Muzzled (26 page)

Pat Buchanan, a former aide to President Nixon, positioned himself as a social conservative and a man of principle willing to lead the charge in what he called “the culture wars.” It was Buchanan who had coined the term “silent majority.”

Buchanan became a regular on political TV and radio shows and eventually landed his own. He was one of the original cohosts of the cable TV shouting match
Crossfire
, which created the spit-flying, barbed-put-down, Left-versus-Right template for political panels and programs that have come since. He ran a lucrative newsletter aimed at conservatives seeking hard-line right-wing views.

Like Jesse Jackson, Buchanan made a run for president. In 1992 he used his hard-right stands on social issues to attack President Bush as a political moderate who made “backroom” deals with Democrats and did not deserve a second term.

Ross Perot, like Jackson and Buchanan, also ran for president. In an amazing turn, the wealthy corporate executive ran as a populist, a man trained by his success in business to get things done. The hero and protagonist of a best-selling book and TV series,
On the Wings of Eagles
, about how he organized the rescue of employees being held hostage overseas, Perot presented himself in the news media as a serious leader. He
spoke as a no-nonsense pragmatist with a particular distaste for President Bush. In nonstop media interviews, including regular appearances on cable TV’s
Larry King Live
, he labeled President Bush a weak leader with no economic know-how and lacking in strong principles.

“This city [Washington] has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don’t ever accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city,” Perot said. One of his most telling campaign pledges fit the ever-escalating media culture of the time. He said that as president he would govern by participating in “electronic town halls,” where people could speak out and also register their preferences for policy and legislation.

But Perot’s erratic behavior, dropping out and then reentering the presidential race in a media frenzy, and his charge that government agents had tried to ruin his daughter’s wedding, as well as his choice of the unknown and out-of-his-depth Admiral James Stockdale as his vice-presidential running mate, undermined Perot’s candidacy. Nonetheless, he won 19 percent of the vote, a record for an independent candidate.

But most of all, Perot, Buchanan, and Jackson left an industry of extreme political pundits in their wake, politicians and talk-show hosts who gained a level of wealth and political power never known to earlier political commentators such as Will Rogers and H. L. Mencken. They prided themselves on being outside observers of the process.

The current crop of provocateurs, too—from Glenn Beck to Arianna Huffington—have become players in that process. They are rewarded for being the ones who shout the loudest
and make the most outrageous attacks, who garner the highest television ratings, the largest radio audiences, and the most Web site traffic. They net lucrative book contracts and receive rapturous standing ovations at political conferences. And they have discovered they can make or break like-minded political candidates with their commentary and endorsements. Voices of moderation and calm persuasion have a hard time being heard over the loud, grating voices of today’s political provocateurs. And the Internet and the communications platforms it has created—from Facebook to blogs—have supported the emergence of even more provocateurs: people paid for screaming out any controversial idea, any conspiracy theory. Most of these agitators act without fear of being held to account for distortions or outright lies. When challenged on the facts, they run behind the First Amendment and charge that their freedom of speech is being taken away. The acolytes in their audience could care less about spin and distortion—unless it is committed by their political foes. They just want to hear a rousing speech by a talk-show host who agrees with them.

This psychological phenomenon is one surprising result of technology’s ability to deliver more cable channels, more radio stations, infinite Web sites, and Twitter feeds. With the greater variety of platforms to get news and opinion, most readers, viewers, and listeners are drawn to platforms and personalities of their choice, in the same way hometown audiences become fans of a baseball team. They believe their team can do no wrong. They revel in the company of like-minded thinkers. They really don’t want to hear news that makes them question their political prejudices. They don’t want opinions that challenge the logic of their political thinking by giving a contradictory
point of view. They want consistency. They are glad to dismiss critics, the loathsome “mainstream” or “right-wing” media, and opposing political parties. They bond with others as outsiders and get a kick out of personalities who use mocking tones to debase the insiders or elite who disagree with them.

It is this new political culture that produced Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh, stand-up comic and disc jockey with brash political views, two funny guys who have risen to unbelievable prominence in the nation’s highest councils of serious political debate.

Limbaugh is the loudest of all the voices in the conservative media echo chamber. A college dropout and failed disc jockey, he created a one-man political show made possible by the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Radio stations no longer had to air opposing views, and Limbaugh is credited with being the first and certainly the best to take advantage of the new law. He beats one ideological drum for three hours a day—the drum of social conservatism. He has made himself into the voice of opposition to everything liberal, from abortion to war protests to concern over torture of captured terrorists and civil rights activists. He lambasted women’s rights activists as “femi-Nazis,” declaring, “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” He mocked AIDS activists by introducing any discussion of the disease with Dionne Warwick’s hit song “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” On Limbaugh’s show, members of the military who did not agree with President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq were “phony” soldiers. He showed no fear of making the kind of racial politics put-downs of black people that have sunk other talk-show hosts. Limbaugh once told a
black caller to “take the bone out of your nose and call me back.” His take on the majority of black Americans identifying with the Democratic Party? “They’re only 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?” One time he remarked that all composite pictures of criminals look like Jesse Jackson. A big football fan, he nonetheless disparaged the large number of professional players who are black by saying: “The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons.” This episode was cited as one of the reasons NFL power brokers blocked Limbaugh’s attempt to buy an ownership stake in the St. Louis Rams football team in 2009. After the plan fell through, liberal comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher joked that this had dashed Limbaugh’s lifelong dream of one day owning black people.

Limbaugh’s comedic talent, his mimicry, his use of music, and his buffoonlike boast that he is taking on the Left with “half my brain tied behind my back” led the
New York Times
to describe him as a “vaudevillian.” When Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican Party, described the radio talk-show host as merely “an entertainer” who stirred up his audience with “incendiary” and “ugly” comments, he found himself deluged with rebukes from the Rush “ditto heads” and threatened with a loss of financial support for the party. So despite Steele’s political standing within the party, he bowed his head, offered a personal apology to “El Rushbo,” and appeared chastened, even abject, when he beseeched the entertainer to go easy on him. As President Obama entered the White House at a time of war, terror threats, and economic crisis, Limbaugh baldly said, “I hope he fails.” He later tried to explain that he was talking only about the president’s liberal policies, but the unapologetic
comment, indifferent to the needs of the nation but crafted to grab attention, fit Limbaugh perfectly.

Limbaugh’s sharp tongue has made him the most successful radio broadcaster of all time. His eponymous radio show, which began in 1988, now has an estimated weekly audience of fifteen million listeners. According to a
Newsweek
report last year, he is by far the highest-earning political personality, earning $59 million annually. For reference, Glenn Beck came in second at $33 million. In third was Sean Hannity at $22 million. Limbaugh’s stature is all the more impressive when you consider that his show saved the AM radio frequency from irrelevance. Conservative talk-radio hosts ever since have copied the Limbaugh model.

The success of right-wing talk radio in shaping national political opinions and policy eventually prompted the question, Why don’t liberals have their own talk shows? The answer was that liberals did not feel alienated from what conservatives called the “mainstream media.” The older, white majority of conservatives had long complained that they were ignored or marginalized as religious extremists, sexual prudes, and bigots by the major newspapers and broadcast networks. And the liberal tilt in Hollywood produced popular liberal-leaning TV sitcoms going back as far as
All in the Family
, in which a conservative blue-collar worker was presented as uneducated, full of blustering resistance to treating women and blacks as equals. The movies promoted liberal themes, including racial integration, premarital sex, and disdain for the American military, from
M*A*S*H
to
Platoon
. On the radio dial, NPR got its start in the early seventies as a network of college stations. Its first big news story was the Watergate scandal and the congressional
hearings that followed, with President Nixon as the villain. NPR was immediately adopted by the campus protest crowd and liberal intellectuals.

Conservatives had complained for decades that liberals tended to win tenured faculty positions at the nation’s top universities. NPR became an extension of liberal campus counterculture. To conservatives, the arrival of right-wing talk radio on the AM dial created a singular outpost for their views in a liberal media landscape. But to liberals and Democrats the success of conservatives like Limbaugh and their power to push national politics to the right was maddening. Liberal counterprogramming finally hit the airwaves in 2004 with a new radio outfit called Air America Radio. And its star, the Left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh, was the comedian and satirist Al Franken.

Unlike Limbaugh, Franken was a top-notch student who graduated from Harvard with a degree in political science. And he had been a star on a hip, liberal-leaning TV show,
Saturday Night Live
, for fifteen years. In 1996 Franken wrote a
New York Times
best-selling book with the insulting, scathing title
Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations
. In 2004 Franken was selected to host Air America’s main show. He was seen as the man to take on Limbaugh as well as the successful Fox News Channel and its lead personality, Bill O’Reilly. Franken initially called his show
The O’Franken Factor
. But the show’s preoccupation with mocking conservative radio and cable personalities did not lead to ratings success. Franken left it within three years as the network struggled to pay its bills and then collapsed.

But Franken found another outlet in real-life politics. He
had written a second book, titled
Why Not Me?
, a satirical account of a fictional Franken campaign for president. And in one of those bizarre moments when life imitates absurdist art, Franken actually ran in 2008 for a real U.S. Senate seat in his home state of Minnesota and won in a very close race over a Republican incumbent. In the Senate, he made news when he rolled his eyes and made faces of disgust while Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell spoke in opposition to a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court. That prompted McConnell to rebuke him with the comment “This isn’t
Saturday Night Live
, Al.” (Franken later wrote a handwritten letter of apology to McConnell for using his comic training on the floor of the Senate when real issues were being debated.) But what was astounding was the elevation of Franken, a man best known for clowning and political satire, a man with no prior political experience, to a seat in the U.S. Senate. Franken may now be maturing in the job, but his background is as a heckler and provocateur.

There is a vast constellation of stars like Limbaugh and Franken now blanketing the media and politics. On the Left there is Michael Moore, the most successful documentary filmmaker of all time. He is a folk hero of the American Left who is praised on college campuses, on the liberal cable channels, and in the progressive netroots community. Arianna Huffington, the Republican pundit turned liberal firebrand, created an incredibly successful Web site, the Huffington Post, which provides liberals with news and opinion. The Huffington Post has been so successful that she was able to sell it to AOL for $315 million earlier this year. Lawrence O’Donnell, one of MSNBC’s most popular liberal commentators, now
hosts the network’s 8:00 p.m. show, which competes with Bill O’Reilly.

On the Right, Rush Limbaugh’s legacy has spawned a plethora of conservative talk-radio hosts who have followed in his path: Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Neal Boortz, and Mike Gallagher. Each one has achieved success by parlaying his or her radio show into television appearances and book deals. Perhaps the most fascinating example is Glenn Beck, who attracts the third-biggest audience in conservative talk radio, behind Limbaugh and Hannity. Like Limbaugh, Beck never graduated from college and had a checkered career as a disc jockey playing pranks and hit records. Beck began his political talk show in 2000 on a Tampa, Florida, AM station, mixing conservatism and conspiracy theories. In dark, whispered voices he claimed liberals were plotting to destroy America, while also confessing to his life as a recovering alcoholic and conveying occasional religious messages.