Blame It On The Nature Of Hate Talk Radio And Pundit TV

Think of this post as Part II of today's coming to grips with the fact that, oops, we picked the wrong man to put over us last November-- not that John McCain (or even Hillary Clinton) would have been a better choice. On the other hand, Clinton did look into Rahm Emanuel's dead reptilian eyes early on and recoiled in horror. As we mentioned here at DWT, before Obama had even taken the oath of office, his administration was doomed to failure by his choice of chief of staff. Is it possible that anyone could have succeeded, though? Last night's throwing Van Jones overboard and next Wednesday's throwing meaningful health care reform overboard are symptoms of the increasingly ungovernable nature of what Charles Pierce has so aptly dubbed Idiot America. Or at least ungovernable by someone without great depth of character and courageousness. Obama, it turns out, is just another troll in a long line of trolls who have been occupying the White House.

I can't recommend Pierce's book highly enough. The subtitle, How Stupidity Became A Virtue In The Land Of The Free, opens the door to understanding the mess the country has fallen into, a mess Obama and Rahm Emanuel have no intention of tackling regardless of the fact that it is mooting what could have been/should have been an historic presidency. Pierce's three tenets of Idiot America:

The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

The Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

The Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believed it.

So, yes, smart money has indeed figured out how to get around that pesky concept of Democracy that is nothing but a threat to the status quo and the power of ruling-- as opposed to elected-- elites. I want to share a few passages from Pierce's 5th chapter, Radio Nowhere. We'll start at an "issues-oriented" Talk Radio convention where G. Gordon Liddy is about to be presented with that medium's equivalent of the Oscar For Best Picture of The Year.

[T]hreatening to poison a journalist [Jack Anderson] is a shining gold star on the résumé. Westwood One, a huge radio syndicator, gave Liddy a national platform, and Liddy did with it pretty much what you might expect. On one memorable occasion he gave his radio audience pointers on how to kill a federal agent. ("Head shots," he advised.) The comment caused no little outrage, particularly among federal agents with heads. President Bill Clinton mooed earnestly about the corruption of our national dialogue. This sent the talk radio universe into such collective hysterics that the New Media Conference in 1995 gave Liddy its coveted "Freedom of Speech" award for boldly speaking truth to power.

...[T]he format did not truly explode until 1987, when, in the deregulatory fever of the Reagan years the Federal Communications Commission revoked the Fairness Doctrine. This rule, adopted in 1949, had required licensed broadcasters to air all sides of the debate on controversial issues... After a favorable ruling by a federal court, and after Reagan vetoed a revival, the Fairness Doctrine was dead. Talk radio exploded on the right. As more and more stations became the property of fewer and fewer companies-- the repeal was only a small part of the general deregulation of the public airwaves-- the medium's ideology hardened like a diamond. These days, the conservatives' dominance of AM radio is overwhelming.

... Since right-wing populism has at its heart an "anti-elitist" distrust of expertise, talk radio offers the purest example of the Great Premises at work. A host is not judged a success by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the ratings needle. (First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.) If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert (Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough) and if the host seems to argue passionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true simply because of how many people are listening to him say it (Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it). Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

Talk radio was the driving force in changing American debate into American argument. It moved discussion southward from the brain to the Gut. Debate no longer consists of thesis and antithesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other in between commercials for male-enhancement products.



Talk radio provides a template for the clamorous rise of pundit television and for the even swifter interactivity on the Internet. And, because the field of play has moved from the brain to the Gut, talk radio has helped shove the way we talk to each other about even the most important topics almost entirely into the field of entertainment. In doing so, it has created a demand for inexpertise-- or, more accurately, anexpertise-- whereby the host is deemed more of an authority the less he is demonstrably polluted by actual knowledge.

After an extensive study of talk radio, and of the television argument shows that talk radio helped spawn, professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis came up with a set of rules for modern American pundits:

1. Never be dull.
2. Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.
3. The American public is stupid; treat them that way.
4. Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.

"Television is an emotional medium," Cline explains. "It doesn't do reason well. This is entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse. Never employ a tightly reasoned argument where a flaming sound bite will do. The argument of the academic is sort of dull, but a good pissing match is fun to watch. To admit anything ore complicated is to invite the suggestion that you may be wrong, and that can never be. Nuance is almost a pejorative term-- as if nuance means we're trying to obfuscate."

I was working on this clip last night, a song by Rev Boy that a Facebook friend sent me, something you might call "the Republican Fight Song." I didn't know about Van Jones firing at the time. Take a look:



And speaking of Hate Talk Radio, Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists has put together a compendium of examples of Glenn Beck promoting far-right extremist material on Fox News.