With Democratic enthusiasm waxing, Republican energy waning, and more than four out of five voters convinced the country is now on the wrong track, one would think hard-right wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh would be near-suicidal.

But no! As it stands, Limbaugh – now in his twentieth year as the universally acknowledged “Grand Poobah” of talk radio, with an estimated weekly audience of about 13.5 million listeners — looks to be the biggest winner thus far in the ongoing Presidential primary sweepstakes.

From attacking Republican frontrunner John McCain early in the process to ‘dreaming’ of – and some say illegally calling for — riots at August’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, all the way to more recent efforts such as “Operation Chaos,” aimed at inserting himself and his followers into the Democratic primaries in an attempt to weaken Barack Obama by supporting Hillary Clinton, the so-called “Limbaugh effect” has garnered excessive attention from the ‘drive-by’ mainstream media that Limbaugh purports to hate but actually depends on and manipulates adroitly. Although the real-world effect of “Operation Chaos” is doubtful – at least in terms of influencing the Democratic primaries – it has clearly been wildly successful in its real mission of promoting Limbaugh and his nationally syndicated radio program.

Front page coverage in The Washington Post, cover treatment from Time magazine, prominent placement on ABC News, a glowing feature article on the influential Politico.com site—the examples of Limbaugh’s clever salesmanship are everywhere. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin put it, “Limbaugh’s skills as a political provocateur, as much P.T. Barnum as conservative ideologue, are such that he can fuel buzz in the political-media world like few others. In other words, Operation Chaos was good box office, and that may well have been the point.”

Well of course it was the point! Limbaugh himself admitted it in an email exchange with Martin, wherein he wrote, “In my universe, there is no doubt it worked like a charm. My audience loved it, they participated in it, they had fun with it, as did I.”

Limbaugh’s clever politico-media manipulation was aided and abetted by Democratic operatives and supporters of Obama for obviously partisan reasons – despite ample evidence that there was as much bluster as basis for the claims that right wingers had crossed over in droves to support Clinton in Texas and Ohio contests and more recently in Indiana. (For example, David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist, repeatedly assured reporters that he attributed Clinton’s victory in Indiana to “Operation Chaos.”) Although it is unsurprising that Obama’s flacks spent a lot of time and effort noting and promoting the so-called “Limbaugh effect,” Obama supporter and onetime presidential wannabe John Kerry really should have known better than to claim Clinton only won Indiana as a result of Limbaugh’s intervention.

Limbaugh’s play is so transparent as to be laughable – yet the increasingly pathetic mainstream media is either unwilling or unable to resist his efforts to re-inject himself into the ongoing ‘news narrative’ and ‘media conversation,’ in part because they covet his audience and hope to bask in the reflection of his prominence. Limbaugh himself is unabashed, asking, “How many of the MSM hope I will mention something they said or wrote? Many of these outlets are losing circulation, ad revenue and audience. I am not. So, they love me mentioning them so that people know they exist.”

Limbaugh is right—and I have come with great reluctance (but also great evidence) to expect little more than pandering on the part of Big Media, particularly at its crucial intersection with Big Politics. And talk radio – a once-moribund format that in the past two decades has risen from the ashes to become, “literally, the talk of the nation — second only to country music in the number of stations that carry it” – is undeniably politically powerful. Its total audience is now nearly 50 million listeners, according to the Arbitron ratings service. Moreover, its actual influence vastly outweighs even those numbers. As Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, an industry trade journal recently noted, the bottom line is that “Talk radio is where the voters are.”

But in their unending quest to reach those voters, leading Democrats such as Kerry, Axelrod (and, by extension, Barack Obama) who are playing along with Rush may soon find they are playing with fire — and as the late political pundit Bob Marley once eloquently phrased it, “Catch a fire—you’re gonna get burned.”

For one thing, bolstering claims that the largely non-existent “Limbaugh effect” is actually playing a crucial role in the Democratic nominating process means that Limbaugh will continue to hold his fire against John McCain, as he tries the delicate dance of consolidating support from the Republican base while still striving to attract moderate and independent voters. For another, it means granting further legitimacy and power to El Rushbo, an out-and-out, avowed enemy who will then spend the next eight years doing everything he can to foil the Democrat’s—and democratic—process. Perhaps that is part of the ‘post-partisan’ political future the Obama camp envisions – or maybe it’s just politics as usual?

(Editor’s note: Rory O’Connor’s new book, “Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio,” will be published later this month by Alternet.org.)

As the seemingly endless Democratic presidential primary slog enters its second spring, one amazing woman has managed – by relentless dint of hard work, long experience, sharp intelligence, quick wit, quicker quips and a winning smile – to shatter the glass ceiling and take her rightful place in the traditional Boys’ Club of Big Time Politics.

No, not Her – Rachel Maddow!

That’s right — a woman who calls herself “a supplicant who worships in the Temple of Journalism” – but whom others have described as “Amy Goodman with animal noises” – is now firmly ensconced in the upper echelon of the political punditocracy. With her own rising radio show on Air America, coupled with regular appearances on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann program, where she is often, oddly and excellently paired with Patrick Buchanan, this self-described “thirty five year old, liberal, lesbian girl-who-looks-like-a-man” is on the brink of becoming progressive media’s next mainstream breakout star. One significant measure of Maddow’s new-found favor: the decision by MSNBC, effective next week, to hire her as a regular panelist on its newest nightly campaign program Race for the White House – and to allow Air America to simulcast the 6 pm nightly program as the first hour of its own nightly Rachel Maddow show.

The cable executives are betting a lot on their new program, which also features NBC News chief White House correspondent David Gregory (who replaces the execrable Tucker Carlson.) Passionate viewer interest in the ongoing presidential race – as evidenced by increased ratings for programs focused on campaign news – has led all three 24/7 cable operations to create new shows to cater to the marketplace demand. Race for the White House will be up against stiff competition from CNN’s Election Center and Fox News Channel’s America’s Election HQ, but installing Maddow as a regular gives MSNBC an edge its competitors can’t match – a telegenic and true progressive voice for an election cycle dominated by progressive politics and politicians. The MSNBC simulcast on Air America – in addition to making an impressive statement about the progressive radio network’s growing stature – also promises to pull in a new progressive audience to MSNBC, which is successfully positioning itself as the hot new alternative to Fox News in the cable firmament.

I sat down early one recent morning to share breakfast with Maddow, who keeps a punishing schedule that begins at 9 am, encompasses hours of preparation for her three-hour live Air America program, and often extends far into the endless cable night. A California native dedicated to promoting AIDS prevention and gay rights — she claims to have been the first openly gay American to receive a Rhodes scholarship – Maddow is also articulate, winsome, and often self-deprecating, someone who says in the same sentence that she tries “to be authoritative, transparently sourced, and pretty comprehensive” in her work, while remaining “a total dork.”

Like most radio talk show hosts, Maddow is forthright about the fact that she is NOT a journalist. “I think of myself as a commentator and a pundit; an analyst but not a reporter and not a journalist,” she told me. “You know, I think doing research isn’t enough…(she laughs) to be considered a journalist.”

Maddow started in radio less than a decade ago as a sidekick on a commercial show in western New England, when she went to an open on-air audition and was hired on the spot. “As soon as I started talking on the microphone I was like, ‘Oh, right! This is what I’m supposed to be doing,’” she recalled. “I wish I figured this out before I was twenty-six. I realized that I had a knack for it and that it was really fun.” Still, she wasn’t convinced that radio was right for her in the long run, so after a year she took time off, finished a dissertation, “and actually did get my doctoral.” Four years later, she had a national radio show. What happened?

“Air America’s first day on the air was the day before my 31st birthday –March 31st, 2004—and I forced them to hire me,” she says with another laugh. “I just pulled every trick I could out of the hat. I’ve never been, like, a well-connected person – my dad worked for the water company, my mom was a Canadian and worked for my middle school. So it wasn’t at all clear that this national media company was going to hire me. They really just seemed to hire celebrities, really. They had Chuck D and Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo and…celebrities, celebrities. And all I had was, well, an ex-girlfriend who pretended she was in Al Franken’s class at Harvard and brought him tapes of my hosted music show as the DJ in the morning from western Massachusetts. So Air America had no business hiring me.”

Nonetheless, Maddow got hired as part of the team. Within a year she had a solo spot: a one-hour program at 5 A.M. Monday to Friday. Although she credits “tenacity more than talent” for her success, it’s actually the combination of the two that makes her so compelling—along with enough self- confidence not to take “No” for an answer. “I took every opportunity given me and then some,” she said. “You know, I just forced myself on them. I knew I was right for the network.”

She’s also right for MSNBC—and perhaps beyond. Certainly her mix of news, opinion, and entertainment – the mother’s milk of talk radio – is also right for the hypercaffeinated world of cable television news.

“Cable news and talk radio are now in the same boat,” Maddow observed. “I noticed when I first started doing cable that there’d be this real exuberance among the news producers, particularly younger cable news producers, about talk radio hosts. I could see the transition actually happening. I think in cable news — whether they intended this or not — they really think that what talk radio has is what they ought to be. Which is, you know, entertaining hosts to whom viewers and listeners have loyalty, in whom they trust to provide information, who supplant other sources of news.

“But they are more full service than that. They are also providing analysis and setting up conflicts, either between themselves and other people or among their guests — and being at the same time, funny and entertaining,” she continued. “I just believe that there is a way to do all that with integrity. I don’t think that mixture of information, analysis and entertainment is itself corrupt or dishonest. The way to do it is by being very clear about what it is that you are doing. The commentary can include parody songs and making fun of people, or, you know, ranting in my dungeon. It can involve a very wide range of stylistic and communicative techniques. You just have to be clear about the distinctions.”

Rachel Maddow is nothing if not clear – about the distinctions between news, opinion and entertainment, but also about her own distinct beliefs, politics, persona, and about where progressive media may be heading. “I think the more power the Democrats gain, the better off progressive radio and progressive media is,” she concluded. “I felt like I was outside banging on a locked door when Republicans were in power seemingly everywhere. But the closer we get to retaking the country, the closer we get to overtaking the traditional media in terms of content and influence.”

Maddow’s newest bosses at NBC News obviously share her assessment — if not her sentiments – as witnessed by the new gig with David Gregory and the groundbreaking Air America simulcast. If they really have the courage of their convictions, however, they’ll soon stop making her just a panelist — and go ahead and create her own cable television show!

As the war in Iraq marked its fifth anniversary, thirteen Iraqis were killed as dozens of mortar shells were fired at the “heavily fortified Green Zone” in what the New York Times called “one of the fiercest and most sustained attacks on the area in the last year.” The attack “ushered in a day of violence around the country that claimed the lives of at least 58 Iraqis and four American soldiers.” The American military deaths increased the number of American service members killed in the war to at least 4,000.

The response of the American media to the ongoing carnage in Iraq, however, seems only to echo that of the current American Administration, as expressed recently by Vice-President Cheney. When told the vast majority of Americans now oppose the war, Cheney pithily replied, “So what?”

As noted in another Times article headlined, “The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?”, “Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet.” Since the start of last year, as reported by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year.”

Given the waning media attention on Iraq –in the middle of last year, it was the most-covered topic in the news, but reporting since then by major American news sources has dropped by a startling 80 percent, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism – it’s not surprising that public interest in the ongoing war has dropped as well. Recent polls show that fewer than thirty percent of Americans polled now say they are following events in Iraq “very closely.” Although leading media executives cite any number of excuses for the decline in attention — the danger and expense in covering Iraq, shrinking budgets and a presidential campaign that is also straining their resources, a national economy in crisis – the bottom line for concerned citizens has been a severe drop in coverage of the war. The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts now spend half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year – and far less than in 2003 or even 2004.

That’s why the decision by PBS Frontline to devote four and a half hours to its two part special Bush’s War, (airing Monday, March 24 from 9-11:30 pm ET and Tuesday, March 25 from 9-11 pm) is to be greatly lauded – as is Frontline executive Producer David Fanning, under whose leadership the series has broadcast more than forty reports on the war, creating in the process both the leading documentary analysis of the war and the richest archive of it in all of broadcast journalism.

There are items to quibble with, of course – Frontline’s own reporting proves the title Bush’s War to be a misnomer, for example, since the lead figures throughout the debacle have always been former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his cunning colleague, Vice-President Cheney – but in sum the two-part special makes a damning case against the incompetence and arrogance that has (thus far) resulted in the 4000 deaths of US service personnel.

The first half of the Frontline special focuses more on the “behind-the-scenes battle” and “the hidden war being waged inside the administration” over Iraq, using an impressive array of top-line sources to paint a compelling portrait of how Cheney and Rumsfeld –- skilled and experienced veterans of Beltway bureaucratic infighting – triumphed against the overmatched likes of Colin Powell, George Tenet and Condi Rice. Almost from the start — the 9/11 terror attacks that shocked the nation out of its millennial complacency and into a new century of strife – “Dick Cheney was in charge,” as Frontline narrator Will Lyman intones in his familiar Voice-of-God manner.

Cheney remained in charge throughout a series of fierce internal Bush Administration skirmishes, working in close concert with his old pal Rummy to circumscribe, end-run and in general thwart the aims and desires of anyone who stood in the way of their vision of regime change in Iraq. Frontline deftly limns the process as, one after another, the opponents of Cheney and Rumsfeld were successively co-opted, marginalized, falsely lionized and ultimately hornswoggled by patient infighters. As Frontline persuasively shows, Rice, Tenet, Powell and their supporters never stood a chance against the superior skills and greater tenacity of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Far from being “Bush’s War,” the reportage here establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was for years really Rumsfeld-and-Cheney’s War – and continues, in Rummy’s enforced absence, now to be almost solely Cheney’s War, with a president and Secretary of State along for the ride and pretty much doing what they are told…

The second part of the Frontline special examines the actual war in Iraq – not the war in Washington — beginning with the quick early “victory” and “Mission Accomplished,” followed by a recitation of how the early mistakes and lack of preparation soon led to chaos, violence and then an insurgency that continues to this day. The special then speeds through an account of the past three years of conflict, and concludes with the current state of the “surge” – the “temporary” increase in combat troops bringing the total American force to 160,000 – that has left President Bush, in the eyes of one observer, New Yorker writer Steve Coll, “certain to at least win a stalemate.”

So, with Rumsfeld gone, Powell gone, Tenet and many others gone but not forgotten, the costly, deadly war most Americans don’t want – but don’t want to think about – grinds on. Now it really is “Bush’s War” – and our own. And as the brilliant Frontline special concludes, “Soon Bush’s war… will be handed to someone new.”

– By Rory O’Connor

Editor’s Note: In conjunction with the airing of a comprehensive series on the Iraq war Monday and Tuesday, FRONTLINE promises a “New TV/Web Experience.”

For further information on Bush’s War visit the Frontline website.

When I was last in China, I was informally told that it would be acceptable to ask government and Party officials about virtually anything I wanted – unless of course it involved one of the forbidden “three T’s.”

“T” for Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Tibet.

All were apparently “T” for Taboo.

I guess someone forgot to tell the Tibetans.

In any event, that particular “T” has begun to boil over of late – and faced with vigorous Tibetan protests, followed by equally vigorous global criticism of their repressive response, China’s top officials countered in a most modern and predictable fashion with an all-out, full-tilt media offensive aimed at controlling both domestic and international perceptions of the ongoing conflict.

On the international front, the Chinese government responded by blocking foreign broadcasters such as CNN and BBC, cutting off websites such as YouTube, and denying journalists access to the Tibetan region — even going so far as to stop CNN reporters when they were still hundreds of miles away. In addition, top officials, including the region’s governor, attacked Western coverage as “ridiculous” at a press conference.

Domestically, after trying first to minimize the uprising, the Chinese government soon shifted and began to promote intense but one-sided television coverage, airing hour after hour of footage of last week’s riots in Lhasa. Employees at the state television service CCTV “were instructed to keep broadcasting footage of burned-out shops and Chinese wounded in attacks,” as Tania Branigan reported in the Guardian. “No peaceful demonstrators were shown.”

Meanwhile, authorities in other areas of western China with large Tibetan populations banned all reporting of the protests and asked foreign journalists to leave, according to a report from Radio Free Asia, which also noted that the government referred to demonstrators as “the enemy” in an editorial in the Tibet Daily, the Communist Party newspaper in Tibet.

“These lawless elements have insulted, beaten, and wounded duty personnel, shouted reactionary slogans, stormed vital departments, and gone to all lengths in beating, smashing, looting, and burning,” the paper said. It also repeated the official line (Premier Wen Jiabao accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of provoking violence to taint the Beijing Olympics and promote Tibetan independence) that last week’s rioting was instigated by the Dalai Lama, who is recognized by Tibetans as both a spiritual and political leader.

“Their atrocities are appalling and too horrible to look at, and their frenzy is inhuman,” the paper concluded. “Their atrocities of various kinds teach and alert us to the fact that this is a life-and-death struggle between the enemy and ourselves.”

Meanwhile, the international media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) attacked China’s media blackout, noting that Beijing had stopped issuing permits for foreign correspondents to enter Tibet, and that at least 25 journalists, including 15 from Hong Kong, had already been expelled from Tibet or Tibetan areas.

“The freedom of movement for foreign journalists had been one of the few positive developments ahead of the Olympic Games,” RSF officials said in a statement. “But this is now being flouted by the Chinese government facing Tibetan protests. Yet again the Chinese government is trampling on the promises it made linked to the Olympics and is preparing the ground to crackdown on the Tibetan revolt in the absence of witnesses.”

As with other governments faced with legitimate dissent from its citizens – recent examples include those of both Myanmar and the United States — the first reaction to unrest is to try to control and contain information. The Pentagon even has a name for this tactic: information dominance. In China, where the media is directly overseen by an Orwellian Ministry of Information, along with the State Council Information Office, edicts are often issued telling media outlets what subjects they can cover, how they should be covered — and perhaps more importantly, which must be avoided. And the “three T’s” have topped that list for nearly two decades.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, it was thought that such barriers to information would topple. Instead the Chinese government created what has ironically come to be known as “The Great Firewall of China,” a well-funded, sophisticated, and ultimately successful effort to control the Internet and ensure that reporting and discussion about Tibet and other sensitive subjects such as relations with Taiwan — or what really happened at Tiananmen Square — remained severely constrained.

Will the world media now allow the Chinese government to establish “information dominance” over the Tibetans – and the rest of us? Or will the protests succeed in focusing world attention on China’s human rights record ahead of the Beijing Olympics — intended by the Communist government to boost its international image?

As one US State Department official told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “The Olympics is an opportunity for China to put its best face forward and show progress to the world” on human rights. “To be successful, they’re going to have to address some of these issues while the world is watching China. And the world will be watching China.”

But if the world’s media and citizens acquiesce in the face of the Chinese media offensive, what pictures of China – or of Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen Square – will that watching world be permitted to see?

Prime Minister Wen now says that Lhasa was returning to normal and “will be reopened to the rest of the world.” But he is not saying when, and he is not saying how. I’d like to ask him—but it’s apparently forbidden…