Ear-Opener
Granted, it's only been on for a week and a half, and my ability to listen's been limited by only being able to access it online, but Air America has been a revelation in a way I hadn't quite expected. While it often engages in hyperbolic messages and cheap puns and shtick over straight reasoning for its own causes, much as Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and so much Right-leaning radio does, it also has been fulfilling its mission of informing people that the line the Bush White House and its flunkies feed the nation is often a funhouse reflection of reality augmented with a Winky Dink screen. (Hey, if you want links to Rush or Faux News, you can find them easily enough. You ain't gettin' there from here.)
Still, that wasn't any sort of revelation.
What Air America drove home for me was how brainwashed I'd become by Right-leaning media, despite thinking I'd been keeping my guard up. How so? Well, over the past decade the message had insidiously crept in that all of the Right radio was some sort of a balance to supposedly Left-leaning NPR. Somewhere over the years the lie crept in and took hold, when the reality was that so much of the rest of the media had become so biased that a place that was trying to show the rest of the picture seemed almost counter-culture.
Getting to hear intentionally Left-leaning radio made it clear to me how balanced NPR generally is. I suppose the perception was part of the slide that's been generally occurring over the same years, as the projected perception of "centrist" has shifted more and more to the Right, despite what individual people might rationally think when they, well, take the time to think.
Far from perfect, I'm still very grateful for the launch of Air America, especially in this election year.
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