Libs are in for a rough ride!
Posted on 08/05/2003 8:58:48 AM PDT by Maceman
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.
Ahem...
LATEST ISSUE OF THE NEW YORKER UNREAD IN FOUR BOROUGHS
WOR carries four hours daily of Bob Grant and Bill O’Reilly, reliable voices of irritable reaction.
Anytime you hear someone talking about the "voices of reaction", you know you're listening to someone who still hasn't quite come to grips with the idea that Stalin wasn't really the Hero of the Workers.
So right off the bat he can't get his facts straight. I call a difference of 5 MILLION (25%) a significant difference.
But these NPR programs are news-feature broadcasts; they adhere to the practices of journalistic professionalism, including the aspirational ideal of objectivity. Only a half-brained liberal would POSSIBLY write this drivel. NPR has never in its broadcast LIFE attempted to reach "the ideal of objectivity," much less actually REACH it.
I blew diet coke out of my nose when I read this line. How can anyone be so thick as to believe that NPR is objective?
I believe the net worth of the owners of The New Yorker is in excess of $ 50 million, made largely through the exploitation of non-union labor. What stinkin' hypocrits...
This statement, of course, is a (pardon the expression) blatant whitewash. Anybody who has listened to WLIB for more than ten minutes knows that it is a seething hotbed of racism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and other assorted leftist hatred and drivel, and full of more hate-mongering than you will hear in ten years of listening to conservative talk radio. And WBAI is a bastion of the loony left, where you can listen for hours without hearing the expression of a single, uncontradictory, un-PC, rational thought.
Of course, that inconvenient truth doesn't fit the author's prejudices, and so he relied (like most lefties do) on the 'big lie' to make his false points.
I assume that your use of the second-person pronoun here is merely a rhetorical device, and not aimed at me personally.
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