April 18, 2005

What's a South Park Conservative?

The words "South Park" and "conservative" seem to be strange bedfellows indeed. Yet if you look into the subject, they have more in common than meets the eye.

Thus a new book by Brian C. Anderson, South Park Conservatives, contends. In this article on Tech Central Station, we find out that

Those right-of-center college students, for the most part, aren't Alex P. Keaton-clones, decked out in Ralph Lauren double-breasted navy blue blazers. They're more likely to look like every other college kid: jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts advertising their favorite rock groups. (On the other hand, as Anderson notes in his book, campus South Park conservatives usually smell better than their bathing-optional counterparts on the left). But there's one thing that South Park campus conservatives abhor: "Political correctness drives them nuts", Anderson says. "In interviewing students, for instance, it was clear how much the PC conformities of the campus Left turned them off."

If Anderson is to be believed, it would seem that PC sensibilities are having the opposite effect than they're intended to on many young college students today. For anyone who has watched South Park, you'll agree that the creators, Matt Parker and Trey Stone, have no patience with political correctness. Anyone and everyone is fair game on the show: from blacks to gays to hippies to rednecks, South Park takes no prisoners.

Anderson also contends that while there is much new media (the Internet, for example) to compete with legacy media (also known as mainstream media, or MSM),

...the legacy media still has one big advantage: its manpower. "The elite media", Anderson says, "have the power to send out squadrons of reporters to investigate, say, Tom Delay but not Kofi Annan and UN corruption, and that can still shape the public's perception of what's newsworthy, still can provide a narrative to the flux of events and issues." The ability to choose what to investigate and what to report remains a powerful form of information control for big media.

This is most definitely true. However, while the MSM might still hold an advantage, it's not necessarily a trump card. Many people now take what they learn from the MSM with the proverbial grain of salt.

As proof, [Anderson] cites a Pew Research poll last year, which found "that just 21 percent of its respondents viewed the New York Times as a trustworthy news source -- a figure below that of Fox News, it's worth noting," Anderson says.

Those are powerful statistics.

Does this mean that conservatism will some day dominate college campuses? Probably not...but it does mean that perhaps students are finally starting to think for themselves, rather than just accept without question what their leftwing professors have been preaching as gospel from the lecturn. And isn't that how things should be?

And you thought South Park was just a juvenile, potty-mouthed cartoon!

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