair competition with conservatives, and plans are now underway to resort to the tried and true leftist technique of resorting to the courts and bureaucratic means to stifle ideas at odds with their own. The folks at Think Progress, for example, have outlined a plan to muzzle conservative talk radio through implementation of draconian regulation.
The nut of it is that they truly believe that the success of conservative talk radio has nothing to do with the free market and everything to do with a shadowy plot by station owners to shut out the lefties. They debunk “simple consumer demand” as a “common myth.” Here we have a text book example of how the Left fails to come to grips with the democratic nature of Capitalism. How can it be that more than 20 million people a week tune in to the likes of Rush Limbaugh? After all, Leftists dominate online media by a long shot, so why not talk radio?
In reality, the answer is simple and telling. The people who are listening to conservative radio are working while they listen. The people who can’t get through the day without a dose of The Daily Kos, on the other hand, spend most of their time between trips to the unemployment office, sitting in their jammies at the computer in a government-subsidized apartment.