A friend of mine wrote me the other day to say he had taken a
new job that gave him a lot of time to listen to talk radio. He
said he found FM talk “much more civil” than AM talk.
I remember when I thought that way, too. Looking back now, I
realize how narrow my horizons were. By “FM talk,” I meant — and I
think my friend meant — exclusively NPR talk shows, which are
subsidized, have no commercials, and do not really have to compete
in a market at all.
My impression back then of AM talk radio was that it was
something like sports talk shout jocks, with lots of slanging and
insults and rudeness.
MY CONVERSION TO CONSERVATISM came about in stages. Some friends of
ours in the early '90s (still friends) asked me to come by their
house and collect their mail from the front hall floor while they
went on vacation. One day in their mail stack I found a new copy of
National Review, which I hadn’t seen in many years. I
opened it to the back page and found Florence King.
Florence King! One of my favorite writers. I sat down and began
to read the issue. I remember the slow dawning of reason, as I went
through issue after issue of this most literate and intelligent of
magazines.
I had a similar dawning experience shortly thereafter when I
turned on the Rush Limbaugh show for the first time. It was a
goosey thrill, kind of like doing something forbidden behind the
barn. In the event, it amazed me how courteous Rush was to his
listeners, how smart he was, and how funny.
RUSH MAKES NO BONES about the core mission of his program, which
has nothing to do with politics or morality. It’s to make as much
money from commercial sponsorship as possible. It’s a business.
All commercial radio has the same imperative. It matters little
whether you listen to country FM or commercial talk: The station
has to sell commercials for as much money as possible. That means
ratings, because ratings drive ad rates. In order to raise and
maintain ratings, radio programs have to entertain.
You can entertain in all kinds of ways: With “ten in a row”
country hits (the anticipation of which will make a listener stay
tuned in through long commercial blocks); with comic bits and funny
noises and sound bites and a mordant sense of humor (like Boston
talk king Howie Carr); with rhetorical verve and adroit argument
(like Jay Severin); or with a nasty, snarling confrontational style
(like Michael Savage, who, with his health food background, must be
a blast at parties).
But however you entertain, you have to entertain. No hour-long
interviews with authors who suffer from polio, no endless
discussions of restless leg syndrome, no half-hour self-righteous
portraits of lowlifes.
THE EXAMPLES CAN VARY WIDELY. This morning, I found Boston
Herald reporter Michelle McPhee on FM talk station WTKK,
talking about how a marginal cheating episode had blown the
validity of the Boston Police Department’s latest promotion exam
for detectives. I listened for an hour while I drove around on my
morning errands. She interviewed the police commissioner, who
obviously knew her well (she’s an experienced crime reporter).
So make the comparison valid. It’s not FM vs. AM. It’s
subsidized radio vs. commercial radio. Howie Carr, for example,
just reportedly inked a new contract with WTKK — bombshell news in
Boston, where Carr has been a fixture on AM WRKO for 20 years.
Besides, if you want to hear the rudest of liberalism on
display, just tune in NPR’s comedy show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell
Me. Its participants are arrogant, superior, snotty,
self-righteous — and wrong.
Not even Michael Savage can beat that quintifecta.
