Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 3

Part II *

TRUTH

CHAPTER FIVE

Radio Nowhere

For an un.o.btrusive little bookworm, Mr. Madison understood the Gut and what it could do better than most of his peers did. He saw it for what it was-a moron, to be sure, but more than that, too. The Gut is democratic. It is the repository of fears so dark and ancient and general that we reflexively dress up the Gut as good ol' common sense, which we define as "whatever the Gut tells us." The Gut inevitably tells so many different people so many different things at so many different times that it causes them to choose up sides. Good ol' common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense. Because of this, Madison was wary of the Gut from the start, and he tried to devise a system within which the Gut could be channeled and controlled, as by the locks in a ca.n.a.l. "So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities," he wrote in un.o.btrusive little bookworm, Mr. Madison understood the Gut and what it could do better than most of his peers did. He saw it for what it was-a moron, to be sure, but more than that, too. The Gut is democratic. It is the repository of fears so dark and ancient and general that we reflexively dress up the Gut as good ol' common sense, which we define as "whatever the Gut tells us." The Gut inevitably tells so many different people so many different things at so many different times that it causes them to choose up sides. Good ol' common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense. Because of this, Madison was wary of the Gut from the start, and he tried to devise a system within which the Gut could be channeled and controlled, as by the locks in a ca.n.a.l. "So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities," he wrote in Federalist Federalist 10, "that when no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly pa.s.sions." 10, "that when no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly pa.s.sions."

Political debate channeled itself into political parties. Madison made peace with their inevitability, and he even helped Thomas Jefferson start one, but he never really trusted them, either. In retirement, he wrote to James Monroe that "there seems to be a propensity in free governments which will always find or make subjects on which human opinions and pa.s.sions may be thrown into conflict. The most perhaps that can be counted on is that ... party conflicts in such a country or government as ours will be either so light or so transient as not to threaten any permanent or dangerous consequences to the character or prosperity of the republic."

Here, of course, he calamitously misjudged his fellow Americans. Following the Gut as though it were not the moron it is, Americans do have a positive genius for choosing up sides. Madison wanted conflicts to be so ephemeral as to not endanger anything important. He did not reckon with the fact that, one day, the country would become so good at choosing up sides that it brought the same unthinking dynamic to questions of life and death, war and peace, and the future of the planet that it does to arguments about center fielders or alternative country bands.

We choose up sides in everything we do. In 2006, for example, writing in the conservative National Review National Review, a man named John J. Miller listed the "50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs." Now, to be fair, Miller was a little bit out of his comfort zone. He'd emerged from the halls of the Heritage Foundation, an inst.i.tution that never has been confused with the Fillmore West. Nevertheless, he soldiered bravely on, never noticing the absurdity that was piling up around his knees. For example, among the addled Tolkienisms with which Robert Plant larded Led Zeppelin's "The Battle of Evermore," the essential conservatism appears in a single lyric: "The tyrant's face is red."

Miller somehow failed to move on to a study of those noted communist propagandists the Cyrkle, whose 1966 hit contained the following summons to revolution: "The morning sun is s.h.i.+ning like a red rubber ball."

A bubblegum "Internationale," that one.

Miller dug deep. In what may have been an attempt to send Bono into seclusion, he cited U2's "Gloria" because it's about faith and has a verse in Latin. (Miller fails to pay similar homage to the "Rex tremendae majestatis" lyric in the a.s.sociation's "Requiem for the Ma.s.ses.") Two songs wholly or partly about the difficulty of scoring really good dope made Miller's list: "Der Kommissar," as a commentary on the repression in East Germany, where only Olympic swimmers ever got really good dope, and "You Can't Always Get What You Want," as a lesson that "there's no such thing as a perfect society." Not even Keith Richards has ever been stoned enough to interpret that song that way.

Miller lists some antigovernment punk songs without noting that the government in question was run by that longtime National Review National Review pinup Maggie Thatcher. The s.e.x Pistols as an anti-abortion band? The notion of the Clash as spokesfolk for adventurism in the Middle East might have been enough to bring Joe Strummer back from the dead. To his credit, Miller was sharp enough to immunize himself against any family-values tut-tutting from his side of the aisle by admitting that a number of the songs on his list were recorded by "outspoken liberals" or "notorious libertines." pinup Maggie Thatcher. The s.e.x Pistols as an anti-abortion band? The notion of the Clash as spokesfolk for adventurism in the Middle East might have been enough to bring Joe Strummer back from the dead. To his credit, Miller was sharp enough to immunize himself against any family-values tut-tutting from his side of the aisle by admitting that a number of the songs on his list were recorded by "outspoken liberals" or "notorious libertines."

Led Zeppelin? Notorious libertines? Who knew?

Thanks to that disclaimer, Miller could write, with a straight face, that the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is pro-abstinence and pro-marriage, although it was recorded at a moment when Brian Wilson was hoovering up the Chinese heroin. Possibly Miller saw Wilson as following a trail through moral consistency already blazed by Newt ("Got a cold, dear? I want a divorce") Gingrich, Rush ("Why wasn't I born an East German swimmer?") Limbaugh, and Bill ("Where the h.e.l.l's 'Tumblin' Dice'?") Bennett. In any event, he can listen to the Kinks while being completely deaf to Ray Davies's sense of irony, which is roughly akin to listening to the "1812 Overture" and failing to hear the cannons.

This is disorder. There are so many things in the wrong place here-entertainment standing in for ident.i.ty, ident.i.ty standing in for politics-that any actual appreciation of the art is impossible to find. It's on the wrong shelf. Or it's slipped down off the windowsill and behind the radiator where n.o.body will find it. Mr. Madison was right to be worried. Americans do nothing better than we choose up sides and, once we do that, we find it d.a.m.n easy to determine that someone-the Masons! the refs! liberals! dead white males!-is conspiring against us. And sometimes, they are. Or so the Gut whispers. The Gut is, if nothing else, a team player.

THE New Media Conference begins with an old joke. New Media Conference begins with an old joke.

"I go back to the days when the Dead Sea was just sick," says Joe Franklin, a man who has been broadcasting from New York since shortly after Peter Minuit blew town. His audience takes just a moment to laugh, possibly because the joke does not translate well from the original Sumerian.

The conference is being held in a hotel in lower Manhattan, about three blocks from Ground Zero and two blocks from the Hudson River. "New Media" is a little misleading, since by now it's a general term for everything that isn't CBS or the New York Times. New York Times. The new media include blogs and webcasts and podcasts. The New Media Conference, however, is a talk show convention. The new media include blogs and webcasts and podcasts. The New Media Conference, however, is a talk show convention.

There is a great h.o.m.ogeneity to the gathering. Golf s.h.i.+rts and khakis are the uniform of the day. The conventioneers do morning drive in Omaha and evening drive in Nashville. As a matter of fact, the conference isn't even a "talk show" convention per se. One of talk radio's most successful and profitable genres, sports talk, isn't represented at all. There are very few people here who dispense home improvement advice on Sat.u.r.day morning, or run the Sunday afternoon gardening show. Rather, this is a convention for people who do "issue-oriented" talk radio. It is sponsored by Talkers Talkers magazine, the bible of the industry, and its majordomo is Michael Harrison, an Ichabod Crane-ish character who bustles about the lobby, snapping photos of talk radio stars like Laura Ingraham and G. Gordon Liddy, and saying "Wow!" a lot. magazine, the bible of the industry, and its majordomo is Michael Harrison, an Ichabod Crane-ish character who bustles about the lobby, snapping photos of talk radio stars like Laura Ingraham and G. Gordon Liddy, and saying "Wow!" a lot.

Liddy's very presence says a great deal not only about the conference but about the industry it's celebrating. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Gordon Liddy is an authentically dangerous man. Back in the 1970s, he was the Nixon campaign operative who proposed firebombing the Brookings Inst.i.tution, murdering the news columnist Jack Anderson, and hiring yachts as floating brothels for the purposes of blackmailing delegates to the Democratic National Convention. And he did all this from inside the executive branch of the government. Even Nixon's felonious attorney general, John Mitch.e.l.l, thought Liddy was a lunatic, and Mitch.e.l.l was no field of b.u.t.tercups himself.

Liddy crashed and burned when burglars he'd organized got caught in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, touching off Nixon's prolonged Gotterdammerung. Liddy went to prison, having named no names, but not before he offered to present himself on any street corner in case anyone from the White House wanted to silence him. Alas for that plan, the only person working for Nixon crazy enough to shoot Gordon Liddy in public was Gordon Liddy.

So off to the federal sneezer he went for a while, and then he came out again and gradually, improbably, made a celebrity out of himself. He toured college campuses with the LSD guru Timothy Leary, whom he had busted years ago as a local prosecutor in upstate New York. This is not so bad. Everybody has to earn a living. It was clear, though, that no country serious about its national dialogue on any subject would allow Gordon Liddy near a microphone, for the same reason that we would keep Charlie Manson away from the cutlery. There was a time in this country when Gordon Liddy could have moved along to a notable, if unprofitable, career as a public crank.

However, in "issues-oriented" talk radio, threatening to poison a journalist is a s.h.i.+ning gold star on the resume. Westwood One, a huge radio syndicator, gave Liddy a national platform, and Liddy did with it pretty much what you might expect. On one memorable occasion, he gave his radio audience pointers on how to kill a federal agent. ("Head shots," he advised.) The comment caused no little outrage, particularly among federal agents with heads. President Bill Clinton mooed earnestly about the corruption of our national dialogue. This sent the talk radio universe into such collective hysterics that the New Media Conference in 1995 gave Gordon Liddy its coveted "Freedom of Speech" award for boldly speaking truth to power. Which is why Gordon Liddy is here today, and why Michael Harrison is taking his picture and saying "Wow!" a lot. Harrison will help the conference hand out this year's "Freedom of Speech" award, a subject on which he waxes particularly messianic.

"There's always a big battle around this award," he says in his opening speech to the conference, "and a lot of it goes back to when G. Gordon Liddy got it. That was a defining experience for so many people with this award. The press likes to take things out of context and blow them up for their own political agenda."

Harrison is glowing with pride now over how his organization handed its most important award to a guy who, inside the government and out, has counseled murder. "People who don't understand this don't understand the First Amendment. Even people who claim to defend the First Amendment don't understand it," Harrison continues. "This is an ongoing battle because if we don't understand the First Amendment, we don't understand America. The process of America is very different than the flag or the president or the government. Presidents or governments are very dangerous whether they are American or Soviet or whatever. Names don't mean anything. Processes mean things. The spirit in which something is done means something."

Everybody in the room sits up a little straighter. Heads nod. Chests puff out a bit. It's hard to know how many of those present actually buy the bafflegab that Harrison is slinging them-that Gordon Liddy was what Mr. Madison had in mind, and that they are information warriors of free expression, keeping the Enlightenment values of the founders alive between jokes about Hillary Clinton's hindquarters and the 5:15 traffic report. Some of them may in fact believe that Harrison is correct in his lemonade libertarianism about the great beast Government, that there is no true difference between the authoritarian ambitions of, say, Bill Clinton and those of Leonid Brezhnev. It's impossible to gauge the effect of all that blather at the end about America being a "process" and about "the spirit of things," probably because it sounds like de Tocqueville filtered through Tony Robbins.

One hungers at this point for someone-anyone!-to come out and make the simple point that talk radio exists because it makes money. "The trick is to be what your bosses also call revenue," confides a consultant named Holland Cooke. This comes like a cool breeze, cutting through the stagnant self-congratulation of Harrison's quasi-profound rambling. "If you are good at this, you could be bulletproof."

Talk radio is a very big fish in a very small barrel. It has a longer history than is usually believed. It probably dates back in its essential form to the likes of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest from Michigan, whose career cratered when he abandoned his support for the New Deal in favor of nativism and (ultimately) anti-Semitism. As it has evolved, talk radio is a conversation between Coughlins.

Many markets took up talk radio in the 1950s and 1960s, when it coexisted with AM Top 40 radio. As the music moved over to the FM dial, talk filled the void on AM. But the format did not truly explode until 1987, when, in the deregulatory fever of the Reagan years, the Federal Communications Commission revoked the Fairness Doctrine. This rule, adopted in 1949, had required licensed broadcasters to air all sides of the debate on controversial issues.

Some very farsighted young conservative leaders saw the demise of the Fairness Doctrine as a way to develop a counterweight to what they perceived as the overwhelming liberal bias of the rest of the ma.s.s media. Even some liberal groups joined in, attacking the regulation on First Amendment grounds. (Ironically, some older conservatives argued for the retention of the Fairness Doctrine, which they had used for years in order to be heard.) After a favorable ruling in a federal court, and after Reagan vetoed a revival, the Fairness Doctrine was dead. Talk radio exploded on the right. As more and more stations became the property of fewer and fewer companies-the repeal was only a small part of the general deregulation of the public airwaves-the medium's ideology hardened like a diamond. These days, the conservatives' dominance of AM radio is overwhelming.

According to a 2007 joint study by the Free Press and the Center for American Progress, on the 257 stations owned by the five largest owners of commercial stations, 91 percent of weekday talk programming is conservative. On an average weekday, the study found, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk is broadcast, but just 254 hours of what the study called "progressive" talk. Ordinary demographics wither in the face of this juggernaut. A 2002 study focusing on Eugene, Oregon, the crunchy-liberal home of the University of Oregon, found that the local stations pumped out 4,000 hours of conservative talk per year, none none on the other side. This is nothing short of a triumph in how we choose up sides in our national life. on the other side. This is nothing short of a triumph in how we choose up sides in our national life.

(Today, the Fairness Doctrine is what conservative talk radio hosts use to scare their children at bedtime. The conference was alive with terror that the newly elected Democratic Congress might bring the beast back to life. Almost every speaker warned ominously of that possibility, even though Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, already had rejected it out of hand.) Since right-wing populism has at its heart an "anti-elitist" distrust of expertise, talk radio offers the purest example of the Three Great Premises at work. A host is not judged a success by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the ratings needle. (First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.) If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert (Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough) and, if the host seems to argue pa.s.sionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true simply because of how many people are listening to him say it (Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it). Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

Talk radio was the driving force in changing American debate into American argument. It moved discussion southward from the brain to the Gut. Debate no longer consists of thesis and ant.i.thesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other in between commercials for male-enhancement products.

Talk radio provides a template for the clamorous rise of pundit television and for the even swifter interactivity on the Internet. And, because the field of play has moved from the brain to the Gut, talk radio has helped shove the way we talk to each other about even the most important topics almost entirely into the field of entertainment. In doing so, it has created a demand for inexpertise-or, more accurately, anexpertise-whereby the host is deemed more of an authority the less he is demonstrably polluted by actual knowledge.

After an extensive study of talk radio, and of the television argument shows that talk radio helped sp.a.w.n, Professor Andrew Cline of Was.h.i.+ngton University in St. Louis came up with a set of rules for modern American pundits: 1. Never be dull.

2. Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.

3. The American public is stupid; treat them that way.

4. Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.

"Television is an emotional medium," Cline explains. "It doesn't do reason well. This is entertainment, not a.n.a.lysis or reasoned discourse. Never employ a tightly reasoned argument where a flaming sound bite will do. The argument of the academic is sort of dull, but a good p.i.s.sing match is fun to watch. To admit anything more complicated is to invite the suggestion that you may be wrong, and that can never be. Nuance is almost a pejorative term-as if nuance means we're trying to obfuscate."

There is some merit in being skeptical of experts. It is one of the most American of impulses. It drove almost all of the great cranks in our history. However, there is something amiss in the notion that someone is an expert because of his success in another field as far from the subject under discussion as botany is from auto mechanics. If everyone is an expert, then n.o.body is. For example, Rush Limbaugh's expertise as regards, say, embryonic stem cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book, but his views on the subject are better known than those of someone doing the actual research, who, alas, likely is not as gifted a broadcaster as he is. Consequently, Limbaugh's opinion is as well respected. Often, the television news networks-CNN is particularly fond of this-will bring on an a.s.sortment of talk show hosts to discuss issues even though, on the merits of the issues, most of them are fathoms out of their depth. But they all are good enough at what they do to stay on the air, so enough people must agree with them to make what they say true.

"Human beings," says Cline, "are storytelling creatures. We structure reality in terms of narratives. In other words, we start at Point A and get to Point B, and everything in between is called hope. If you're a human, you're a storyteller, a story believer, and that's just the way it is."

By adopting the ethos of talk radio, television has allowed Idiot America to run riot within all forms of public discourse. It's not that there is less information on television than there once was. (Whether there is less actual news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that "fact" is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it. A 2006 Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal story quoted a producer for story quoted a producer for Hardball Hardball, the exercise in empty bombast hosted by Chris Matthews that precedes Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC, who said that she heard from more than a hundred people a day who aspired to be television pundits. "We call them street meat," she said.

"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,' and that's what they get-two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'd.a.m.n right. It's those liberals' fault," says...o...b..rmann. "Or, it's those-what's the word for it?-college graduates' fault. Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success." fault. Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success."

However, following the pattern laid down by talk radio, Fox has managed to break off a larger segment of a smidgen of a piece of the audience than MSNBC has.

The conference itself is something of a giveaway. Twenty-two percent of those responding to a 2003 Gallup poll considered talk radio their primary source of news, and here was the cream of the industry, all together, three blocks away from Ground Zero. The country was at war. The climate was in disarray. The economy was tanking. What promised to be a sprawling presidential election was just gearing up. Over the course of the weekend, there are dozens of small workshop sessions, all of them about running a better talk show, about building your brand, about the latest breakthroughs in technology. "Programming a News Talk Station in Interesting Times" dealt with the damage to the brand done when cranky old Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's" and was forced to absent himself (briefly) from the airwaves.

"We have a liner card in the studio that says, 'As edgy as you can get with the kids in the car,'" explains Heather Cohen, the director of programming for GreenStone Media. Jack Swanson, of KGO in San Francisco, said he'd have fired Imus and then resigned, too, "for allowing it to happen." David Bernstein, the programming chief of the progressive Air America network, disagreed with his fellow panelists.

"The dude got f.u.c.ked," Bernstein explains.

This is a trade show, nothing more. You can learn a great deal about how to talk on the radio, but very little about anything you might be talking about. Wandering the halls over the course of the weekend, Todd Bowers, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, is reduced to b.u.t.tonholing whomever he could find just to talk about the wars, and the issues confronting his fellow soldiers, topics that most a.s.suredly will come up on the call screener back at the station.

"Most of them thanked me for my service," he says.

"Talk radio is the biggest con to be perpetrated ever," explains a host named Lionel-ne Michael Lebron-who works for the perpetually struggling Air America network. "We create the veneer that we know what we're talking about, a veneer of expertise. We pontificate on TV. This TV guy called me and asked, 'What do your listeners think?' I don't know. We talk to people who have nothing better to do than listen to us." This cri de coeur was not well received by those in attendance, many of whom, one suspects, saw in their mind's eye a naked emperor walking off toward Battery Park.

It becomes obvious that there are no workshops on the issues because there really isn't a need for them. Most of the people present know exactly what they believe, because what they believe is fundamentally defined by their niche. They have chosen up sides, and what is most important is that what you say is what your side believes. A good talk radio host is playing a role; he knows what the team expects of him-he "skates his wing," as hockey coaches say. That said wing is usually the right one is a function of the fact that modern conservatism recognized early on the importance of vicarious politics in America-understood that everything is entertainment now, and what matters is not how much you know, but how well you can entertain your portion of the audience. This depends on how convincingly you can portray the character you play on the radio.

Rush Limbaugh brilliantly created the template. He constructed an entire universe with himself at its center, and he sold members.h.i.+ps to it, every day for four hours, on the radio. With his listeners self-identified as "dittoheads," Limbaugh created a place with its own politics (where Hillary Clinton may have had Vince Foster snuffed), its own science (where tobacco has no connection to lung cancer), and its own physical reality (Rush is a roue who makes Errol Flynn look like a Benedictine monk). He created a s.p.a.ce for vicarious reality at its highest level, and lesser hosts have been scrambling to keep up ever since. And he sold it like the radio pitchman he once was.

(In fact, the track record indicates that when the world he's created comes into contact with reality, Rush fares rather less well. His TV show was a debacle. A guest shot hosting Pat Sajak's late-night show ended with him nearly booed into the Pacific and sweating like a wh.o.r.e at high ma.s.s. And he had a brief stint as an NFL a.n.a.lyst on ESPN that foundered when he divined a liberal conspiracy to promote the career of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. You see, McNabb was black and all the baby John Reeds in press boxes throughout the NFL were pus.h.i.+ng him out of some devotion to affirmative action. This wasn't any more loopy than most of what Limbaugh said about the Clintons, but football a.n.a.lysts are a harder sell than most political editors, and Limbaugh was laughed off the air. He has since largely eschewed events not of his own devising.) When Limbaugh got caught sending his maid out to score his dope, one of the most pathetic drug busts since Joe Friday was running down the hopheads on the old Dragnet Dragnet TV show, his hold on his audience remained unbroken. This was largely because listeners didn't choose to a.s.sociate Rush Limbaugh, the character on the radio, with Rush Limbaugh, the actual person who gobbled OxyContin like M&M's, even though the radio character regularly inveighed against people just like himself. The great thing about living vicariously is that you only take on yourself the admirable aspects of the person through whom you are living vicariously. Their flaws don't exist in you; therefore, their flaws don't exist at all. Thus can Limbaugh pop pills, Bill Bennett gamble with both fists and a steam shovel, Newt Gingrich chase tail all over Capitol Hill, and Bill O'Reilly engage in creepy phone-stalking that would have embarra.s.sed Caligula, while all four make a comfortable living talking to America about the crisis in the nation's values. More than anything else, the "culture war" is a masterpiece of niche marketing. Buy Us, not Them. TV show, his hold on his audience remained unbroken. This was largely because listeners didn't choose to a.s.sociate Rush Limbaugh, the character on the radio, with Rush Limbaugh, the actual person who gobbled OxyContin like M&M's, even though the radio character regularly inveighed against people just like himself. The great thing about living vicariously is that you only take on yourself the admirable aspects of the person through whom you are living vicariously. Their flaws don't exist in you; therefore, their flaws don't exist at all. Thus can Limbaugh pop pills, Bill Bennett gamble with both fists and a steam shovel, Newt Gingrich chase tail all over Capitol Hill, and Bill O'Reilly engage in creepy phone-stalking that would have embarra.s.sed Caligula, while all four make a comfortable living talking to America about the crisis in the nation's values. More than anything else, the "culture war" is a masterpiece of niche marketing. Buy Us, not Them.

In 2003, the psychologist Paul Ginnetty examined this dynamic in Newsday Newsday, focusing on Limbaugh's show but a.n.a.lyzing the appeal of the entire genre, what he called "the potent narcotic of rea.s.suring simplicity."

"Many of [the callers] probably also derive a sense of inclusion and pseudo-intimacy via this electronic fraternity of kindred spirits," Ginnetty wrote. "They get a chance to feel smart when the master seems to agree with them, failing to see that it is actually they who are agreeing with him."

(It's possible that Limbaugh will finally be done in by getting old. In the vicarious life, n.o.body's getting old, and a talk show host who reminds his audience that they're doing just that, usually because he's aged out of the valuable twenty-five-to-fifty-four demographic, as Limbaugh has, is not long for the airwaves. This would certainly account for Limbaugh's serial marriages, his detention for illicit possession of v.i.a.g.r.a in the Dominican Republic, and his endless bloviating about his studliness and his golf game-as though those two pastimes weren't self-evidently oxymoronic. The end is near.) The issues do come up, mostly in the plenary sessions held in a vast movie theater within the hotel complex. The Great Talk Show Rumble is a desultory affair. There are eight panelists, four on either ideological side. (That the organizers managed to find four liberals in the place would be the biggest upset in New York that weekend outside of Rags to Riches' winning the Belmont.) Onstage, smiling like a guy you'd change cars on the subway to avoid, is Gordon Liddy, so the panel actually comprises seven panelists and one felon. A good-hearted soul named Jack Rice is alleged to be the moderator, but he rather loses control early on when a guy named Jerry Doyle says of Hillary Clinton, "She's just so full of s.h.i.+t." And we're off.

Things get little better. As the discussion turns to the war in Iraq, one of the liberals on the panel, a lovable goofball named Stephanie Miller-the daughter of Barry Goldwater's 1964 running mate, William Miller-achieves a certain level of bipartisan amity when she announces that, in not forcing a quick end to the conflict, "The Democrats are p.u.s.s.ies."

"I agree," chimes in Lars Larson from the right end of the table. "Democrats are p.u.s.s.ies."

Nothing moves. Nothing progresses. It's all Kabuki bulls.h.i.+t, and the audience begins to stir with a certain level of boredom broken only when Liddy interrupts a discussion about tossing illegal immigrants into the clink in California by saying, "I am the only person here who's actually done time in the LA County jail." He had them there.

Sean Hannity also talks about the issues, in his keynote address. Hannity occasionally seems to make an earnest attempt at avuncularity. He looks like the bouncer at an Irish bar in Southampton, the big lug in the golf s.h.i.+rt who throws you out for singing "The Rising of the Moon" atop the bar but, as he does so, presses a couple of drink tickets into your hand with a wink and tells you to come back next week.

His academic background is sketchy. He had a brief, unsuccessful encounter with higher education at New York University. Claiming to have become politically energized by the proudly accessorial behavior of Oliver North during the Iran-Contra investigations, Hannity ground his way to the top. His one setback came when a California station canned him for a blatantly h.o.m.ophobic segment on his show. Seeking more fertile pastures for such things, he moved south, finally ending up in Atlanta, where he honed his craft and hitched his wagon to the rising star of Newt Gingrich. In 1996, the fledgling Fox operation brought him to New York, where they put Hannity on a prime-time show with putative liberal Alan Colmes.

Once in New York, Hannity was also hired by WABC to replace Bob Grant, whose bigotry had gotten so far out of control that even talk radio couldn't contain it. Hannity's show was an instant success. Fueled in part by his nightly television visibility, it quickly went into national syndication and now is said to reach thirteen million listeners a day. He has risen to prominence by the seemingly limitless means of being sure of everything about which you actually know very little. You pitch it to the Gut, is what you do.

Hannity's show is a superlative example of how much better conservatives have become at taking advantage of how Americans choose up sides, and how gifted they are at the new forms of vicarious politics that were created when the media's balance s.h.i.+fted from information to entertainment. Callers regularly tell Sean that he is a "great American." He replies that they are, too. Having established these simple proletarian bona fides, the $4-million-a-year host works the niche with exactly what his audience expects to hear.

Hannity has been wrong about almost everything, from the vicious police a.s.sault on Abner Louima in New York City (Hannity attributed Louima's injuries to a "gay s.e.x act") to the conflict in Kosovo (President Bill Clinton didn't have "the moral authority or ability to fight this war correctly"), to the war in Iraq (Hannity was one of the last people to cling to the notion that, rather than use them, you know, to defend himself against an imminent invasion, Saddam Hussein s.h.i.+pped his weapons of ma.s.s destruction to Syria). In any other job in the communications industry, such (and let us be kind) bungling would end a career. In his chosen field, it has made Hannity a multimedia force.

He's in a terrific mood this morning, discussing the rise of talk radio, whose success he links to the rise of the conservative movement. Two of the first milestones he cites are the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the Gingrich-led sweep of the congressional elections in 1994. He's not wrong, especially not about the latter. He gracefully acknowledges the deregulatory regime that made Limbaugh and him possible.

"We are living through a moment today that we have not seen since the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the emergence of Rush Limbaugh," he says. "The second wave is going to be as growth oriented as the first wave was."

Hannity sees the talk format moving gradually into FM radio, dominating that dial as thoroughly as it took over AM. "Just as music on AM was in trouble in the late 1980s," he says, "music on FM is in trouble today. What kid today doesn't have an iPod? Every car sold in 2009 is going to have a connection for an iPod. Why would anyone who loves music listen to a station programmed by a strange PD [program director] when they can listen to their own music?"

This would be an ironic twist. FM music radio rose in opposition to the Top 40, when the alb.u.m replaced the single as the primary musical format. Top 40 died, and talk radio took its place. Now, with the iPod and the MP3 changing everything, it may very well be that FM music will die out and be replaced by talk radio, cheaply produced cheese with a guaranteed market. FM used to be the place where people fled to avoid Bobby Goldsboro. Then it became the place where people fled to avoid Sean Hannity. Soon, there may be no escape at all.

The speech gets a little iffier when Hannity starts talking about how important talk radio was in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. "We are one major event away," he says, "from being the most relevant format again."

This is where talk radio abandons its honorable history as a platform for cranks and pa.s.ses over the border into Idiot America. If it defined itself as entertainment-along the lines of professional wrestling, say-it would be a perfectly respectable enterprise. Indeed, whenever a talk radio host is criticized for remarks that seem beyond the pale of civil discourse, the almost reflexive reply is that talk radio is entertainment and that its critics should lighten up. (Limbaugh is particularly fond of proferring this excuse for himself.) But the whole conference is based on the notion that talk radio is something more-a vehicle of national unity, a town meeting of the air, and so on.

Talk radio pleads entertainment as an alibi for its most grotesque excesses while at the same time insisting on a serious place in the national discourse. It seeks camouflage against the not unreasonable notion that it's mainly a very noisy freak show. It justifies both claims by the simple fact that it moves the ratings needle. This confers upon a talk show advertising revenue, but it does not confer upon its host any real level of expertise. It does that through the Three Great Premises.

Hannity's remark about talk radio and the September 11 attacks was remarkably ahistorical. In the first place, after the initial shock of the attacks wore off, no medium was more instrumental than talk radio in the destruction of the unity forged by those attacks. And it did what it did because it is primarily entertainment. As soon as it sank back into its niche again, talk radio quickly leaped to blame those same people whom it would be blaming for all the other ills of the world anyway. One of the great canards thrown around after September 11 was the fact that we would become a more serious, united nation again. Settling right back into the old tropes, energized by the emotions that were running high at the time, talk radio and the opinion entertainment industry did more than anything else to demonstrate what a lie that was.

In November 2001, for example, former president Bill Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University in which, addressing the question of how long-standing historical debts can be, he made the unremarkable observation that the United States was still "paying a price" for slavery to this day. A reporter for the Was.h.i.+ngton Times Was.h.i.+ngton Times wrote a meretricious story claiming that Clinton had attributed the September 11 attacks to a debt the country owed, that he was somehow saying that the United States had brought the attacks on itself. Glad to have Clinton to chew on again, talk radio hosts made a dinner of the story for several days. TV pundits adopted the comfortable role of the Professionally Obtuse. To be fair, some of the people who ran with the story walked their own criticism back once they read the original article. However, Sean Hannity, to name only one person, liked it so much that he included it in one of his best-selling books, long after the episode had been roundly debunked. wrote a meretricious story claiming that Clinton had attributed the September 11 attacks to a debt the country owed, that he was somehow saying that the United States had brought the attacks on itself. Glad to have Clinton to chew on again, talk radio hosts made a dinner of the story for several days. TV pundits adopted the comfortable role of the Professionally Obtuse. To be fair, some of the people who ran with the story walked their own criticism back once they read the original article. However, Sean Hannity, to name only one person, liked it so much that he included it in one of his best-selling books, long after the episode had been roundly debunked.

Now, though, as Hannity speaks about the vital role that talk radio will play when the next attack comes, it's hard not to hear a distressing glee in the prospect. After all, this is someone who wrote a best seller called Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. Another attack would put these people on top again. Gordon Liddy, it turns out, is a piker. It's ma.s.s murder that's the true ratings bonanza. The best is yet to come. Another attack would put these people on top again. Gordon Liddy, it turns out, is a piker. It's ma.s.s murder that's the true ratings bonanza. The best is yet to come.

AM radio wasn't always like this. Once, in a sunburnt brick building in Nashville, Tennessee, radio was a truly revolutionary thing, carving out its own niche without the help of gargantuan syndicators, media megaliths, and marketing strategies meant to divide before conquering. It forced the country to look at itself in different ways. It didn't rely on what people already felt. It didn't encourage them. It challenged them. Listen to this, it said, and see if you feel the same way about things. It changed people's hearts before it changed their minds. Here was where the true revolutionaries were, some of them. Here was where they changed the country.

HEY, John R. Whatcha gonna do?C'mon, John R., play me some rhythm and blues.-Radio introduction, WLAC Radio, Nashville, Tennessee In 1951, radio station WLAC in Nashville was celebrating its silver anniversary, so it put out a souvenir program recounting the highlights of its twenty-five years on the air. There was an unmistakable midcentury Babbitry about some of them. Bettie Warner of Chattanooga, a soph.o.m.ore, had won the "Voice of Democracy" contest for high school students. James G. Stahlman, the publisher of the Nashville Banner Nashville Banner, had a regular spot, "Stahlman Speaks Out for Freedom," in which he harrumphed that "every day, right here in America, these freedoms are in constant jeopardy.... Once they're gone, only your life or that of your children, or theirs, will be the price of their return."

A young congressman named Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee's Fourth Congressional District, took to the airwaves to deliver a talk ent.i.tled "The Iron Curtain vs. Freedom," and Richard D. Hurley, the chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, came to town to appeal for moral leaders.h.i.+p. "Who," asked Hurley, "is going to bail America out if we follow Britain down the economic skid row of socialism?" It was not all grim business at WLAC, though. The listeners also were treated to entertainment by Audrey Holmes ("The Lady of the House") and Charlie Roberts ("Let's Go Fis.h.i.+ng") as well as the gardening advice of Tom Williams, the Old Dirt Dobber, whose "The Garden Gate" came courtesy of the Ferry-Morris Seed Company. Things were different, though, when the sun went down.

WLAC had started out in 1926 as just another radio station, operating at 1510 on the AM dial, and broadcasting from fairly opulent studios in the building owned by the Life and Casualty Company, from which the station took its call letters. Its most formidable compet.i.tion in town was WSM, the radio home of the Grand Ole Opry, which brought the likes of Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow to homes throughout the South. WLAC played some country, too, even hosting live musical acts in its studio. The problem was that the station sold so little advertising that everyone there, including the musical acts, often found themselves moonlighting at other jobs around the station. F. C. Sowell was hired in 1930 to sell advertising and as an on-air announcer. In an interview recorded as part of Columbia University's "Radio Pioneers" oral history project, Sowell explained that the station "was owned by the insurance company and they didn't push it very much."

WLAC puttered along until 1945, when the station hired a man named Gene n.o.bles to work as an announcer.

n.o.bles was a disaster. "He didn't develop according to our wishes," recalled F. C. Sowell. "He wasn't good at handling straight copy. We'd had a great deal of trouble with our late recorded show, a disc jockey show. None of our announcers that we had tried seemed to take an interest in it, so he came in and requested permission to try out.

"We let him try it and we found out within a couple of weeks that we had something that was a rather unusual approach to kidding the public along.... The mail started pouring in."

Gene n.o.bles had found his calling. He specialized in snappy DJ patter. (The girls in his audience were "fillies.") Soon, he'd partnered up with Randy Wood of Randy's Record Shop, a mail-order house in Gallatin, Tennessee. Randy would sponsor the show. n.o.bles would plug the records. They broke the mold with what they began pitching: records of what was then called "race music," the work of black R&B artists. Race music had heretofore been largely restricted to black audiences throughout the South. Now, WLAC was putting fifty thousand watts behind records by artists like Amos Milburn and T-Bone Walker. (Walker's "Stormy Monday" was one of Wood's biggest-selling singles.) It seems safe to say that not many of the people who tuned in to hear the Old Dirt Dobber also tuned in to hear the anarchy that was breaking out on WLAC after dark. The station programmed a solid block of the music all night long. n.o.bles, and later Herman Grizzard and Hoss Allen, became stars. In 1942, a former New York radio soap-opera star named John Richbourg took over the one A.M. A.M.-to-three A.M. A.M. s.h.i.+ft. s.h.i.+ft.

Richbourg was born in the small town of Davis Station, in South Carolina. He worked in radio in New York and auditioned for a job at WLAC during a vacation back home. After a brief stint in the Navy, he came back to the station and stayed for thirty-one years. "John R.," he called himself; his deep voice and command of the slang led a great portion of his listeners to believe that John R. was black, and not the very straight-looking gent who would go home after work to narrate the Christmas pageant at the Harper Heights Baptist Church. Black artists who came to the station to be interviewed, Richbourg remembered, "well, their mouths would fall open."

He committed himself from the start not only to playing black music, but also to creating a national audience for himself and the music. "I suppose it had something to do with the war coming on," he told an interviewer in 1974. "Otherwise, there may have been more resistance. I did get a few phone calls from your dyed-in-the-wool so-called rednecks who would call up and say, 'Who do you think you are?' I just said, 'Well, that's fine, so why don't you just listen to another radio station, then?'

"See, we had already decided that our night programming at the station would not be for Nashville. We were interested in directing our night programming to the rural areas, the areas that were not being serviced at all. Many areas, in every state, particularly [where] black people [lived], had no service at all."

In many ways, WLAC was still an underdog station. The atmosphere in the studio was wild and uninhibited. People reading radio copy would find that someone had set the paper on fire. The station once broadcast a phony report announcing the end of World War II. The DJs played poker and drank whiskey during their s.h.i.+fts; n.o.bles legendarily pa.s.sed out once, producing a moment of dead air before he regained consciousness and flawlessly cued up another record. The station's commercials sold Royal Crown Hair Dressing and White Rose Petroleum Jelly. They even sold baby chicks. And they sold the music. Randy's mail-order business went from $20,000 to $300,000 over three years.

There was no sales plan. No marketing scheme. n.o.body knew this music, except the black audiences, and they were isolated by law, by culture, and by three hundred years of ugly history. John R. scoured the record shops for sides by Little Richard and Ruth Brown and Big Mama Thornton. Every night after midnight, his show sponsored by Ernie's Record Shop, John R. threw this music out over WLAC's huge signal. It was said that you could drive from New York to Los Angeles and never miss his show. The clear air was his syndication.

He got letters from thirty states and from Iceland and Greenland and Australia. In Canada, Robbie Robertson heard the show long before he became the guitarist for the Band. Young Johnny Winter listened in Texas, and Bob Seger tuned in from Detroit. A songwriter named Bob McDill recalled listening to the show and wrote "Good Old Boys Like Me," a country hit for the singer Don Williams that placed it in a long list of essential experiences for a southern boy of that time: John R. and the Wolfman kept me company.By the light of the radio by my bed,with Thomas Wolfe whispering in my head.

John R. also promoted and produced new artists. It was he who got a hot young guitar player named James Stephens to call himself Guitar Slim. In 1967, Jim Stewart, cofounder of Stax Records in Memphis, signed over his share of the publis.h.i.+ng rights to a single called "These Arms of Mine," by an unknown soul belter named Otis Redding. Richbourg "must have played that record for six months literally, every night, over and over, and finally broke it," Stewart later recalled. With the Grand Ole Opry two blocks away, he helped turn Nashville into a center for R&B.

"One city in particular that tends to be a.s.sociated with a single genre of music is Nashville, Tennessee," wrote David Sanjek, in a study of African-American entrepreneurs.h.i.+p after World War II. "... Nashville has been a thriving center for the playing of a wide range of African American musical forms over the public airwaves-princ.i.p.ally through the disc jockeys Gene n.o.bles and John Richbourg (John R.) of ... WLAC."

Gradually, John R. and WLAC were integrating the country, even if the country pretended not to notice. They recognized no rules, so they abided by none. They introduced the country to a soul it didn't know it had, one so vast and indomitable that it was able to overcome-in the three minutes it took to play a 45 record-even the artificial barriers of race and cla.s.s and region. John R. carved a niche big enough for everyone, and he helped develop the next generation of artists, who would break down the barriers entirely. WLAC was deeply and truly subversive, and you could buy baby chicks from its advertisers if you wanted.

It couldn't last, although John R. hung on for three decades. Top 40, ironically, did him in. WLAC went to a tightly programmed musical format, and John R. hated it. He did his last s.h.i.+ft on June 28, 1973. He kept his hand in, producing some records and teaching broadcasting. In 1985, his health went bad. Phil Walden of Capricorn Records put together an all-star tribute to him in Nashville. Walden was one of the thousands of southern kids who'd fallen asleep by the light of the radio. "I am a better person just for knowing you," Walden wrote to him in a letter not long before the show. Rufus and Carla Thomas played. So did B. B. King and James Brown. John R. died a year later, at seventy-five. Ella Was.h.i.+ngton sang "Amazing Grace" at his funeral.

WLAC moved out of the old insurance building. It's now in an office on a hill not far from the gleaming towers that have housed Music Row since the record companies moved up and out and the Opry moved out of the Ryman Auditorium. WLAC is now owned by Clear Channel, the ma.s.sive media conglomerate, and you can see from the signs by the door how radio has resegregated itself, not by race, but by niche. There's WUBT ("The Beat") and WNRQ ("The Rock"), and WRVW ("The River"). And there's WLAC, 1510 AM, now Nashville's "News-Talk Leader." Except for Steve Gill, who does a local show in the afternoon, WLAC relies on nationally syndicated talk shows for its basic programming.

The station is the state of the art. It is a quiet place. n.o.body bustles from room to room. Phones ring softly in small cubicles. There is a low buzz of quiet conversation, but there's no sense that anyone is really working here. Even the sales department is placid. You can no more imagine a whiskey-soaked poker game breaking out than you can imagine an elephant stampede in the hallway. The inside of the building is of a piece with the sign on the wall outside. It is a place made of niches, each one carefully cut and shaped to fit a specific audience, each making its quotas, the s.p.a.ce between them dull and impermeable.