Maddow explains the conservative media model: 'Everybody else is out to get you'

Conservative media outlets encourage their audiences to keep viewing only their content by demonizing other news sources, according to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

"If I am trying to get across a point of view, I have to persuade and not assert," she said in April at The Castro Theater in San Francisco. "Because I can't assume that everybody is already agreeing with me when I start to make the funny voice. I can't assume that I'm not going to offend somebody that thinks that person shouldn't be made fun of. So, I try to be sort of ecumenical. I try not to imagine my audience being people who already agree with me. I, in fact, try to imagine a Republican audience."

"I think the conservative media model involves this one really important step that liberals don't use," Maddow continued, "which is, 'listen to me, I am the light and the truth and the way, you have to believe what I say and everybody else is out to get you and you can't listen to anybody else, don't change the channel, they're trying to kill you.' Liberals don't say that. Conservatives tell their audience that."

"That sense of an embattled community that needs to protect itself from someone who is trying to victimize them is not part of a way liberals talk in the media."

The event was hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by ForaTV on May 1, below: