FATS et. al. VERSUS SOMERBY & A. J. AYER

Bob Somerby (Daily Howler) gives a nice description of how lame Rush Limbaugh is based in part on his recent exchange with Mike Stark and concludes that liberals and the media are to blame for allowing these Prophets of Deceit to gain some measure of authority:

An eighth-grade civics text can tell you—a democracy simply can’t function this way! But down through the years, the nation’s mainstream press organs have given wide berth to frauds like Limbaugh. And these same mainstream organs are very reluctant to report and discuss the facts touched on in Krugman’s piece—to report the fact that we the people are cluelesss about our own government. Meanwhile, the weak-willed boys and girls of our “liberal journals” have sat on the sidelines politely observing. Can you name the liberal journal which has ever criticized the mainstream press corps for its determined silence on these matters?

Can we talk? Limbaugh operates within a consensual code of silence agreed to by all major sectors. That helps explain how we’ve come to live in our own private laughable gong-show.

I think this is by and large correct and here I want to suggest another way of talking about these frauds. In one of his papers on the concept of freedom, A. J. Ayer makes use of the notion of "playing field," a notion he said he borrowed from statistics. Other things being equal, such as ability, a larger playing field means that a person has more freedom than someone with a smaller playing field. In general, the more knowledge one has, the larger is one's playing field and that is part of the reason Enlightenment thinkers insisted on the importance of education. Ayer notes several twists to this metaphor, such as the dependence of freedom on what is chosen to be one's playing field. Thus, an ascetic monk may have more personal freedom than say a person trapped in a ghetto in an advanced 1st world country because the monk can fulfill a higher percentage of his own desires but that's a nicety we can ignore here.

The point is that by spreading propaganda and misleading their listeners, gasbags like Beck and Limbaugh are REDUCING the freedom of their listeners.