How
sweet it sounded: The Golden Hour of the
Little Flower. But the 1930s radio show was anything but pleasingly
tasteful.
This was the hour of Father Charles
E. Coughlin, the Toronto-born, Michigan-based Roman Catholic priest who whipped
up hatred and fear with a blend of religious fanaticism, far-right
anti-capitalism, and anti-Semitism. The recipe made him one of the most
perversely successful radio personalities of all time. Popular historian Tom
Lewis summed up the phenomenon in an Organization of American Historians
journal: “When a Philadelphia station asked
its listeners if they would like to hear Coughlin or the New York Philharmonic
on Sunday afternoons, the vote ran Coughlin 187,000; Philharmonic 12,000.”
Coughlin’s direct assaults on FDR
and coded attacks on “international bankers” grew increasingly
outrageous. In 1938, he actually published an edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the century’s most
destructive frauds. Such efforts drew plaudits from Nazi leaders. Coughlin’s
religious superior sidelined him in 1940.
The errant priest was a one-man
disaster. But today he might seem a gentleman and scholar compared to some
“talent” heard on Rochester radio.
Take one stage
name that works: Michael Savage.
Savage, whose program runs on WHAM
1180 AM, has some of Coughlin’s devotional power. For
example, he recently charged that opponents of an Alabama judge who
installed a religious monument in his courthouse are “moral
terrorists” attacking “God, family, and values” and seeking to
“destroy the 10 Commandments.” Nor does Savage show much sensitivity
for the commandment to love thy neighbor
as thyself: He founded the “Paul Revere Society,” which demands
an end to affirmative action, closure of US borders, the immediate deportation
of “all illegal immigrants,” the mandatory “health testing”
of “all recent foreign-born immigrants,” and more.
But Savage reserves his strongest
language for gays. This past July, MSNBC dumped him after he excoriated a
caller. Fox News transcribed the remarks: “Oh,
you’re one of the sodomites,” Savage told the caller. “You should
only get AIDS and die, you pig. How’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue
me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage.
You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it.”
Obviously, such
views have not deterred WHAM from keeping Savage on board. And a recent scandal
— talk-show host Bob Lonsberry’s racist on-air
remarks and his subsequent firing by WHAM — hasn’t made the station alter its
general course. Meanwhile, Lonsberry has declared
he’ll try to get his job back and also run for State Assembly. (Station Manager
Jeff Howlett did not return our call for comment.)
With or without Lonsberry, WHAM’s schedule is
dominated by hard-shell rightwing opinion. Rush Limbaugh is anchor of the
afternoon schedule. Limbaugh has lately been consumed with health problems,
prescription-drug dependency, and tangles with the
law. But he still can rail against “pointy-headed intellectual
leftists,” and so forth. On his November 19 program, he condemned protests
in the UK
against George W. Bush’s state visit, blaming “that wacko [London]
mayor.” Turning less derisive, he noted only “hundreds” had
taken to the streets against Bush that day. Limbaugh may not have realized the
major anti-Bush demo (which ended up drawing more than 100,000) was scheduled
for the next day, November 20.
WHAM also carries
pop psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger — her
doctorate is in physiology — in the mornings. Schlessinger
is a serial gay-basher; this apparently doesn’t devalue her stock at WHAM.
But Schlessinger isn’t the only right-wing Laura in local radioland.
WROC-AM 950
features Laura Ingraham, a Dartmouth
grad and former law clerk for US
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ingraham has a
reputation for being more balanced than some competitors. Yet on one recent
program, she assailed some groups which, she said, want to establish an
“Islamic Republic of America” and a counterpart in the UK.
She also praised the War on Terror’s constitutional shortcuts, scoffing at
“this idea that we should be self-flagellating because we’ve got people
penned up…” People on the left, she charged, won’t wake up until
“their own homes are incinerated.”
By the way, WROC
also has conservative hit-men Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity
on its schedule.
WHAM
1180 is a major player in Rochester
for two reasons. First, it’s a lower-case “clear channel” station,
that is, one with 50,000 watts of broadcasting power and a frequency all to
itself over an immense geographical area. Second, it’s a (capital-C) Clear
Channel Communications holding. Clear Channel Rochester owns seven radio
stations and WOKR-TV Channel 13. The parent corporation owns 1,225 radio
stations and 37 TV stations in the US,
says a company webpage.
But WHAM hasn’t
monopolized the radio market for conservative opinion.
Many Rochesterians have been tuning into a pair of
Penfield-based stations owned by Dallas, Texas-based Crawford Broadcasting.
(Crawford owns 31 radio stations nationwide; the name comes not from George
Bush’s Texas
hideaway, but from the company’s founding family.) WLGZ 990 AM has an
“adult standards” format; WDCZ 102.7 FM, billed as “The
Light,” specializes in “Christian talk, programs, and music.”
Operations
Manager Scott Ensign says part of WDCZ’s programming
comes from Focus on the Family, a conservative group founded by Dr. James
Dobson. “As a station, we do not take a political stand,” Ensign
says. But he adds that some Crawford stations, including WDCZ and WLGZ, run
commentaries produced at corporate headquarters under the collective title “The
Stand.”
Archived in print form on
the corporate website (www.crawfordbroadcasting.com), the commentaries are
steeped in far-right political and religious belief. They were first issued in
1992, “when liberal voices were becoming loud and shrill,” says the
website. In their written form, the commentaries are each hundreds of words
long. But in general, says Ensign, they’re broadcast in shortened form, a
minute to 90 seconds. In any case, Crawford Broadcasting exploits the link
between radio and the Internet; the company also solicits short responses from
listeners.
As archived, a
“Stand” from this past May takes on “The President and Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq.”
“Bush was willing to pay the price to do the right thing,” says the
commentary, complaining about “the fanatic liberal critique of George Bush
as being an empire-crazed leader, a warmonger, a militarist without human
compassion…” Yet this commentary also retrieves a vital fact from the
memory hole: the continuity between former President Bill Clinton’s Iraq
policies and those of the current residents of 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue.
But “The
Stand” can take more rightward tacks than this. For example, an archived
commentary on Israel,
while expressing a vague hope for peace, charges that “Arab countries and
the vast majority of Arabs in the Middle East”
wish to “utterly possess the land
of Israel,
all of it” and “see every Jew buried at the bottom of the Mediterranean
Sea.” This rests on an interpretation of God’s
promise that “HIS people will return, inherit, and prosper.”
Yet the
commentaries can be balanced, if not entirely fair, when addressing
controversial issues. One piece late last year on abortion and stem-cell
research is clearly in favor of “the right of the unborn.” But the
piece sounds ambivalent about stem-cell research. “Whatever is right,”
says the piece, “the point is that there simply is no dialogue in America.
There is no rational, sensible, sane, and calm discussion of the issues… The
war of words turns into the war of deeds… What a sad state of affairs.”
The
sad state gives progressive media observers plenty to chew on, too.
New York
City-based Jim
Naureckas — editor of Extra!, a bimonthly magazine from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and author
of The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s
Reign of Error — surveys the national scene daily.
Some popular hate-radio jockeys,
says Naureckas, “are trying to be as offensive
as they can get away with,” testing “what the market will bear.”
In particular, “there’s an awful lot of gay-bashing on what we thought of
as mainstream stations,” he says.
“Savage,” says Naureckas,
“is about as hate-filled as you can get.” But Limbaugh, he says, has
softened a little: “He used to be more racist and homophobic, openly so;
he once told a black caller to ‘take that bone out of your nose and call me
back.'” (This incident is sometimes reported as apocryphal. For a
discussion, see Snopes.com, an “urban legends” investigative website
that concludes Limbaugh is guilty as charged.)
Groups like FAIR have assembled
volumes of quotes and related data and published many a critique. But exactly
what can be done about the excesses of rightwing radio? “You don’t have to
have censorship,” Naureckas says. “You have
to have people recording what’s said” and following up on it. “If
what you’re hearing on the radio really offends you, get a tape recorder and a
computer and type up a transcript.” Too many hate-jocks, he says, get away
with stuff because people have a hard time believing they actually said it.
On a related topic: Can progressives
get their own act together — get their own airtime to counter the right? Naureckas says there are mixed signals. He notes that
philanthropists Sheldon and Anita Drobny
recently tried to create a network with solidly-liberal commentators
like comedian Al Franken. But the effort foundered,
says Naureckas, when a new owner wanted to go
“centrist with a hint of liberalism.”
“Corporations and the left
don’t go well together,” unless it’s “a left with no fangs,”
says Naureckas. He recalls what happened to gadfly
Jim Hightower. Ben & Jerry’s sponsored the folksy, anti-big-money Texan, he
says. But that wasn’t enough to allow Hightower to take on the rich, ubiquitous
likes of Limbaugh.
What about the new technologies,
like webcasting and streaming? Can progressives use
these technologies to make end-runs around the well-heeled right and center?
It may be too soon to know, but
there certainly are experiments all over the map.
Some Rochester activists,
for example, have been developing a web-based alternative source of news and
views through the international “Indymedia”
network (www.indymedia.org). Andy Dillon, a 19th Ward resident who volunteers
for the project, says the local group may add streaming audio to its site,
which already has considerable “movement” news. But the group, he
says, now is concentrating on video production, in alliance with Metro
Justice’s TV Dinner public-access cable show.
Jim Naureckas
says advances in broadcasting technology may open new avenues. For example, he
says, digital tuners can lock in four to six times more stations in the same
frequency band than analog tuners can. More extensive use of these tuners could
make it possible to multiply the number of local stations — and it could also
make it cheaper to acquire a broadcast frequency.
“Low-power FM” is an
option, too. LPFM outlets have a maximum of 100 watts of power and a
three-to-four-mile broadcast radius; the equipment is relatively cheap, so even
small community groups can afford to start an outlet. The FCC opened the door
to legal LPFM almost four years ago. But things have been delayed after
Congress — beset by the National Association of Broadcasters, National Public
Radio, and other stakeholders worried about signal interference — imposed
some restrictions.
LPFM is sure to grow. And this fits
with Naureckas’ emphasis on seizing the mainstream.
“The most convenient way to communicate speech is the AM and FM radio
bands,” he says. “Every home has a radio, every car has a radio.
Unfortunately, there’s a [tendency] to let more and more frequencies fall into
fewer and fewer hands.”
So how do you
take back the mainstream?
“You don’t try to attract a
liberal audience to WHAM, you set up a parallel to it,” says Jason Crane,
Green Party activist and station manager of Greece-based jazz station WGMC 90.1
FM. “There are achievable, winnable steps that can be taken,” says
Crane. He suggests that some local station should pick up Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, which is broadcast on Pacifica and some NPR
stations. (The show can heard on the radio in many
parts of New YorkState, but Rochesterians must stream it via www.democracynow.org.)
Then there are some tools that might
be put back to work — like the “Fairness Doctrine.”
This doctrine, a key component of
the New Deal regulatory framework, was tossed out by the Reagan Administration
in the 1980s. Congressional action has so far failed to undo the damage. This
past summer, though, Representative Maurice Hinchey
(D-NY) said he and other members of Congress were backing legislation to
restore the doctrine. Hinchey said it’s also
necessary to “revise the media ownership rules” that allow vast
corporations like Clear Channel to tie up markets.
The Fairness Doctrine has, or had,
two important parts. First, it required stations to give “equal time”
to opposing political candidates and viewpoints. The theory was that unlike
print media, broadcast frequencies are finite public resources that must be
used for the common good; today progressives argue that even the expansion of
cable, unforeseen in the Great Depression, has not rendered that theory
obsolete.
Moreover, the Fairness Doctrine gave
citizens a handle on local media affairs. “People forget,” says local
commentator Mitch Kaidy, “that the doctrine
included ‘public ascertainment.'” Kaidy examined
the process in a City Newspaper op-ed
this past July 13. “‘Local ascertainment,'” he wrote, “meant
that radio, and later radio and television stations, were directed to offer
opportunity for public views to be aired on major local issues as well as to
insure that those issues were ventilated on local stations by the activists
involved with them.” He described how some Rochesterians
used this process in the 1970s to get reforms at (you guessed it) WHAM. But in
regulatory terms, that was long ago and far away.
The old rules had another facet that
could give traction to efforts against Limbaugh and company. This is the
“personal attack rule.” As the FCC once described it, the rule
“provides generally that when, during a program on a controversial issue
of public importance, an attack is made on someone’s [or some group’s]
integrity, the licensee must inform the subject of the attack and provide an
opportunity to respond on-the-air.”
Tragically, that FCC description now
reads like an obituary for fairness and balance.
Big money is now ruling the
airwaves. But new technologies and attitudes may carry the day. Regulatory
regimes, like radio jockeys, have their ups as well as downs. And nobody can
see where the career of democratic media control is headed.
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2003.
