Mitt Romney Literally Owns Conservative Talk Radio: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, etc.
Why it is that the conservative media has given such strong support to the most moderate Republican candidate in the race, Mitt Romney? Glenn Beck effectively callled the TEA Party people, who rallied with him in 2010 in D.C., racist because they overwhelmingly supported Newt Gingrich for president. Technically, he said that the only reason that anyone would support Newt over Obama is because he’s white. However, the support for Newt came from the TEA Party that rallied with Beck in D.C.
Many others in the conservative media have lined up behind Mitt Romney as well. Ann Coulter, who in 2009, said that if Chris Christie didn’t get into the race that we would end up with Mitt Romney and we would lose, now is fully behind Mitt Romney and has called him the most conservative candidate in the race.
It doesn’t end there either. Conservative columnists, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, have been pounding all of the other republican candidates while supporting Mitt. National Review came out praising the two most liberal candidates (Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman) and trashing all of the conservatives. Sean Hannity and Michael Savage have been supporting Mitt too. Even Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge are supporting Mitt Romney, though they are doing so less obviously. This could all be seen as typical establishment behavior, if it didn’t include talk radio and some of the most reliable conservatives in media.
Perhaps the most astonishing support for Mitt Romney came in the wake of Newt Gingrich’s attack ads against Mitt Romney for his work as the CEO at Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich launched the ads in response to Mitt Romney’s multi-million dollar ad blitz in Iowa, which effectively took Newt from front-runner to fourth place. Mitt Romney’s ads lied about Newt, but no one seemed to care much. However, when Newt launched his Bain ad campaign against Romney, every conservative in radio and elsewhere jumped to Romney’s defense and attacked Newt.
They claimed that they were just defending capitalism, but what I didn’t know at the time was that most of these conservative hosts are actually owned by none other than Mitt Romney. That’s only a slight over-simplification. In 2008, shortly after Mitt Romney lost his first presidential race, Romney’s Bain Capital closed a deal to acquire Clear Channel Communications, which owns the stations that play all of the conservative talk radio shows. Bain Capital has also made substantial contributions to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Why not, they’ve already given him countless hours of advertising.
Sadly, conservative media has destroyed much of its credibility and it has probably destroyed most of the conservative movement, all in an effort to prop up a moderate candidate.
January 16, 2012 at 11:53 am Comment (1)