Calls Grow for GOP to Break its Media Cocoon

[Frodo]

The GOP's media cocoon

By JONATHAN MARTIN | 11/12/12 4:36 AM EST

A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week’s shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self-defeating.

GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the country’s changing demographics to an ill-timed hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believes the party’s problem is even more fundamental.

The party is suffering from Pauline Kaelism.

Kael was The New Yorker movie critic who famously said in the wake of Richard M. Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972 that she knew only one person who voted for Nixon.

Now, many young Republicans worry, they are the ones in the hermetically sealed bubble — except it’s not confined to geography but rather a self-selected media universe in which only their own views are reinforced and an alternate reality is reflected.

Hence the initial denial and subsequent shock on the right that the country would not only reelect President Barack Obama — but do so with 332 electoral votes.
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83704.html#ixzz2C1qpncrz

[Frodo]

Media cocoon doesn't matter.  No one's telling the Dems to break their media cocoon.

Trying to "fix" the losing party after every election has become tiring.  See the Dems in 2004 and 2010, GOP in '06 and '08.   The GOP lost because it had an inferior operation and an inferior campaign controlling the top of the ticket.

I'm sorry but the GOP media cocoon is a huge problem for the party. Right wing media created a false universe that thoroughly convinced Republicans that their views not only were right, but were also shared by the vast majority of Americans. It created a false sense of security. They figured they were doing everything right and didn't make the changes necessary to win the election, As it turns out, most Americans were very much against their agenda.

Almost all of the polls were wrong, Republican-friendly or otherwise. 

Except that, y'know, they weren't. Many of them (and the aggregates certainly) nailed this election all along. Only the few that this very bubble chose to accept were completely wrong. You only further prove the point, really.

I don't think you can reasonably suggest a New Yorker is in "the bubble". Unless he's from Buffalo, or somewhere absurdly rural.

Did you read this paragraph from the article?

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It doesn't matter where you live -if your primary source of news is Fox News and conservative talk radio, a conservative  in San Francisco or New York City can be just as deluded as his counterpart in Texas or Georgia.