Media

When Someone Wants To Scare You

~ Guy Hall

It’s harder to analyze events than to paste labels on them. Events come thick and fast, and pundits have to say something. It’s mostly pundits I’m talking about, but not entirely. History may not repeat, but it does rhyme, they say, and then they reach for one of these tropes. When the tropes are repeated again and again, they can influence policymakers. They flatten everyone’s thinking.

Here are five that I find particularly irritating.

Nuclear Diner

It’s a good read about how pundits quickly give you rhetorical shortcuts when writing about current events. Cheryl Rofer over at Nuclear Diner gives you five signs that the author of the post, op-ed, or Twitter you’re reading is lazy writing and to be avoided.

Ain’t Breaking MyHeart

~ Guy Hall

(Salon) According to Reuters, iHeartMedia is trying to kick the debt can further down the road by trying to pay off its maturing bonds by purchasing other ones while undergoing yet another corporate overhaul.

But this time, the company’s bondholders aren’t playing along. Per Reuters, a group that claims to represent more than half of the company’s lenders are refusing to cooperate with the restructuring plan, meaning that there is a very real possibility that iHeartMedia may have to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to evade its creditors.

Should such a restructuring happen, there’s a very real chance that it could allow iHeartMedia to force Limbaugh, Hannity and its other top talents to renegotiate their contracts for a lower payment amount. Of course, that’s assuming that there would be any takers on what are likely to be bonds that would be sold at fire-sale prices.

I’m trying to find some tears of sympathy, but to no avail. Ain’t no empathy being evoked either.

The era of conservative radio dominance is slowly coming to a close. With Fox News and its continued sexual harassment problems, iHeartMedia’s financial woes, and their audience dying off, I don’t see them being players in the 2020 election. I don’t think they will even have that much of an influence in the 2018 election.

Your mileage may vary, of course.