Their shocking thesis, that Rush Limbaugh, the editorial page at the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News constitute a “conservative media establishment” that have “protected Reagan conservatism across a more than decade-long period and insulated their audiences from political persuasion from Democrats and the ‘liberal media,’” is so glaringly obvious that you indeed wonder why it took two college professors to dream it up, but there it is.  Like even the worst nonfiction book, there are astounding statistics for the still-awake shot through the plodding sociologese in which the book is written…  polling they conducted in 2004 showed that while 91.3% of Limbaugh listeners thought the Iraq war was worth it, only 73.1% of FOX viewers did, 60.9% of WSJ readers did, compared to the notably less addled and misled public, only 48.7% of  who by then clung to that demented notion. Naturally, these rather eye-popping numbers as well as many other astonishing facts, are presented in such a bland way, complete with decimals, that you might miss them, and wander dazedly on to the next mind-numbing description of methodology.

Missing, though, even from a section about the economics of AM talk radio in a post Fairness Doctrine world and the obvious machinations of Rupert Murdoch to advance his particular ideology, is the elephant, literally, in the living room:  thousands of righty gasbags putting out a coordinated message every day that infects the mainstream media, lies to the public, promotes racism, misogyny, torture, and war as it has reduced our political discourse into an Orwellian sideshow while Americans are fleeced, duped, spied upon, and if they complain about it, tased.  In their conclusion, (eponymously titled, natch) they actually take great pains to avoid this unpleasantness for anyone still reading, of whom there couldn’t possibly be many.  

In a moment of mental abstraction for which I’m still kicking myself, I bought this book to read on the train to Seattle, and having been rescued from much of that infuriating drudgery by a delightful retired couple I befriended from Wisconsin, it then took me all week to finish it, and I hated every minute of it.  But I was determined to do so, lest any Hag reader waste $24.95 on this gaseous blunder, and, I might add, shamefully missed opportunity.