Radio waves
Howard Kurtz on the rise of the talk culture
by Dan Kennedy
by Dan Kennedy
The rise of talk, Kurtz says in his new book, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time (Times Books, 407 pages, $25), has warped the culture of media and politics. Respected journalists such as Michael Kinsley become parodies of themselves, making oversimplified arguments to meet television's demand for pithy soundbites. Political analysts such as Cokie Roberts and David Gergen compromise their integrity by accepting tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. This year's Republican presidential field began with three professional talkers: not just Pat Buchanan, who earned his stripes on Crossfire, but also Alan Keyes and Robert Dornan, both former talk-show hosts.
The most untamed genre of talk is radio, where right-wing ratings champ Rush Limbaugh's denunciation of liberal women as "feminazis," once outrageous, is now comparatively mild. As Kurtz notes, listeners are regularly treated to New York host Bob Grant's description of black criminals as "savages" and "subhuman scum," to Watergate miscreant G. Gordon Liddy's advice on how best to kill federal agents, and to wild conspiracy theories about subjects such as the alleged murder of Vince Foster and the rise of the New World Order. Then there's Don Imus, a politically sophisticated satirist whose parodies of Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and (yes) Rush Limbaugh can be as vicious as Liddy's most hateful outbursts.
"The rise of talk radio -- from three hundred news/talk stations in the late '80s to more than a thousand in the mid-'90s -- has revolutionized the way millions of Americans get information and opinions about public issues," Kurtz writes.
Kurtz discussed talk radio in an interview with the Phoenix.
Q: You point out in your book that most radio talk-show hosts are conservatives. Here in Boston we have only one liberal host, Marjorie Clapprood, of WRKO [AM 680], and she co-hosts her show with a conservative. Why is talk radio dominated by the right?
A: Most liberal hosts have not done that well. It's not an accident that there isn't anybody who even remotely approaches the popularity of not only Rush Limbaugh but of G. Gordon Liddy on the left side of the spectrum. Jerry Brown, a nationally known figure, is basically kind of a flop on the radio. Mario Cuomo, who a lot of people thought would be the liberal Limbaugh, has had a slow start, to put it charitably.
I think there are two basic reasons for this. One is that there is not a comparable hunger among liberal listeners for some alternative source of news and information the way there is among conservatives. Limbaugh has been unusually successful not only because he's very entertaining, but also because people who share his views felt like they were getting screwed by the mainstream media. Rightly or wrongly, they felt that the big news organizations tilt to the left.
The second reason is that, in most cases, liberal hosts are kind of boring. I don't know if that's genetic or whatever, but radio has not produced very many of these folks who can be both ideologically fervent and entertaining at the same time. I don't think anybody would accuse Marge Clapprood of being boring, so I don't know what the explanation is there. But by and large, most of these folks are not burning up the airwaves.
Q: Yet Jim Hightower, who's certainly not boring, was slowly building a national audience before he was yanked off the air last fall. He claims that his network, ABC, dumped him because of his politics at the instigation of the network's new owner, Disney. Is there a place for an anti-corporate populist like Hightower in an age of huge media monopolies?
A: I'd like to think that there is, and perhaps if ABC had been a little more patient Hightower would have continued to make progress. But at the same time that he was adding stations, some other stations were dropping him. He was also having trouble cracking the major markets, which is very important for national advertising. He was not on in Washington, New York, or Boston.
I've listened to tapes of his show, and I think he's pretty good. But I stop short of the conspiratorial view, which I know he holds, that Disney/ABC/whoever basically didn't like his politics and therefore booted him off the air. I happen to believe that if the show had cracked big markets and pulled big ratings, these executives would have held their nose and put him on, even though privately some of them might have hated his politics.
I don't subscribe to the theory that station managers are conservatives, and therefore they only want to put conservatives on the air. I think these guys would put on Karl Marx if they thought he could get a 15 share.
Q: Just a few years ago Boston's most controversial host was Jerry Williams, of WRKO, a conservative populist who fought such things as legislative pay raises and seat-belt laws. As you note in your book, Williams virtually invented talk radio in 1950. A couple of years ago his old time slot was taken by Howie Carr, who hurls demeaning insults at politicians he doesn't like and makes fun of gay people and minorities. Why does that style play so well not just here but across the country?
A: Because the easiest and quickest way to create a hit show is by being outrageous, whether it's by tossing around a lot of sexual innuendo or by beating up on politicians in the rawest terms imaginable. The trend in radio, like the trend in the whole talk culture, is not toward nuanced discourse of the issues. It is toward raw meat; it is toward bashing people. Whether you're talking about The McLaughlin Group and Crossfire on television, or whether you're talking about Don Imus and Bob Grant in New York, being outrageous is what sells in today's overheated radio environment.
Talk shows always reflect the culture. If somebody was trying to be Howard Stern 20 years ago, if somebody went on the air and called politicians "lying weasels," the way Imus does, it would have caused a huge sensation, and that person probably would have been out of a job. But in today's anything-goes political culture, where the politicians themselves run attack ads accusing each other of being scum and worse, I guess it's hardly surprising that the media types would try to pick up on this.
Q: Has Rush Limbaugh peaked?
A: I think he does have some problems. Not only was it unlikely that anybody could sustain those titanic ratings forever, but Rush has become part of the dreaded media elite that he loves to bash, and has even more conspicuously become a propagandist for the Republican establishment. He was a lot funnier and a lot more interesting about five years ago, when he was an independent conservative critic of the culture and politics. Now every other day he starts the program by talking about the latest fax he got from "Mr. Newt."
Having helped elect all these Republicans in '94, at least in a small way, he has become their mouthpiece, and that has made him predictable. Even conservatives who like him are growing a little weary of the way in which he carries water for the Republican leadership in Washington. The most interesting thing to happen is that all the Pat Buchanan fans have turned on Rush and decried him as a member of that Beltway establishment. It really shows how much Limbaugh sacrificed when he declared quite frankly that he is a Republican, and that he will not criticize Republicans on his show.
I mean, you can't imagine anybody who plays a liberal on TV, whether it be Jack Germond or Michael Kinsley or whoever, saying they're never going to utter a syllable of criticism against Democrats. Yet Limbaugh gets away with that. But I think it is ultimately limiting his appeal.
Q: What effect do you think talk radio is going to have on the political campaign this year?
A: Compared to '94, when talk radio had a tremendous effect on the congressional elections, it's been quite muted so far. We're basically seeing an intramural fight within the Republican Party, and a lot of the conservative hosts, from Limbaugh on down, are notably unenthusiastic about this Republican presidential field. There's a palpable sense of disappointment on the air, both among the hosts and among many of their listeners.
Once we get to the fall, though, I think these hosts will revert to their most enthusiastic Clinton-bashing. I mean, we're talking about in some cases calling the first lady an "evil witch," calling the president of the United States a "lying bastard." We're not talking about just people who don't happen to like their politics. We're talking about people who hate their guts.
I suppose that mostly they'll be preaching to the choir. But I think that when you have a president being assailed day after day after day by dozens and dozens of hosts in many, many cities, it has an effect. So I think it will have an effect on the fall election, even thought it hasn't had much of an effect now.
Q: Imus in the Morning is very popular in Boston [it's heard on WEEI (AM 850)], and Senator John Kerry and his challenger, Governor Bill Weld, are fast becoming regulars. How important is it that a politician do shows such as Imus's to prove that he or she can mix it up with the I-man and the boys?
A: Apparently a lot of politicians have concluded that it's quite important. It certainly helped Bill Clinton in the '92 primary in New York. It's not important in the sense that Don Imus is going to tell the people of Massachusetts whom they should elect to the United States Senate. It is important in that it is a way for people like Weld and Kerry to reach folks who don't watch Meet the Press and Face the Nation on Sunday morning, who aren't C-SPAN addicts, who don't spend 18 hours a day thinking about politics, and to display another side to their personality beyond what is their position on welfare and taxes.
Clearly a lot of these folks are collecting one-liners so they can go on and try to appear to be real human beings and yuk it up with folks like Imus. But that just strikes me as an extension of what politicians do every day, which is to try to appear like real human beings.
Candidates also try to use talk radio as a cheap and easy means of communication. Pat Buchanan has been brilliant at this, in doing two dozen talk-radio interviews a day from his cell phone at a time when he couldn't afford to do much else. Even Arlen Specter, whose presidential campaign lasted about three and a half days, went on The Howard Stern Show in an effort to reach out to listeners who aren't necessarily addicted to politics. Dole does Imus. The use of talk shows as a vehicle to connect with America is only going to increase.