Radio Daze
Roger
Radio Daze
Issue of 2003-08-11
Posted 2003-08-04
New York City is the home base of Fox News, National Review, and “The Rush
Limbaugh Show.” We’re in our tenth straight year under Republican mayors.
And we’re the world headquarters of heartless, rapacious, crush-the-workers
Finance Capitalism. But none of that makes our town Nirvana for
conservatives. Politically, we’re blue through and through. Al Gore’s margin
over George W. Bush here was four to one, and the city’s congressional
delegation consists of twelve Democrats and one Republican. New York has its
share of paleocons and more than its share of neocons (neoconservatism
having been invented on the Upper West Side, circa 1968), but what we mostly
have is noncons—that is, nonconservatives. We even have liberals.
You’d be hard put to notice that, though, from listening to the radio. As in
the rest of the country, political talk radio here is dominated by the hard
right. On the AM band, whose low-fidelity signal is perfect for shrill
jabber, no fewer than four powerful stations feature “conservative talk.”
Two of them, WMCA and WWDJ, are “Christian” and heavily salted with attacks
on homosexuality, abortion rights, and stem-cell research and support for
school prayer, President Bush’s judicial nominees, and Israeli maximalism.
The other two pump out a steadier flow of viscous, untreated political
sewage. WOR carries four hours daily of Bob Grant and Bill O’Reilly,
reliable voices of irritable reaction. The biggie is WABC, which claims the
largest talk-radio audience in the country. The station features fifteen
hours a week of Limbaugh, fifteen of Sean Hannity, and ten of Mark Levin
(“one of America’s preëminent conservative commentators”). It recently
dropped the malignant ranter Michael Savage, not because he told a
“sodomite” caller, “You should only get aids and die, you pig”—that
happened a little later, on Savage’s short-lived MSNBC cable-television
show—but over a contract dispute. (Savage’s photograph remains on the home
page of the WABC Web site, like Banquo’s ghost.) As its call letters
indicate, WABC carries the respectable imprimatur of the American
Broadcasting Company, which owns it and provides its hourly newscasts, and,
by extension, of ABC’s parent company, Disney.
A generation ago, when WABC was New York’s No. 1 Top Forty rock station,
talk radio, here and elsewhere, was both smaller and more varied. In 1980,
only seventy-five stations in the United States used the all-talk format,
and most of them were politically anodyne. Conservative hosts were novelty
items. Now there are more than thirteen hundred talk stations, the vast
majority of which are relentlessly right-wing. New York, like a few other
big coastal cities, has a squeaky voice or two on the marginal left. WBAI
broadcasts Chomskian harangues, and WLIB, which carries mostly Caribbean pop
music, dips an occasional toe into protest politics. On the whole, though,
the New York lineup mirrors the far right’s near-monopoly on political
broadcasting nationwide. There is no real liberal or even just noncon
counterpart to the radiocons, as we might as well call them. On (mostly) the
FM dial, National Public Radio is an alternative but not an equivalent. NPR’
s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” like “The Rush Limbaugh
Show,” are carried on some six hundred stations, and their audience is
roughly the size of El Rushbo’s—somewhere around fifteen million people per
week. But these NPR programs are news-feature broadcasts; they adhere to the
practices of journalistic professionalism, including the aspirational ideal
of objectivity. Their sensibility may fairly be said to be “liberal” in the
sense that liberal education is liberal—that is, open-minded and urbane,
with a preference for empirical inquiry over dogmatic
conclusion-mongering—but what little overt political commentary they offer
hovers around the moderate middle. NPR’s local talk-show hosts tend to be
more overtly liberal, but they are always polite about it. In contrast,
Limbaugh and his scores of national and local imitators aggressively
propagandize on behalf of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and
the domestic and foreign policies of the Bush Administration, with a stream
of faxes and e-mails from conservative think tanks and the Republican
National Committee keeping the troops firmly on message. Neither NPR nor
anyone else ever performed any such services for the Clinton Administration,
and no one is doing so today on behalf of the beleaguered Democratic
opposition.
Anita and Sheldon Drobny, a couple of Chicago venture capitalists, have set
out to do something about this. They have formed a company, AnShell Media,
have pledged ten million of their own dollars to it, and are spending the
summer trying to raise more money and assemble a fourteen-hour-a-day package
of liberal talk radio and a national network of stations to carry it. It won
’t be easy to get this act together, and it’ll be even harder to give it
legs once it’s on the air. The main obstacle, probably, is neither financial
nor ideological but temperamental. Remember the old joke about politics
being show business for ugly people? Well, right-wing radio is niche
entertainment for the spiritually unattractive. It succeeds because a
substantial segment of the right-wing rank and file enjoys listening, hour
after hour, as smug, angry, disdainful middle-aged men spew raw contempt at
reified enemies, named and unnamed. The radiocons seldom offer analysis or
argument. To the chronically resentful, they offer the sadistic consolation
of an endless sneer—at weaklings, victim-group whiners, cultural snobs,
Hollywood hypocrites whose hearts bleed for the downtrodden though they
themselves are rich and privileged, feminists, environmentalists, and, of
course, “liberals,” defined as the Clintons, other members of the “Democrat
Party,” and persons suspected of thinking that the state ought to help
correct for various kinds of unfairnesses or calamities (economic, racial,
climatic, medical) or of attaching themselves to some identity other than or
in addition to “American” (black, gay, foreign, all humanity).
By contrast, most noncons—most people, for that matter—do not regard
politics as entertainment. They regard it as politics. They wouldn’t think
it was fun to listen to expressions of raw contempt for conservatives—oh,
maybe for a little while now and then, just as some occasionally tune in
Limbaugh to give themselves a masochistic thrill or to raise their blood
pressure, but not long and often enough to sustain an industry. When they
want to be entertained, they watch comedy or drama. For the radiocon
audience, political hate talk is comedy and drama. To their ears, it’s
music.
The radiolibs at AnShell Media are aware that previous attempts at liberal
radio have been undone by dull earnestness. At the same time, they know that
anger and abuse will not win them the audience they seek. Accordingly, they
plan to rely heavily, they say, on “comedy and political satire.” As their
headliner, they are trying to recruit Al Franken, the “Saturday Night Live”
star and the author of such works of political science as “Rush Limbaugh Is
a Big Fat Idiot” and the forthcoming “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell
Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” Good luck to them. God knows
they’ll need it. They should only break a leg.
— Hendrik Hertzberg
--
I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my
enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
- Voltaire
redclay
Roger <rog...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:QkMXa.865$q24.69...@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com...
> The New Yorker -- Comment
> Radio Daze
> Issue of 2003-08-11
> Posted 2003-08-04
>
>
> New York City is the home base of Fox News, National Review, and "The Rush
> Limbaugh Show." We're in our tenth straight year under Republican mayors.
a demolican until they said they did not want him as the mayoral candidate
for New York city. So he took his money to the other faction of the GUP,
grand unified party, and anted up and won the hand. Bloomberg is the poster
child for the hypocrisy of today's politics. I wonder why GBII has not been
looking into Bloomberg's heart to see what is going on.