Getting With The Program

by digby

I am really loving the wingnut magnolia wilting over us rude leftist vulgarians. I am tempted to get out my bulging folder filled with examples of right wing cretinism (which I’ve been collecting for over 15 years) but it’s a waste of time. The newsmedia is feeling beseiged by the left and that is an unadultered good thing. Being nice is beside the point.

But it’s a pleasure to reprint this e-mail from Rick Perlstein to this little naif over at CBS who seems to think that the left invented swarming the Amazon reviews section:

Cher colleague, you know nothing about Amazon.com and have fallen for a
right-wing propaganda campaign. People have been driving down the ratings of books for ideological reasons since there have been reviews on Amazon, with conservatives in the lead by about half a decade.

I append an article I wrote on the subject in 2000, in which I observed “most conservative books” garner “80 percent five-star ratings and 20 percent one-star, as opposed to pro-Clinton books, which receive 20 percent five-star, 80 percent one-star.”

I humbly suggest a correction.

Rick Perlstein

That article was written in 2000.

To those of us not living in a cave for the last decade, the manipulation of book reviews on Amazon by freepers of one ilk or another is not a surprise any more than is right wing manipulation of book sales. I’ve always kind of admired them for it. For decades the right has had book clubs and book stores and now online book clubs and book stores to promote their own thinkers and writers. They support their idea people explicitly and compensate them well. I think that’s a good idea if your job is to persuade people that your idea is better than the other guys’ which is what politics is all about.

They also learned very early on to game the system in both the media and in places like Amazon by placing fake “liberals” on TV and radio and creating a false impression in the public’s consciousness that conservatism is a much more powerful force than it actually is. They have been using mischief to manipulate the Amazon rating system for years.

This is simply another illustration of the whiny-ass bedwetting that characterizes so much of the right wing. They benefit for years from gaming the system and then faint with the vapors when subjected to their own tactics.

What a shame. Here’s a hankie.

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