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In this article with Milwaukee Magazine, Dan Shelley, the Program Director for two daytime radio talk show hosts lays out how it functions and clandestinely pipes in conservative memes into the general discourse. Of note are as follows:
* While they "use their own voice" they receive talking points from the White House and the RNC as well as from Republican candidates for office. They also coordinate what other talk show hosts, most notably Limbaugh, are talking about, and tailor it to their own subject of the day.
* Listeners to talk radio are always considered victims and the talk show hosts go out of their way to work on their feeling of victimhood.
There always has to be an enemy – "more often than not the Mainstream Media" who is considered to be "socially liberal."
* "Fair and Balanced" are proverbial dog whistles so that conservatives know that what they will be hearing will be slanted towards a conservative point of view.
* Calls that make the host look bad will not get past the program’s producer. Callers that disagree with the host will only get through if they reinforce the host’s point of view in the first place; the host will personally attack the caller should that caller be making valid points that are hitting home.
* Talk show listeners are actually quite educated and are not only "angry white males." This stereotype actually plays into the hands of the talk show hosts.
* While right wing talk show hosts actually rely on facts (rather than outright fabrication, which surprised me), they make the facts fit their point. In other words, they are lies by omission, but not outright lies.
* And finally, Right wing talk radio is entertainment first and foremost.
Read the whole thing and comment what you think!
10 Comments
that’s a good read, reinforcing what most progressives already knows
he makes one big mistake though;
that’s completely untrue, the entertainment value is simply to get people comming back the only purpose is propaganda
they want corporate candidates elected, they want corporate agenda promoted
that is first and formost, to the point where it does not matter one stitch if the show makes money on broadcast, it makes money in the long run getting agenda passed, getting people to vote against themselves
I agree with you. The people who see it all as entertainment are usually the sales people who care about number of listeners and how that relates to ad revenue. I can’t imagine that program directors of stations are so naive to think that they are not presenting this “entertainment” as if it’s fact based opinion. They can spin it if they like (and they do) but at the end of the Limbaugh or Hannity show, Orson Welles doesn’t come on to say “Happy Halloween”.
I respectfully disagree – While totally unfunny in my view, Limbaugh will feature “comedy bits” and songs. Loathsome as she may be, Camile Paglia has a valid point that (in my view, sick way) Limbaugh is entertaining; especially so to those who don’t read or keep themselves informed. I posit to you that once you become informed, you just become disgusted with all the lies and lies by omission.
Limbaugh, for example, will discuss the NFL, his golf game and pop culture to keep things “light.”
Also:
“it does not matter one stitch if the show makes money on broadcast” is certainly not true. While it is intellectually lazy manner to make money, this kind of radio certainly does. Limbaugh doesn’t get mega contracts just because he’s a good propaganda spreader, he makes stations money. This is of course a question of chicken and egg or egg and chicken.
rush got a national contract while he was a total flop in new york
faux news lost gazillions of dollars and didn’t make a penny till bill o and hannity
making money per episode is fine but it doesn’t matter, they will still get subsised by the corporate world in the long run
Agree completely.
Pox Newz lost hundreds of millions in their first 5 years. I saw a report saying they didn’t really get profitable until Shrub invaded Iraq (Lewinsky, 9/11 helped right the ship before that), and of course capitalized on the jingoism within their carefully fabricated audience.
We won’t even get started on the book publishing side of the operations to control the message machine. We know that Wingnut Welfare “think tanks” buy books by those like Jonah Goldberg to inflate sales numbers. Is there some huge rabid following of Bill Kristol that’ll follow him wherever he leaves his screeds? I bet the NYT has lost a lot of readership by bringing Kristolnacht on, yet he’s still there every week.
Sure, if they make some money in the process, they love it, but even if these things do not make money, it’s a proven fact that they’ll still finance these operations. What examples are there of this happening on the Liberal side of the spectrum?
As far as the Moonie Times, Regnery, National Review and the Weekly Standard, your point is correct. Faux did indeed lose money for a long period of time, but now cable companies actually pay a premium to place Faux on their cable systems.
Let me back up a step and clarify what I am saying here. For a local station manager based solely on profit motive, it certainly does make a difference whether a station makes money or not. When Rush lost ratings in Baltimore, he was pushed to another station who was willing to subsidize him and his message. He is now on a station, WCBM, where the owner provides wingnut welfare.
If they weren’t good at what they did, right wing hosts wouldn’t get these massive national contracts. The main question, as I stated in my first comment above is a question of causation – Does Rush create revenue and therefore a contract or did wingnut welfare create Rush and his Rushbots and did they then get a contract generated out of it??? I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but I don’t think it is as simple as a corporation doling out $20 million a year solely because of the message he is propagating. It’s much more insidious than that.
What I would like to lift out of the article is the point that our stereotype of the “angry white man” listener to talk radio is absolutely wrong. This propaganda sneakily effects a lot more people than we are willing to give it credit for. When people ask why Obama tends to pick up these false Right Wing memes and amplify them for the sake of everyone getting along, it is because the Right is able to inject these false memes in to the discourse and effectively move the goalposts. If you don’t accept or understand this fact, you cannot understand why we get these constant cave ins to the right. It is because the Democratic establishment cannot and will not accept that the Right does not want to play on an equal playing field – they only care about winning and don’t care about how that victory is achieved.
The Wingnut Welfare programs have been going on for generations. William Randolph Hearst was famous for pushing ideology in his papers. The various radical right “think tanks” openly called for message control after the social upheaval of the 50s and 60s as a way to put the lid back on “We the people.”
So, I think Lush Limpbaugh, Pox Newz, etc simply get the reap the rewards of decades, if not centuries of Wingnut Welfare, which means not just the financial backing involved, but also generation upon generation that has been conditioned by all the carefully crafted messaging.
This is why it’s so important to keep pushing back against the false frames at every chance and fiercely. Thank goD for the Internets coming along when they did. DemocratIC “leaders” are shooting themselves in the foot by not pushing back harder, and trying to kick the ball through goalposts that Wingnuts keep moving around.
We need to take control instead of wringing our hands and saying, “Well, that’s just the way it is.” We need Liberal funders to float new Liberal media until enough audience can find it to make it financially secure on its own, just like Murdoch did with Pox. There’s way more “talent” on the Liberal side and always has been, we know there’s been an audience clamoring for this kind of content for years (Olbermann, Maddow, Donohue, etc).
For me, it’s just been about being more agressive and less passive when it comes to media. Thanks for thee interesting discussion. This is such a crucial issue, since if we had an actual “Press,” I don’t think people like Shrub would ever be elected, and the Paylins of the world would be laughed off the stage immediately. Instead, the Conglomerate Media provides cover for them, and the profit motive is secondary in my opinion. And yes, it does happen even on the local levels as well. I used to work for a station owned by Sinclair Broadcasting for a time and the propaganda pushing was even more overt. “Ratings” never seemed to matter.
I used to work for a station owned by Sinclair Broadcasting
My sympathies – those a-holes are right down the road from me in Hunt Valley.
The family that runs Sinclair are real pieces of work, but I’m sure you know that already….
Yes, they are. If I’m ever in the area I’ll give ya a call. We can go TP their house, or leave a pile of flaming dog poo on their step!
Anyway, huge fan of your work and people like you are how we’re gonna take the bastiches down. Rock on.
In my yearly migration from Wisconsin to Texas every winter, I have come to a startling conclusion: the media in the red states is dominated by right wing programs and messages. In Texas around the Waco area we once hit the scan botton for AM radio and got Rusch 4 out of 5 times (the 5th station was a right wing evangelist). The newspapers have a definite right wing extreme capitalistic slant. The TV stations avoid any stories critical of the Neoconservatives and their message. As to the domination of this area without exception by the radical right hollerers, I have been told that as to AM radio, statins get “placement fees” to put Rusch, Bill-o and the rest if these propagandists on. Can any one confirm or rebutt this? If so where are these placement monies coming from?