Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (15 page)

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 album 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 passes 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
Washington 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.

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.
Another attack would put these people on top again. Gordon Liddy, it turns out, is a piker. It’s mass 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.

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 sophomore, had won the “Voice of Democracy” contest for high school students. James G. Stahlman, the publisher of the
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 entitled “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 leadership. “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 Fishing”) 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 competition 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 Nobles to work as an announcer.

Nobles 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 Nobles 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. Nobles 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. Nobles, 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.
-to-three
A.M.
shift.

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 shifts; Nobles legendarily passed 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. Nobody 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: