Here we are in the midst of the standard post-election navel gazing that always seems to occur. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. What good does it do anyone to keep retreading all these same paths over and over again? Yes, discussion helps us to gain insight and paves the way to solutions, but the blame game does nothing but satisfy our enemies.
The number one question that keeps getting asked over and over again, what can we do to keep this from happening again? How can we engage the electorate by the time 2014 rolls around? This is not as impossible as they try to make this sound. There are people out there who will tell you it can’t happen. Well, guess what. These people are the solution. Our best bet right now is to gain control of the media. Instead of flushing money into PAC after PAC, we need to have our big money people start buying up these failing newspapers, get one of the big three alphabet networks, get their own entertainment channels. Music, movies, television, nothing should be out of question. There are a number of strong conservatives out there in all these areas, the problem is that they are spread amongst so many liberals their voices are not heard.
It turns out that I’m not the only one thinking these things. Here’s just a couple of articles that have popped up since I’ve been planning mine.
There We Went Again
While the right’s ability to access mass audiences has increased substantially in recent decades with the advent of talk radio, cable television, and the Internet, its audience reach is still tiny compared to the hundreds of millions who consume news generated by the liberal mainstream media.
It is true that the audience share of these supposedly objective outlets has decreased in recent years, but that hardly means they have lost their ability to persuade people, especially with working journalists now ever more willing to throw their self-styled proclamations of objectivity to the wind.
Or this one:
Uncool conservatives need to re-engage pop culture
Culture matters. It’s the fertile ground where political seeds are planted and votes harvested.
When ethnically diverse, Hollywood actress Stacey Dash tweeted in favor of Mitt Romney last month, conservatives flocked to her defense as the left besieged her with ugly and vicious taunts. Yet she shouldn’t have had to endure this concentrated rage. The reason a moderately successful actress became the focal point of a pop culture backlash is because there aren’t enough conservative celebrities to disperse the hate.
Conservatives know they’ve been routed in the pop culture wars, and judging by the intense embrace of the few celebrities in Hollywood that skew to the right, conservatives also understand the importance of victories on this turf. Various websites often run “Conservatives in Hollywood” slide shows because the creature is so rare (for the liberal version, just go to IMDb.com, the cast of any movie). Based on the intensity of leftist attacks on conservative celebrities, the left understands how important it is to defend this ground.
The cooler president won Romney kinda sorta got the pop culture gap when he declared he liked Snooki during his appearance on Live! With Kelly and Michael, but the objective isn’t to see the garbage in pop culture and yell, “Me too!” (and come across as phony in doing so). The object is to create your own culture and ridicule the absurdity of the existing culture. Most people like to feel clever, smart. In the know. Being in on a joke makes people feel good.
This isn’t going to be easy and it isn’t going to happen overnight. The fact remains we have ceded the media battleground. AM radio is our domain, it shouldn’t remain thus. Glenn Beck sees this his GBTV, now BlazeTV started as an internet channel and has now moved onto DISH network. Herman Cain has his own internet channel now called CainTV. This is a good start, but we aren’t going to get to the people on the middle unless we are in their face every night on one of the big three networks.
People have said over and over again, where is our Stephen Colbert? Well, I believe we have him or at least one person that can begin to get us some ground in that area.
Ladies and gentlemen presenting Alonzo Rachel.
Conservatives, Win the Culture and You Win the Country
And one that needs repeated over and over
For an even more sarcastic take on things we have Scott Ott
A very Colbert/Stewart kind of delivery.
There are more, the Politichicks at www.politichicks.tv, Victoria Jackson (formerly of SNL), Janine Turner, etc.
We also have the talent in the documentary business. Look at Dinesh D’souza, Mike Wilson, Alan Peterson, James O’ Keefe, and anyone Andrew Breitbart trained.
We have the talent, now we need the outlets. Feel free to discuss other people we could put forward. We need to hit everything, music, tv, movies, documentaries, and paper media. We have radio and we have books. (Conservative books consistently hit the top spots on the NYT Best Sellers list.)
And for everyone who asked for a ringtone, here’s a couple MP3’s.
The Warrior Song
The stuff is out there. Now to get it where people can see and here it. And add to it, build our label. The product will sell, it’s the medium we are using that isn’t working.
-Mars
