Narratives and Templates

Who would ever expect Rush Limbaugh and Harry Shearer to be singing from the same songbook?

Harry you may know from the movie Spinal Tap, his time on Saturday Night Live or his long running “Le Show” on Public Radio and probably half the characters on The Simpsons. He’s currently promoting his movie called the “The Big Uneasy” – a movie he has made about the flooding of New Orleans, and how the Media operating from the template is “OMG, George Bush hates Black People” kept them from looking into the real issue – the incompetence, political interference and bad judgments of the Army Corps of Engineers. [That’s Harry’s Narrative :)]

Harry is a flaming lib. But he’s now a mission – NPR refused to cover his movie and rejected his sponsorship of a show to draw attention to the movie on the basis that it would violate FCC rules. Harry is also very unhappy with President Obama.

Harry appeared this past week on a podcast called Ricochet that I’ve written about before. Ricochet is a members-only bulletin board affiliated with National Review Online – the podcast is available via Sticher and other places like their web site. They describe themselves as “Center Right” politically – one of the regulars on the podcast was the lawyer who advised George Bush that water boarding was not legally torture.

So they were working pretty hard on Harry that if the Government was this corrupt and incompetent in New Orleans, then maybe he should give some more thought to the proper role of government in general. I doubt if Harry is going to do a U-Turn in his old age, but you never know.

Rush Limbaugh constantly uses the phrase that “Well, this fact didn’t match the Media’s Narrative” or “They already had the template and this didn’t fit their template” – which is exactly the same thing that Harry Shearer says is true based on his own experience inside the media.