What Digby Says on How to Boil a Frog

...While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a "preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy's labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That's what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

I'm not going to argue with my fellow Democrats any more about how Janet Jackson's nipple and Desperate Housewives' double ententres are coarsening American media culture. This is not because American media culture isn't being coarsened. But T&A is clearly not the problem. It's the... selling liberal death fantasies to the public... being aided by idiots in the mainstream press who are so in the (ever heating) tank that they have lost all sense of perspective.

The recently annointed GOP saint, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was the one who coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" and I think he's been validated. When a deranged, flamthrowing fascist like Ann Coulter is called "amusing" and "entertaining", deviancy has definitely been redefined.

And pay careful attention to the "re-defining deviancy" statement. Let's place this in context with what Billmon has to say:

...The old Time mirrored the obsessions of its founder, which were only partially, and not even primarily, commercial. The new Time is only part – and probably not even the largest part – of a line item on a quarterly profit and loss statement. The Time drones are giving head to Ann Coulter for the same reason the NBC clones are putting Left Behind knock offs in the fall line up: They’re both terrified they’ve lost touch with the mass audience, which they believe (based on what evidence I don’t know) to be drifting deeper and deeper into wacko land.

But there’s absolutely no conviction behind it, no Lucian desire to smite the wicked and elect the virtuous. Heck, according to BuyBlue.org, Time-Warner is the bluest of the blue corporations, with its executives giving a cool 77% of their $1.7 million in political contributions to the Democrats in the 2003-04 cycle.

Which is exactly why the magazine's fawning treatment of the conservative Mafia is being repaid with such contempt. Time is offering the journalistic equivalent of protection money, but the crew has something bigger in mind – like busting up the joint and taking it over...

...But the corporate media’s present eagerness... is based on an increasingly frantic belief that this is what the audience wants. With their massive market power, however, the mega-monsters also have the ability to shape consumer appetites – creating, in effect, a demand for the kind of content they want to supply.

All the pieces are in place, in other words, for a self-perpetuating spiral into extremism – with the corporate bean counters smiling and clapping all the way. The evolution of talk radio into a contest to see who can shout the most deranged opinions into a microphone shows how the process can work. Something similar may now be happening in the print media.

In other words: if the Wrepublicans control the polling data input and all the companies monopolies advertising in the media, the marketing executives- MBAs more impressed with their shiny wingtips than the statistical validity of the data they're presented with- adjust their media focus a little to the right.

This pisses off most people- come on, really, is the average working mother or factory floor dad really going to pick up a copy of time with that hateful skank Coulter on the cover- so sales go down.

That's something the opinion pollsters can't hide.

So- the MBAs move it a little further right. The sales drop a little more. The hysteric unease is a vicious cycle, feeding on itself, as the frog reaches down and turns up the burner.