At Slate today, Karl Agne, a senior advisor to Democracy Corps, offers his take on the Fox-Limbaugh Industrial Propaganda Complex:
When we spoke with these conservative Republicans in the focus groups we did for Democracy Corps recently, what was really striking was we asked them specifically, who is the leader of the Republican Party, who speaks for the Republican Party today? And none of them in the groups we did named a single elected official. They didn’t name George W. Bush, they didn’t look to past presidencies the way Democrats did when Bush was in the White House and they looked back to Clinton-Gore and those times. Who they named was Fox News. Who they named was Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh. Those are the people who speak for the Republican Party in the minds of the conservative base voters that we’re talking about. So the centrality of — first of all, a media entity, not a partisan or ideological entity, but a media entity. And second of all, the fact that it’s so large, and so organized.
Ailes-Limbaugh 2012?
Prometheus Unbound 