Tag Archives: Guess Bill

What Difference Does It Make…?

By Tom Ballantyne Jr.

Author’s Note – I began my most recent post with the following:

“I never imagined that I’d find myself quoting Bill’s one-time heart throb (okay, eons of time ago), but using her just happens to suit my purpose. (Guess Bill and I aren’t so different after all….)”


Due to an inadvertent title change (the title was to have been the same as this one’s), readers were no doubt puzzled by this. Hopefully, this will clear things up.


Anyone who registers even the faintest EKG response realizes that the “Mainstream Media” isn’t mainstream. So if you felt your not insignificant intelligence was being insulted…and therefore didn’t dive headlong into the piece, I’d ask you to reconsider, as I believe our perception of the establishment media (which almost no one in this audience either reads or watches) is at the very root of all that ails us…and I mean that with absolute sincerity!


Note that I did not say that the endangered media is the problem, but that our perception of it is. Hear me out….


Every national Conservative pundit I know, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh (who has famously – and accurately – dubbed them the “Drive-by” or “Endangered Media”), Michael Savage, and Joseph Farah (who both refer to them as the “so-called ‘mainstream’ media”), mindlessly refers to them as the “mainstream” or “MSM” – freely bestowing upon them the highest of both compliments and credibility!


Would we have called the Communists’ Pravda (far more conservative today than our own state-controlled press!) the Soviet Union’s “mainstream” media? Of course not! It was nothing more than a state-owned organ of propaganda…and while George Soros may not own the New York Times outright (or even in part), it is clear that he, his allies, and his pawns are in lockstep with its entire agenda. (Obviously everything I have said about the networks applies to the so-called “Newspaper of Record,” as well as to its counterparts from coast to coast – whose viewership and coffers are also universally, and happily, “on the brink.”)


To put this in perspective I will recount an experience I had last spring, when AZ State Representative Carl Seel took me by to introduce me to then Speaker of the House, Andy Tobin. It was a Friday afternoon, perhaps 2:00 or 3:00, and the Speaker had gone for the week, as it turned out. His secretary dutifully wrote down my name and phone number, however, promising to have him call me…which, of course, he never did. I knew little about the Speaker at that time, but have since learned all I need to know: he’s a “Republican” – not a Conservative, and a “politician” – not a Statesman, as best I can tell. (It’s difficult, of course, to know any of our “representatives” well when they refuse to respond to their constituents!


As I left his office that day, and passed through the deserted anteroom, there on a …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism

‘Mainstream Media’ Not Mainstream

By Tom Ballantyne Jr.

Media bias1 Mainstream Media Not Mainstream

I never imagined that I’d find myself quoting Bill’s one-time heart throb (okay, eons of time ago), but using her just happens to suit my purpose. (Guess Bill and I aren’t so different after all….)

A persistent (make that constant) theme I have extolled in both writing and speaking is that as Conservatives we should not fall prey to the ingrained habit of referring to the all-but-obsolete establishment media as “the mainstream” or “MSM.” Could anything be further from the truth? Stop and think about it for a minute….

As I like to tell audiences, “You’ll never see [David Gregory or Katie Couric, et al.] at a Denny’s!” It isn’t going to happen!

Back during the Roger Staubach Era, the Dallas Cowboys were affectionately referred to as “America’s Team.” As one might imagine, such a moniker would be considered the gold standard in the world of marketing or PR.

Imagine that you are starting a new grocery store chain, and through a stroke of luck you become known as “America’s Grocer.” Could it get any better than that?

Imagine, on the other hand, that you are one of the “Big Three” television and news networks – NBC, ABC, or CBS. Imagine also that over the past 50 years your viewership has plummeted from a virtual collective dominance of 100% to, say, 25% of the “news”- viewing public.

That would still represent one out of four American adults watching, but put in perspective, three out of four “news”-watchers would have rejected your collective “news” coverage. Not very good!

While that was merely a hypothetical construction on my part, here are some actual numbers for “Evening News Ratings,” obtained at MediaBistro.com:

NBC – 9,640,000 (Total Viewers)
ABC – 8,628,000 ( ” ” )
CBS – 7,482,000 ( ” ” )

Those numbers combined make 25,750,000 out of the current U.S. Population of 315,497,649. The annual population increase is estimated elsewhere (by extension) to be .76%. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the number of adults 18 or over to be 234,564,000 in 2010, which would be roughly 240,000,000 today, in 2013.

Thus the “Big Three” viewers among the total U.S. adult population (over 18) would be approximately 10.7%…far less than my “guesstimate” of 25%.

One site I came across seemed to indicate that some 74% of adults watch at least some news program weekly. According to this site, “CNN (20%) and FOX News (18%) are the television channels adults most often turn to when they want news or information related to politics or public affairs. These are followed by the networks, including ABC (9%), NBC (8%) and CBS (7%). Other channels include MSNBC (5%), C-SPAN (3%), PBS (3%) and CNBC (1%).”

These figures – for those who watch news or “political/public affairs” programs, as opposed to strictly the “Nightly [Network] News” – show an aggregate of 24%of Adults watching the Big Three.

Getting back to the Nightly Network News (America’s staple before Cable and the Internet)…it would appear that my hypothesis was spot on among viewers …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism