http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,906875,00.html
The US is on the right wavelength
Liberalism doesn't get a hearing on American radio or television
Matthew Engel in America
Tuesday March 4, 2003
The Guardian
You are white, male, and old enough to vote but probably too young to
have been forced into combat. You are most likely somewhere west of New
Jersey but east of California. You may well be driving a pick-up truck
while imagining it is one of those tank-like things known as Hummers. You
are not very well-educated and certainly not well-travelled. You don't
harbour doubts. You are the target audience for American talk radio.
De Gaulle wondered how you could govern France when it has 246 kinds of
cheese. You might more pertinently wonder how you govern a country like
the US that has 13,000 radio stations. The answer is that it's simple,
provided they all say the same thing. Of the 1,000 or so commercial
stations in the US that actually deal in words rather than music, the
overwhelming majority rely on a handful of syndicated hosts, all
rightwing, all skilful, all ferocious.
Some of the names are familiar, led by Rush Limbaugh, who defined the
genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s and soared to glory the moment
Bill Clinton became president and gave him an irresistible target. But
Limbaugh, who supposedly reaches 20 million listeners a week, now has
many rivals, like G Gordon Liddy (the ex-Watergate burglar-in-chief),
Bill O'Reilly (the star of Fox News on TV), Sean Hannity (the only man
who can say "I gotta tell you" five times in a single minute) and Michael
Savage, who defines liberalism as "Trojan-horse fascism without the
jackboots".
There is a sub-genre of family-oriented hosts, whose programmes are aimed
more at stay-at-home women. The leaders here are the Christian
conservative Dr James Dobson, and the bleak advice-giver, Laura
Schlessinger, a doctor unpleasant enough to empty a crowded NHS
waiting-room.
Despite all these rivals, Limbaugh has no opponents. Rich pinkos are
trying to put together a scheme to start a liberal talk-show, but it is
doomed because the essence of liberalism is that it does not deal in the
slashing handed-down certainties of the radio shows. More thoughtful
people listen instead to the quiet debate of the non-commercial and
small-beer PBS stations. Only last week, Phil Donohue, who had been
trying to run a much publicised "liberal" TV show in opposition to
O'Reilly, was finally euthanased by his bosses at MSNBC after being
crushed in the ratings.
Obviously there are consequences of this for the alleged debate over war
in Iraq. ("You disagree? Too bad. We're invading.") But in fact the
Limbaugh-demographic represents the one group in the US which is
unhesitatingly pro-war. And in any case the secret of media influence is
far more complex and insidious than is often believed.
It doesn't actually matter which side of the Iraq fence the New York
Times leader writers (who have spent months impaling themselves) land on.
No one will change their minds as a result. What makes a difference is a
slow drip-drip-drip, seeping into the body politic and ultimately
flooding it. Neil Kinnock's leadership of the Labour party was destroyed
because, over a nine-year period, Britain's top-selling paper, the Sun,
successfully portrayed him as an inadequate.
American talk radio's great achievement is more general than that. With
individuals, the hosts have not yet had a major success. In spite of
everything, they could not quite get rid of Bill and Hillary. They tried
to demonise the mild-mannered Tom Daschle, the Democrats' leader in the
Senate (the word "demonise" is used advisedly - Limbaugh calls him "El
Diablo"), but it was his opposite number, the Republican Trent Lott, who
fell. No, the Limbaugh gang's real triumph is altogether more
breathtaking, something that makes one want to rewrite the ancient
explanation of the Yiddish word chutzpah (traditionally defined as the
boy who murders his parents and begs for mercy because he's an orphan).
These guys have taken over the airwaves and persuaded America that the
media are dominated by lefties. If that were ever true, it is
emphatically untrue now. Radio obviously belongs to the right. So, by
default, does TV, because the agenda is set by the White House, and Bush,
Rumsfeld, Fleischer etc get massively more exposure to promote their
agenda than anyone gets to counter it - especially at a time when there
is no clear, credible and confident opposition leader. And the same
applies in the newspapers, where the rigid notions that govern mainstream
journalism demand "objectivity".
Effectively that means that the front pages are dominated by government
assertions, uncritically relayed. Hannity said on his Friday show that
three-quarters of Americans believe the left dominate the media. That was
a little lie: the poll he quoted showed that 45% believe that and 15%
don't, which is not the same thing. The idea itself is a much bigger lie
- I gotta tell you.
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