part one: paradise lost

There’s no doubt that the current conservative talk radio format would cease to exist if for every hour of Limbaugh or Beck or Hannity or Levine or Gibson or Thompson or Ingraham or Savage or Miller, etc., the station had to allow opposing voices equal time: Twenty minutes of Beck alone would generate an entire week’s worth of rebuttal material. The packaged syndication deals would soon collapse if rank amateurs were allowed the use of ex-public airwaves to exercise their First Amendment right.

Make no mistake, the conservative talk radio heavyweights are nervous; their gravy train will derail if the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated. The elimination of the FCC rule that required stations provide free airtime to controversial opinions opened the door wide open for ideologically driven propagandists to ply their trade. It’s no accident that Limbaugh was routinely fired before finding safe haven in Sacramento, where he honed his anti-liberal shtick before going national in 1988. Freed from accountability, Limbaugh was the first to exploit the potential of launching unchallenged attacks on political opponents. Pretending that the Fairness Doctrine was a liberal conspiracy designed to keep conservatives silent, Limbaugh and his ilk continue to complain that the so-called mainstream media (everything but right-wing radio and Fox News) is in the tank for liberal elites. Of course, the rash of hard right monologists, dominating what were once regulated airwaves, offer nothing but the unvarnished truth to rural, mostly under-educated whites. Like the John Birch version of Radio Free Europe, they keep the cross of ‘American Exceptionalism’ burning behind enemy lines, ever vigilant for signs of cultural diversity and godless communists guised as the ‘Democrat ’ Party.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment circus not withstanding, the high water mark for the right-wing media monolith was reached in the months after 9-11. The genuine fear and paranoia that gripped the nation was tailor made for talk radio to exploit. Long standing civil liberties were quickly dismissed as dangerous impediments to defeating Islamic Terror. The Constitution, the sacred document Limbaugh & Gang claim to venerate, was presented to President Bush as his personal property. Elevating the commander-in-chief to unprecedented heights, the liberty-loving patriots found no irony in granting Bush dictatorial powers. Imagine Beck’s hysteria should President Obama issue a signing statement giving him the authority to arrest and indefinitely detain any American citizen he thought posed a threat to national security? Although it’s hard to believe, none of the freedom-obsessed broadcasting specialists were alarmed by the suspension of habeas corpus, nor were they incensed when Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of WMD failed to materialize. Once again, imagine the shrieks of outrage if a ’Democrat’ president had ordered troops into combat based on such faulty intelligence? Did Beck weep?
Did Hannity demand impeachment? And who knew that oral sex trumps unnecessary death and destruction as a high crime and misdemeanor in the mind of Long Island’s ‘Greatest American’’?
It’s safe to say that the AM genre has taken situational ethics into dark grottos never probed by Dostoevsky.

Because it’s late and I have to discipline our not-so-beloved squirrel monkey, I’ll get to health care v talk radio tomorrow.

Juan Don