Right now, politics follows the rules of talk radio - using conflict, tension, fear, and resentment to find new recruits.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Talk radio doesn't need to be political.
What's different now is that while political leaders used to give talking points to talk radio, now talk-radio hosts are giving talking points to political leaders. It's all part of the suffocating spin cycle we're in. In media, politics and publishing, the conventional wisdom is to play to this base.
If journalism is the first draft of history, then talk radio provides an early glimpse into how the meaning of political events will be spun for ideological and partisan purposes.
American media has just become talk radio, incredibly partisan name-calling and op-eds.
The reason that conservative talk radio works is because there is an audience for it.
The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger.
Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving.
Politics is not my life. I have a career in radio and another career in film.
I've become very interested in the spectrum of political discourse as seen on the cable news channels that are conveniently right in a row on my cable provider's dial. I can flip from Fox to CNN to HLN to MSNBC, and I find myself at night flipping it back and forth through them, and it's something of an addiction.
Now interpersonal politics... that's what it's all about.