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Just as the global warming fanatics are stumped for a sensible rejoinder about the East Coast’s brrrrrr cold winter, what do you suppose our good liberal friends would say about the latest television ratings?
Sean Hannity’s new evening program on Fox News swamped the competition last night, drawing more viewers than the rest of his cable competition, Rachel Maddow and Larry King, combined.
Last week, Fox News’ top four shows — Bill O’Reilly, Hannity, Greta and Shep Smith — outdrew all of their cable rivals on left-wing CNN and farther out MSNBC.
This has been a steady pattern in recent years. Sober purveyors of news and commentary have found Fox to be telling the truth when they maintain they present the news in a fair and balanced manner.
Neither the vaunted but much weaker CNN nor MSNBC is a magnet anymore for serious seekers.
As America’s most reliable internet news link, the Drudge Report has attracted 23 million viewers in the last 24 hours. Not one electronic source I am aware of even is in Drudge’s neighborhood.
Liberal journalists may dominate newspapers, magazines, television and probably the internet.
For 23 months, we have been told that Mr. Obama heralds an enlightened new world order, that he is turning tradition upside down.
Maybe.
But when journalists are not dictating American tastes and voters make their own choices, they consistently lean in the direction of tradition.
Coming Back Home
Which brings me to Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger’s latest disappointment, the much belated discovery by City Hall staffers of a dusty old policy that will make it easier for him to get pet items agendized. (See the nearby City Council report.)
I hope that during his final 15 months on the City Council, Mr. Silbiger scores a few deserved victories on his favorite projects.
He will need to be much more flexible, compromising, than he ever has been. But he knows that.
The Martin Luther King Weekend at the Senior Center — on Saturday night at 6 and Sunday at 12 noon — will stand as the Vice Mayor’s legacy when he leaves office a year from April.
Winning a difficult argument to honor Dr. King was the one time in the last almost seven years that Mr. Silbiger’s stubbornness and trademark haranguing were rewarded.
He has had so much trouble developing an order of prioities around his bulging, but mainly unfulfilled, agenda.
Everything is a life-threatening, fire-engine emergency for the Vice Mayor.
It is too bad that his son Karlo has been unable to convince him that if he moderates some of his positions and bears down on others, he will win occasionally.
But all of that is well-trod ground.
Once He Was a Star Salesman
Convincing some entrenched opposition that 40 years removed from Dr. King’s assassination, it only makes common sense for Culver City to join the rest of the country.
The first very informal, entirely unofficial King Day began in a tiny way about five or six years ago on a Sunday afternoon.
I drove toward the top of Culver City Park where I found Saundra Davis, School Board member and candidate for Mark Ridley-Thomas’s old state Senate seat, playing hostess to a pocket-sized party. I am sure Mr. Silbiger was there, and probably Mary Ann Greene.
Getting City Hall, which sometimes thinks in the 19th or early 20th century, to agree to a King Day was scaling a crafty mountain.
Hopefully in his last 15 months, Mr. Silbiger will draw on the lessons of that joust to further brighten the sometimes-resistant Culver City landscape.
