Previously in "Hannity & Limbaugh: The Worst of America?" we invited discussion on the legal domestic propaganda techniques used by our country's two most-listened to talk radio "entertainers", suggesting that the right wing talk phenomenon evolved directly and deliberately from deregulation, creating a schizophrenic media environment where we must navigate extremes in right or left wing opinion and commentary, and will rarely glimpse the self-contained balance in media that previous generations knew.



After the essay ran for about a week as a top hit on major search engines under either the term 'Hannity' or 'Limbaugh', Hannity started speaking about bloggers in their basements posting terrible, horrible things about him, wearing only their underwear. He reused this quip relentlessly throughout the week. Though many left wing bloggers do curse Hannity in the worst ways imaginable, it made me look again at my OpEd. Did I "attack" Hannity or were these legitimate criticisms? Was there balance? Did I appeal to the intelligence of my reader, or pander to their basest emotions?



If I was one of the 'amateur journalists' Mr. Hannity was referring to, one thing is for sure, he did not discuss my arguments on their merits - rather he painted me as a half-naked subterranean hack. Just for the record, my basement is too cold for just underwear - our home heating costs have tripled since 2000.



Hannity was also reactive this week to flak he took for his ongoing Rev. Wright diatribe, where he has been seeking to cram-fit Barack Obama's ideology somehow together with the slyly spliced sound clips of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's worst moments, speculating that Obama must endorse racist policies because he did not leave the church or publicly denounce those comments before.





This week, it's back to the guilt-by-association trick on Hannity's show, this time using William Ayers, a member of the radical Weather Underground group who bombed government targets decades ago. Now an accepted member of liberal Chicago social and academic circles, his connections to Obama are not even clear. Hannity bellows about Obama commenting he and Ayers were "friendly", and they appeared in panel discussions before. So Hannity works with what he has - you can tune in all this week to hear him hysterically exaggerate about Obama's "terrorist" pal. The exciting part will be listening to hear if any caller gets through to mention that Ayers was exonerated of wrongdoing when it was found the government was eavesdropping on his communications illegally! This is why Hannity broadcasts in a bubble.

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