The Good, the Bad, the Insidious, the Dangerous, and the Appallingly Banal

For a good scare, read Howard Kurtz's book about our talkathon culture alongside Lawrence K. Grossman's recent The Electronic Republic. Grossman, former president of NBC News and PBS, posits that a "new political system is taking shape in the United States" thanks to instantaneous, two-way, interactive telecommunications tools that will eventually give practically everybody "a greater voice in the making of public policy than at any time since the direct democracy of the ancient Greek city-states. . . ." This electronic gimcrackery in every home will make lawmakers "instantly aware of, and responsive to, popular will" and will allow the public "to participate directly in making the laws and policies by which they are governed."

Now, compare the Kurtz aper�u: America is "awash" in loud, angry, raunchy, smug, ill-informed, rumor-mongering, and cacophonous talk. This talk emits from television and radio hacks and hucksters, experts, frauds, pundits, charlatans, mountebanks, and bigots; and also from millions of American citizens who daily telephone their opinions and their queries to scores of emotionally charged TV and radio chat programs. No effort is expended to achieve balance, objectivity, or even truth. As the talk culture has burgeoned, Kurtz argues, the national discourse has been "coarsened, cheapened, reduced to name-calling and finger-pointing and bumper-sticker sloganeering," and all of this adds up to a "profound cultural shift in the nature of communication."

The implicit peril in the comparison of the two books hardly needs belaboring. If the level of our quotidian communion as a society is as debased as Kurtz claims (and his research is persuasive), then we're headed down a long slippery slope toward civil chaos. Grossman's teledemocracy will inevitably become mobocracy and my fellow Baltimorean H.L. Mencken will be proven correct in having decided that democracy is a form of government that assumes the common man knows what he wants and should get it good and hard.

What universe are we talking about here? Larry King, The McLaughlin Group, Phil Donahue, Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Crossfire, Capital Gang, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder and Sally Jessy Raphael among platoons of others; not to mention Nightline, Washington Week in Review, Charlie Rose, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Wall Street Week, and the three network Sunday morning political chat programs Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week with David Brinkley. Then there are the hundreds of local radio call-in programs and even whole networks devoted to the presumptive allure of the human voice: CNBC, C-SPAN, CNN, National Empowerment Television, and America's Talking.

That spectrum includes the good, the bad, the insidious, the dangerous, and the appallingly banal. Some are better inoculated than others against the twin viruses of casuistry and banality. But even the best are not immune to the odd bit of pandering. Nightline, for example, had done fifty-five programs by the summer of 1995 on the O. J. Simpson trial -- nearly half of its airtime during one particular seven-week period. Those shows boosted the program's ratings 15 percent. "There is a point in journalism," Ted Koppel explained, "where you have to accede to the voracious appetite of the consumer." Ratings would soar even higher, he added, if Nightline did O.J. every night, "but we'd be giving up our moral high ground." He'd already given up a few acres of it with programs on Tonya Harding (3), Paula Jones (2) and child molestation charges against Michael Jackson.

Kurtz says this:

 The culture of news, once the straitlaced, buttoned-down preserve of Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley, has merged with the relentlessly glitzy world of entertainment, producing one great, roaring Oprahfied ooze of headlines and hype. The most prominent print journalists of our era have eagerly enlisted in the shouting-head society, electronic court jesters determined to reap the rewards of maximum exposure. They are talking their way into the heart of America, wrapping their words around each passing fad and obsession, their voices merging into a vast harmonic convergence of talk. . . . The power of talk has changed the very fabric of the country. . . . [T]rash talk helps degrade a culture that is slowly sinking into the gutter. . . . It is the combined lung power of these hundreds of shows that creates the deafening roar that so often overwhelms intelligent public discourse. In this static-filled environment, it is the loudest, the most extreme, the most twisted pronouncements that break through the din

Mark Twain said that Wagner's music isn't really as bad as it sounds; and Kurtz's mordant assessment of the effects of electronic talk may not be as overwrought and hyperbolic as it first appears. Certainly the strategies of office-seekers in the 1992 elections were a new twist on how to run campaigns -- as most vividly dramatized in the symbiosis between Larry King and Ross Perot, who appeared no fewer than nine times with King during 1991 and '92. That exposure helped Perot win 19 percent of the vote and changed history by contributing significantly to the unseating of a president. All told, six presidential aspirants (including Clinton, three times) appeared with King and suddenly his nightly program on CNN -- deservedly obscure until then -- was the most important stop on the campaign trail. ("Larry King liberated me by giving me to the American people directly," Bill Clinton said.) Most candidates for the presidency, House, and Senate learned in 1992 how to stiff-arm the mainstream press and conduct an endun around Russert, Broder, Rather, Schieffer et al., leaving them perched ruefully in the grandstand as spectators.

By the off-year elections of 1994, President Clinton was feeling less liberated than agitated, as talk radio and its principal exemplar, Rush Limbaugh, played a major role in ushering in the so-called Gingrich revolution. Clinton complained about "Rush Limbaugh and all this right-wing extremist media just pouring venom at us every day." He told KMOX-AM:

Look at how much of talk radio is a constant, unremitting drumbeat of negativism and cynicism. . . . After I get off the radio with you today, Rush Limbaugh will have three hours to say whatever he wants, and I won't have any opportunity to respond, and there's no truth detector.

As recently as the late 1980s, only 300 news/talk stations graced the airwaves. The total is now more than a thousand, and for better or worse (depending on your predisposition), 70 percent of the hosts are right-wingers and 80 percent are male. Talk radio is now second only to country music in popularity. "The most successful hosts . . . are raging egotists," Howard Kurtz writes, "who dominate their programs in a way that television could never tolerate. . . . No formal training, advanced degree, or lengthy apprenticeship is required. It is a tower of babble, the rawest form of media democracy."

A lot of radio talk, actually, is harmless (and occasionally helpful) badinage about money, health, gardening, shopping tips, and showbiz, but too much of it is racist, anti-Semitic and insanely paranoiac about alleged oppression by government in America. Last year's bombing in Oklahoma City and the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, brought to the general public's radar screen for the first time a weird subcult of neo-Nazis, soldiers of fortune, militiamen, and mercenaries whose local and nationally syndicated radio programs had quietly been feeding the fears and prejudices of millions of Americans for years.

More out in the open are the likes of Bob Grant, whose WABC-AM daily talkfest has been airing in New York for a quarter century. "We have in our city [and] in our nation . . . millions of sub-humanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya -- people who, for whatever reason, have not become civilized." You don't have to be Jesse Jackson to decode that, do you? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a "scumbag" and Haitian boat people are "swine" who should be "drowned." "Policemen with machine guns" should take aim at a gay pride parade and "mow them down." Welfare mothers are "maggots" who deserve "the Bob Grant Mandatory Sterilization Plan."

On Pacifica radio, one Julianne Malveaux hopes that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife "feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease." G. Gordon Liddy on WJFK in Fairfax, Virginia, declares that while practicing shooting his assault weapon, he drew figures on the target and named them Bill and Hillary. "I thought it would improve my aim," he explained. J. Paul Emerson of KSFO, San Francisco, advises listeners to "go out there and shoot illegal immigrants who come across the border." In Phoenix, KFYI's Bob Mohan says that gun control advocate Sarah Brady (wife of the wounded and disabled Reagan press secretary James Brady) should be "put down" like an animal. "A humane shot at a veterinarian's would be a good way to do it." One of the blessings of a democratic society like our own is that such speech is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.

But the torrent of talk that most Americans tap into on television is usually more benign. Television is more "mass" than radio, less targeted, more expensive to produce, and usually has better manners if not always more brains -- leaving aside all consideration of the trash talk shows (Ricki, Maury, Jerry, and friends) as being beyond rational criticism. Howard Kurtz -- he's the media beat reporter for The Washington Post -- has performed a signal service in Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time. He has done the legwork and collected all the bits of string that add up to an unnerving vision of what's on our airwaves. Especially piquant is his backstage, fly-on-the-wall reporting about The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, Rush Limbaugh, Larry King Live, and other talkoramas. The raffish Jack Germond, with characteristic candor, informs Kurtz that the McLaughlin show "is not something you take seriously. I am not comfortable with any of this but I do it for the money. . . . If I didn't have to pay alimony, I wouldn't do it." Michael Kinsley was disdainful of political talk shows ("televised journalistic gasbaggery," he called them), but finally agreed in 1986 to play substitute host briefly on Crossfire. "By the end of my two-week stint," he wrote, "I was a trained killer, unfit for human society and in need of plastic surgery to remove the permanent sneer from my face." Ted Koppel complained to Kurtz that too many viewers perceive Nightline as just one more chat show, and himself as yet another talk show host among many. "I thought I was still a newsperson," he said, but finds himself lumped in with Phil and Oprah and Geraldo. "If there is no discrimination in the public mind between what I do and what Geraldo Rivera does, then I think we're in trouble." Phil Donahue dismissed "the self-anointed and -appointed wooden soldiers and talking-head mainstream journalists who continue to believe they are morally superior to everyone and sneer at Louise-from-Omaha."

Kurtz confesses, ever so peremptorily, that the ocean of blather we're swimming in does have an upside in that it reduces people's sense of isolation and powerlessness and gives them the illusion of participation in worlds -- political, social -- they're customarily excluded from. Call-in shows constitute a national town hall meeting, and serve as a safety valve for frustration and rage. Folks in Peoria and Podunk can grill politicians just as though they were panelists on Meet the Press. In a bare few pages at the end of his book, Kurtz nods in the direction of the emerging, worldwide on-line community of computer jockeys who are engaged in "talk" -- much of it just as boring and ill-informed as its radio-TV counterparts. As the talk culture migrates to on-line, every computer user (God save the mark) is potentially the host and star of his own talkfest.

With unintended irony, the book includes an "About the Author" coda that admits Kurtz has regularly "made the talk show rounds on radio and television." Elsewhere, the publisher boasts that Kurtz will head out on a coast-to-coast publicity tour to promote Hot Air, during which, doubtless, he'll appear on every talk program that will have him.

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