 The New Yorker's
editorial director Hendrik Hertzberg updates us this week on the
Drobnys' plan to start a network of liberal talk radio stations to
counter the thirteen hundred
'relentlessly' right-wing conservative talk radio stations that blanket
the American airwaves. He then goes on to brilliantly explain why the
plan is doomed:
The main obstacle, probably, is neither financial nor
ideological but temperamental. Remember the old joke about politics
being show business for ugly people? Well, right-wing radio is niche
entertainment for the spiritually unattractive. It succeeds because a
substantial segment of the right-wing rank and file enjoys listening,
hour after hour, as smug, angry, disdainful middle-aged men spew raw
contempt at reified enemies, named and unnamed. The radiocons seldom
offer analysis or argument. To the chronically resentful, they offer
thr sadistic consolation of an endless sneer -- at weaklings,
victim-group whiners, cultural snobs, Hollywood hypocrites whose hearts
bleed for the downtrodden though they themselves are rich and
privileged, feminists, environmentalists, and, of course, "liberals",
defined as the Clintons, other members of the "Democrat Party", and
persons suspected of thinking that the state ought to help correct for
various kinds of unfairness or calamities (economic, racial, climatic,
medical) or of attaching themselves to some identity other than or in
addition to "American" (black, gay, foreign, all humanity).
By contrast, most noncons -- most people, for that matter -- do not
regard politics as entertainment. They regard it as politics. They
wouldn't think it was fun to listen to expressions of raw contempt for
conservatives -- oh, maybe for a little while now and then, but not
long enough and often enough to sustain an industry.
And, you know, when we do occasionally
think it's fun to entertain expressions of raw contempt for
conservatives, we prefer to read them from articulate journalists in
quality periodicals like The New
Yorker, rather than listening to hate-mongering radio stations
that pander to the insatiably angry and semi-literate. Perhaps that's
because the written word can be re-read and its eloquence savoured,
while with few exceptions the throw-away ramblings of talk radio
neither lend themselves to a second listen, nor warrant even a first.
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