Talking Back To Talk Radio

By Thom Hartmann, AlterNet. Posted December 11, 2002.

"All Democrats are fat, lazy, and stupid," the talk-show host said in grave, serious tones as if he were uttering a sacred truth.

We were driving to Michigan for the holidays, and I was tuning around, listening for the stations I'd worked for two and three decades ago. I turned the dial. "It's a Hannity For Humanity house," a different host said, adding that the Habitat For Humanity home he'd apparently hijacked for his own self-promotion would only be given to a family that swears it's conservative. "No liberals are going to get this house," he said.

Turning the dial again, we found a convicted felon ranting about the importance of government having ever-more powers to monitor, investigate and prosecute American citizens without having to worry about constitutional human rights protections. Apparently the combining of nationwide German police agencies (following the terrorist attack of February 1933 when the Parliament building was set afire) into one giant Fatherland Security Agency answerable only to the Executive Branch, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, was a lesson of history this guy had completely forgotten. Neither, apparently, do most Americans recall that the single most powerful device used to bring about the SS and its political master was radio.

Is history repeating itself?

Setting aside the shrill and nonsensical efforts of those who suggest the corporate-owned media in America is "liberal," the situation with regard to talk radio is particularly perplexing: It doesn't even carry a pretense of political balance. While the often-understated Al Gore recently came right out and said that much of the corporate-owned media are "part and parcel of the Republican Party," those who listen to talk radio know it has swung so far to the right that even Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater would be shocked.

Average Americans across the nation are wondering how could it be that a small fringe of the extreme right has so captured the nation's airwaves? And done it in such an effective fashion that when they attack folks like Tom Daschle, he and his family actually get increased numbers of death threats? How is it that ex-felons like John Poindexter's protégée Ollie North and Nixon's former burglar G. Gordon Liddy have become stars? How is it that ideologues like Rush Limbaugh can openly promote hard-right Republicans, and avoid a return of the dead-since-Reagan Fairness Doctrine (and get around the desire of the American public for fairness) by claiming what they do is "just entertainment"?

And, given the domination of talk radio by the fringe hard-right that represents the political views of only a small segment of America, why is it that the vast majority of talk radio stations across the nation never run even an occasional centrist or progressive show in the midst of their all-right, all-the-time programming day?

Even within the radio industry itself, there's astonishment.

Program directors and station managers I've talked with claim they have to program only hard-right hosts. They point out that when they insert even a few hours of a centrist or progressive talk host into a typical talk-radio day, the station's phone lines light up with angry, flaming reactions from listeners; even advertisers get calls of protest. Just last month, a talk-radio station manager told me solemnly, "Only right-wingers listen to AM radio any more. The lefties would rather read."

How could this be? After all, an "environmentalist" Democrat Al Gore won the majority of the popular vote in the last presidential election, with a half-million more votes than any other presidential candidate (of any party) in the entire history of the nation. How could it be that there are only two Democratic or progressive voices in major national radio syndication, and only a small handful in partial syndication or on local shows?

The issue is important for two reasons.

First, in a nation that considers itself a democratic republic, the institutions of democracy are imperiled by a lack of balanced national debate on issues of critical importance. As both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia learned, a steady radio drumbeat of a single viewpoint -- from either end of the political spectrum -- is not healthy for democracy when opposing voices are marginalized.

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