Tuesday, May 10, 2005
The business of liberal talk radio
Nicholas von Hoffman has an excellent article in the current issue of The Nation about the business of liberal talk radio. Von Hoffman looks at the different approaches of Air America -- a network -- and syncator Democracy Radio. Most of his essay is such a nuts and bolts discussion of the structure of the radio business that it is startling to read it in The Nation. At the end, though, he echoes a theme that has been much discussed on both right and left:
Walter Cronkite couldn't have said it better. And he should know.
Thousands of hours of liberal blabbery on hundreds of stations will go part of the way toward changing the impression that this is a right-wing world, that reaction is the default setting and that anything to the left of Tom DeLay is a foreign, New York kind of idea. Reactionaries must not be allowed to make all the noise, but lib-lab noise-making will not assure the winning of elections. It can make liberalism respectable in the eyes of the impressionable, feckless, white-collar American masses; it can validate it, but it will not put a lefty in the White House any more than Limbaugh and his clonish imitators captured Congress for Jesus and the big-money people in 1994. He helped, but untold numbers can't stand listening to call-in programs. They find hearing talk-radio--left, right or center--akin to having a tooth drilled. All the callithumpian, pot-walloping noise in the world will not break liberalism out of the ghetto in which it is currently confined. Not alone. Not by itself.
Progressive talk-radio has to be for something. You can't live off a straight diet of political paranoia. Liberalism has to have its thrilling moments, its heroes. It has to have a platform, a positive agenda, a program. But the invention of same is not the job of a small group of overwrought men and women leaning into microphones. When liberalism and liberals do find their platform, their new, progressive talkers will surely broadcast it. And if all will not be good, it will be better than it has been.
Walter Cronkite couldn't have said it better. And he should know.
0 Comments:
