Tom Wolfe and the Rise of Donald Trump: A Review of Wolfe’s Writings

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Wight Martindale Jr. writes in 2018:

* I believe that intellectually and, in some personal habits as well, Wolfe and Trump are similar. But they lived in separate worlds. Perhaps someday a doctoral student will show us that all along Wolfe was commenting on Trump.

For sure, they were both dedicated New Yorkers, loving the city’s energy and glamour. And both are great self-promoters. Trump had a TV show and sold himself along with his hotels and clubs as a brand. Wolfe got attention by wearing white suits, often with a white vest—winter or summer. When he was on the cover of Time in 1998 he added a white homburg, while holding a pair of white kid gloves and a white walking stick.

Most importantly, they both recognized themselves as natural drainers of the swamp, born iconoclasts. And they remained outsiders, for life. The political class dislikes Trump, and the West Side publishing world resents Wolfe. Trump has gone after an elite, bureaucratically protected political class, full of perks and power for themselves, using, rather than helping, the little people who elect them. They are both great defenders of the middle class, often feared by the elite (this is where the new rich and powerful will come from) and resented by the poor. Wolfe punctured the over-the-top pretentiousness of New York intellectuals—the secretive William Shawn (editor of the The New Yorker), the rival novelists who despised him, as well as insider celebrities like Leonard Bernstein (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” 1970). He bravely championed a new writer from Harlem, Claude Brown, whose book, Manchild in the Promised Land, was to sell four million copies (New York, July 18, 1965). “Brown,” Wolfe wrote, “makes James Baldwin look like a tourist.” Wolfe was a new kind of iconoclast, refreshingly different from people like Darwin or Freud, Marx or Chomsky. He made you laugh. He loved what he was doing. He was having fun.

I am not the only person who has noticed the Wolfe-Trump connection. No less than Niall Ferguson—Research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and one-time Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard—has made the same observation. Ferguson’s commentary in the May 18, 2018 issue of the South China Morning Post, goes back to 1987, the year Trump published The Art of the Deal and Wolfe wrote Bonfire–both books being about financial wheeler-dealers. “You can easily picture the young tycoon Trump rubbing shoulders with Wolfe’s character, Sherman McCoy, the bond-trading master of the universe,” Ferguson writes. Wolfe’s second novel A Man in Full, is about an Atlanta real estate developer with a gorgeous young wife and an embittered ex-wife. His business, like Trump’s, is loaded with debt and often in trouble.

Ferguson goes on to point out that in March 2016 Wolfe recognized that Trump’s candidacy was capitalizing on the widespread distress and contempt for government and said that Trump’s “real childish side” is part of his appeal.

“Childishness makes him seem honest,” Wolfe observed. He might have made another observation: Donald Trump was having fun upsetting things. He was not just rich, but happy with his toys, his influence, and his family. Wolfe’s established literary rivals, including Noman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, recognized Wolfe’s conservatism and said bad things about his novels. Wolfe counterattacked with “My Three Stooges,” in 2000. In this rivalry Ferguson sides with Wolfe writing, “Wolfe’s fiction is superior to theirs. For what Wolfe shows is that the obsession with money and the status it confers is only part of a triptych. Next to it, is sex—about which Croker, the central character in A Man In Full thinks a great deal—and race, America’s original sin, about which Wolfe wrote fearlessly. Most intellectuals missed completely the potency of Trump’s candidacy.”

* Why does Wolfe find this so offensive? First, The New Yorker style is exactly what Wolfe and the new journalism is not. Wolfe discovered new subjects and wrote about them in a flamboyant, original style, his style. He believed everything about The New Yorker writing was wrong. The passive-aggressive tone of its overediting had always limited the number of authors willing to submit stories. After John O’Hara, who wrote for The New Yorker for 38 years, the most used writers of fiction in its early days were Sally Benson (99 stories from 1929 to 1941) and Robert Coates. From 1935 to 1982 John Cheever sold the magazine 121stories, but he always viewed his editor, William Maxwell, as a competitor who was trying to squelch him.

Wolfe called this committee-driven style the “whichy thicket,” by which he meant “all those clauses, appositions, amplifications, simplifications, qualifications, asides, and God knows what else hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss.” This was the product of the fact-checking, proof reading, style-controlling system Shawn had created to preserve—Wolfe would say embalm—The New Yorker style. One rebel in the system described it to Wolfe as a literary “auto-lobotomy.”

Further, Wolfe continued, the magazine was always overrated. He lists two dozen good writers who published in Esquire first, and another dozen who published first in the Saturday Evening Post. Twisting the blade, he reminds us that J. D. Salinger was published in Esquire before he came to The New Yorker. He concludes that for 40 years The New Yorker has paid top prices and achieved a strikingly low level of literary achievement. What the magazine does have is advertisements; it has the perfect audience for those who purchase Lincolns and Cadillacs.

* For Wolfe, this was the literary establishment which he would challenge for the rest of his life, his own success being his ultimate victory. But the lines were drawn: Shawn would never allow anything resembling the “new journalism” into his magazine; its new home would be Clay Felker’s New York.

* As Maggie Haberman has written in the New York Times, “Tom Wolfe envisioned a Donald Trump before the real one came into tabloid being.”

* “Plenty of outsiders have tried to capture the spectacle that is Miami, and some, like Joan Didion (Miami, 1987), have succeeded to an extent. But nobody has ever conveyed the intricacies of the city and its roiling cultural cauldron with such breathless, gaudy literary acrobatics as Wolfe does in Back to Blood.”

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David Foster Wallace: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

From 2004 on John Ziegler:

* His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction.

* It’s near the end of his “churn,” which is the industry term for a host’s opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show’s nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they’re drawn into the program and don’t switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience — if only because so many of the listeners are driving — but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a 5 or 6 percent audience share.

* One reason why callers’ voices sound so much less rich and authoritative than hosts’ voices on talk radio is that it is harder to keep telephone voices from peaking. Another reason is mike processing, which evens and fills out the host’s voice, removing raspy or metallic tones, and occurs automatically in Airmix. There’s no such processing for callers’ voices.

* As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic glee, all of which the Nick Berg thing’s got in spades. Mr. Ziegler, whose program is in only its fourth month at KFI, has been fortunate in that 2004 has already been chock-full of Monsters — Saddam’s capture, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Scott Peterson murder trial, the Greg Haidl gang-rape trial, and preliminary hearings in the rape trial of Kobe Bryant. But tonight is the most angry, indignant, disgusted, and impassioned that Mr. Z.’s gotten on-air so far, and the consensus in Airmix is that it’s resulting in some absolutely first-rate talk radio.

* Be advised that the intro’s stilted, term-paperish language, which looks kind of awful in print, is a great deal more effective when the spiel is delivered out loud — the stiffness gives it a slight air of self-mockery that keeps you from being totally sure just how seriously John Ziegler takes what he’s saying. Meaning he gets to have it both ways. This half-pretend pretension, which is ingenious in all sorts of ways, was pioneered in talk radio by Rush Limbaugh, although with Limbaugh the semi-self-mockery is more tonal than syntactic.

* It is true that no one on either side of the studio’s thick window expresses or even alludes to any of these objections. But this is not because Mr. Z.’s support staff is stupid, or hateful, or even necessarily on board with sweeping jingoistic claims. It is because they understand the particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio. The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “We’re better” — strenuously — or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating. An obvious point, but it’s one that’s often overlooked by people who complain about propaganda, misinformation, and irresponsibility in commercial talk radio.

* One of the more plausible comprehensive theories is that political talk radio is one of several important “galvanizing venues” for the US right. This theory’s upshot is that talk radio functions as a kind of electronic town hall meeting where passions can be inflamed and arguments honed under the loquacious tutelage of the hosts. What’s compelling about this sort of explanation is not just its eschewal of simplistic paranoia about disinformation/agitprop (comparisons of Limbaugh and Hannity to Hitler and Goebbels are dumb, unhelpful, and easy for conservatives to make fun of), but the fact that it helps explain what is a deeper, much more vexing mystery for nonconservatives. This mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in US political life, why the conservative message seems so much more straightforward and stimulating, why they’re all having so much more goddamn fun than the left of the Times and The Nation and NPR and the DNC. It seems reasonable to say that political talk radio is part of either a fortuitous set of circumstances or a wildly successful strategy for bringing a large group of like-minded citizens together, uniting them in a coherent set of simple ideas, energizing them, and inciting them to political action. That the US left enjoyed this sort of energized coalescence in the 1960s and ’70s but has (why not admit the truth?) nothing like it now is what lends many of the left’s complaints about talk radio a bitter, whiny edge …which edge the right has even more fun laughing at, and which the theory can also account for

* Why is conservatism so hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw? It can’t just be 9/11; it predates 9/11. But since just when has the right been so energized? Has there really been some reactionary Silent Majority out there for decades, frustrated but atomized, waiting for an inciting spark? If so, was Ronald Reagan that spark? But there wasn’t this kind of right-wing populist verve to the Reagan eighties. Did it start with Gingrich’s rise to Speaker, or with the intoxicating hatred of all things Clinton? Or has the country as a whole just somehow moved so far right that hard-core conservatism now feeds, stormlike, on the hot vortical energy of the mainstream? Or is it the opposite — that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we’ve reached a kind of apsidal point? It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It’s not that hard. Imagine gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children’s fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what’s supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you’re him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it’s got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family’s computer. Your kids’ school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor’s moving away because he can’t afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver’s licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president’s ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country’s been directly attacked, and people aren’t supporting our commander in chief.

* Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names. To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want — with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential — a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying — which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. ) Plus ideally what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself — your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious “umm”s or “you know”s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English — the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: It can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it’ll sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and strictures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air…

* It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is to induce joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, etc. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by expressions like “He really pushed my buttons”).

* “Why is talk radio so overwhelmingly right-wing? [It’s] because those on the left are prone to be inclusive, tolerant and reflective, qualities that make for a boring radio show.”

* But there is also the issue of persona, meaning the on-air personality that a host adopts in order to heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike. It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But it’s not the same as outright acting. A host’s persona, for the most part, is probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.

* National talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, Prager, Hendrie, Gallagher, et al. tend to have rich baritone radio voices that rarely peak, whereas today’s KFI has opted for a local-host sound that’s more like a slightly adenoidal second tenor. The voices of Kobylt, Bill Handel, Ken Chiampou, weekend host Wayne Resnick, and John Ziegler all share not only this tenor pitch but also a certain quality that is hard to describe except as sounding stressed, aggrieved, Type A: the Little Guy Who’s Had It Up To Here. Kobylt’s voice in particular has a snarling, dyspeptic, fed-up quality — a perfect aural analogue to the way drivers’ faces look in jammed traffic — whereas Mr. Ziegler’s tends to rise and fall more, often hitting extreme upper registers of outraged disbelief. Off-air, Mr. Z.’s speaking voice is nearly an octave lower than it sounds on his program, which is mysterious, since ’Mondo denies doing anything special to the on-air voice except maybe setting the default volume on the board’s channel 7 a bit low because “John sort of likes to yell a lot.” And Mr. Ziegler bristles at the suggestion that he, Kobylt, or Handel has anything like a high voice on the air: “It’s just that we’re passionate. Rush doesn’t get all that passionate. You try being passionate and having a low voice.”

* Kobylt and his sidekick Ken Chiampou have a hugely popular show based around finding stories and causes that will make white, middle-class Californians feel angry and disgusted, then hammering away at these stories/causes day after day. Their personas are what the LA Times calls “brash” and Chiampou him self calls “rabid dogs,” which latter KFI has developed into the promo line “The Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio.” What John & Ken really are is professional oiks… The point being that Mr. John Kobylt broadcasts in an almost perpetual state of affronted rage; and, as more than one KFI staffer has ventured to observe off the record, it’s improbable that any middle aged man could really go around this upset all the time and not drop dead. It’s a persona, in other words, not exactly fabricated but certainly exaggerated . . . and of course it’s also demagoguery of the most classic and unabashed sort.

* It should be conceded that there is at least one real and refreshing journalistic advantage that bloggers, fringe-cable newsmen, and most talk radio hosts have over the mainstream media: They are neither the friends nor the peers of the public officials they cover.

* Robin Bertolucci wants the program to be mainly info-driven (according to KFI’s particular definition of info), but she wants the information heavily editorialized and infused with ’tude and in-your-face energy. Mr. Ziegler interprets this as the PD’s endorsing his talking a lot about himself, which Emiliano Limon views as an antiquated, small-market approach that is not going to interest people in Los Angeles, who tend to get more than their share of colorful personality and idiosyncratic opinion just in the course of their normal day. If Emiliano is right, then Mr. Z. may simply be too old-school and self-involved for KFI, or at least not yet aware of how different the appetites of a New York or LA market are from those of a Louisville or Raleigh.

* One of many intriguing things about Mr. Ziegler, though, is the contrast between his cynicism about backstabbing and the naked, seemingly self-destructive candor with which he’ll discuss his life and career. The best guess re Mr. Z.’s brutal on-record frankness is that either (a) the host’s onand off-air personas really are identical, or (b) he regards speaking to a magazine correspondent as just one more part of his job, which is to express himself in a maximally stimulating way (there was a tape recorder out, after all).

* His sense of grievance and loss seems genuine. But one should also keep in mind how vital, for political talk hosts in general, is this sense of embattled persecution — by the leftist mainstream press, by slick Democratic operatives, by liberal lunatics and identity politics and PC and rampant cynical pandering. All of which provides the constant conflict required for good narrative and stimulating radio. Not, in John Ziegler’s case, that any of his anger and self-pity is contrived — but they can be totally real and still function as parts of the skill set he brings to his job… A corollary possibility: The reason why the world as interpreted by many hosts is one of such thoroughgoing selfishness and cynicism and fear is that these are qualities of the talk radio industry they are part of, and they (like professionals everywhere) tend to see their industry as a reflection of the real world.

* Mr. Z. is consistently cruel, both on and off the air, in his remarks about women. He seems unaware of it. There’s no clear way to explain why, but one senses that his mother’s death hurt him very deeply.

* Ideology aside, this may be the most striking thing about talk radio personalities: They are the most media-saturated Americans of all. The prep these hosts do for every show consists largely of sitting there absorbing huge quantities of mass-media news and analysis and opinion… then of using the Internet to access still more media. Some of the results of this are less ironic than surreal. John Ziegler, for instance, is so steeped in news coverage of the Peterson trial that he appears to forget that the news is inevitably partial and skewed, that there might be crucial elements of the case that are not available for public consumption. He forgets that you simply can’t believe everything you see and hear and read in the press. Given the axioms of conservative talk radio and Mr. Z.’s own acuity as a media critic, this seems like a very strange thing to forget.

* Mr. Z. has an observable preference for female callers. Emiliano’s explanation: “Since political talk radio is so white male–driven, it’s good to get female voices in there.” It turns out that this is an industry convention — the roughly 50-50 gender mix of callers one hears on most talk radio is because screeners admit a much higher percentage of female callers to the system.

* The standard of professionalism in talk radio is one hour of prep for each hour on the air. But Mr. Ziegler, whose specialty in media criticism entails extra-massive daily consumption of Internet and cable news, professes to be “pretty much always prepping,” at least during the times he’s not asleep (3:00–10:00 am) or playing golf (which since he’s moved to LA he does just about every day, quite possibly by himself — all he’ll say about it is “I have no life here”).

* Nobody ever ribs Mr. Z. about the manual golf ball thing vis-à-vis, say, Captain Queeg’s famous ball bearings. It is not that he wouldn’t get the allusion; Mr. Z. is just not the sort of person one kids around with this way. After one mid-May appearance on Scarborough Country re some San Diego schoolteachers getting suspended for showing the Nick Berg decapitation video in class, a certain unnamed person tried joshing around with him, in an offhand and lighthearted way, about a supposed very small facial tic that had kept appearing unbeknownst to John Ziegler whenever he’d used the phrase “wussification of America” on-camera; and Mr. Z. was, let’s just say, unamused, and gave the person a look that chilled him to the marrow.

* He keeps saying he cannot believe they’re even giving Simpson airtime. No one points out that his shock seems a bit naive given the business realities of network TV news, realities about which John Ziegler is normally very savvy and cynical.

* “And to top it off,” Mr. Z. is telling [the intern] Kyra as her smile becomes brittle and she starts trying to edge away…

* Plus of course there’s the creepy question of why O.J. Simpson is doing a murder-anniversary TV interview at all. What does he possibly stand to gain from sitting there on-camera and letting tens of millions of people search his big face for guilt or remorse? Why subject himself to America’s ghoulish fascination? And make no mistake — it is fascinating. The interview and face are riveting television entertainment. It’s almost impossible to look away, or not to feel that special kind of guilty excitement in the worst, most greedy and indecent parts of yourself. You can really feel it: This is why drivers slow down to gape at accidents, why reporters put mikes in the faces of bereaved relatives, why the Haidl gang-rape trial is a hit single that merits heavy play, why the cruelest forms of reality TV and tabloid news and talk radio generate such numbers. But that doesn’t mean the fascination is good, or even feels good. Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed? If it’s true that there are, and that we sometimes choose what we wish we wouldn’t, then there is a very serious unanswered question at the heart of KFI’s sweeper: “More Stimulating” of what?

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Call-In Talk Radio: Compensation or Enrichment?

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

From a 2005 essay:

* This study focused on call-in talk radio because it provides a unique opportunity to test competing hypotheses drawn from two different perspectives about the appeal of media programming. A good deal of research on call-in talk radio grows from a deficiency perspective, which holds that people seek out media content to fill gaps in their lives. More recent research, however, suggests that, like the selection of other media content, the appeal of talk radio lies in enrichment, or its ability to provide content for specialized interests. A random telephone survey tested competing hypotheses that compared listeners to call-in talk radio with nonlisteners. For the most part, the results supported an enrichment explanation. Compared to nonlisteners, listeners to call-in talk radio listened to the programs for information, perceived themselves as more mobile, and valued arguments. Compared to nonlisteners, callers to the programs were also more civically engaged. Moreover, listening to various subformats of talk radio programs was also likely to signal enrichment.

* A good deal of research was conducted from this mass-media-as-compensation orientation. Television was seen as one source for “escape,” a way to deal with daily pressures and stress.

* Riley and Riley (1951) found that children who were not well integrated into peer groups watched more television. Rosengren and Windahl (1972) characterized television as a functional alternative to social interaction. They argued that people need social interaction, and that when their needs cannot be met in “natural” ways, people will find alternatives. Because television can mimic social interaction, television use can be motivated by that need. Rosengren and Windahl found that when people had fewer opportunities to interact socially, they were more likely to become involved with television content.

This notion of media use as a compensation for deficiencies in social activity undergirds much of the research on call-in talk radio. Researchers expected that call-in talk radio would be popular with people who were “deprived of interpersonal contact” (Turow, 1974, p. 173) and with those who would be constrained in their search for social contact by economic circumstances. In general, those research expectations were supported. Turow observed that callers to a Philadelphia talk radio show were more likely to live alone and had lower incomes than the typical person. Avery, Ellis, and Glover (1978) found that many listeners to talk radio had lower incomes and were retired. The researchers suggested that these socially isolated listeners viewed the format as a “window on the world.” Tramer and Jeffries (1983) asked callers to Cleveland talk radio shows why they called the programs. Whereas sharing information was the most commonly mentioned reason for calling, the listeners who called for companionship were among those who called most often. Tramer and Jeffries characterized these callers as “isolated listeners.” More recently, Armstrong and Rubin (1989) found that callers to talk radio programs appeared to use the programs as a substitute for interpersonal contact. Compared to listeners who did not call, callers were less mobile and found interpersonal communication less rewarding. Research, then, has found some support for a compensation-oriented approach to listening to call-in talk radio. In general, an illusion of social contact appears to motivate listeners and callers to turn to the programs. This research presented a dismal view of the audience for call-in talk radio.

* Media Use as Enrichment. There are limits, however, to considering media use solely from a need-oriented compensation standpoint. It is hard to reconcile findings that characterize the audience for call-in talk radio as socially isolated and economically insecure with the growth of the format. Neither station owners nor advertisers
would find much appeal in such an audience. Moreover, not all research supports the view that mass media use is motivated by a desire to compensate for life’s deficiencies. Rubin, Perse, and Powell (1985), for example, found no support for a hypothesized relationship between loneliness and parasocial interaction, or a sense of friendship with television newscasters. Instead, substantial research suggests that people select mass communication to enrich their lives and to promote their interests.

* Research on call-in talk radio shows that these programs are used to enrich people’s interest in politics. Hollander (1996) observed that listeners to issue-oriented call-in talk radio were more educated, of higher socioeconomic status, more likely to read newspapers, and reported higher levels of political participation and political self-efficacy than nonlisteners. Hofstetter and Gianos’s (1997) survey of the San Diego political talk radio audience found that listeners were not a socially deprived group. Compared to nonlisteners, listeners were better educated and reported higher incomes. Moreover, listeners were more politically involved than were nonlisteners. They reported higher political efficacy, greater political involvement, and greater likelihood to vote in local and national elections. Listeners were also more attentive to political news in other media, suggesting that talk radio was part of media use that grew out of political interest, rather than deficiencies in political knowledge. Interestingly, this portrait of callers to political talk radio differs dramatically from that of the socially deprived callers in early research. Callers to political talk radio programs evidenced even higher levels of political participation than those who listen and do not call.

* Scholars have noted that the talk radio audience is gaining in social capital. Lee, Cappella, and Southwell (2003), for example, found that listening to political talk radio is linked to interpersonal trust and talking about politics. In fact, their experiment found that listening to talk radio can increase interpersonal trust. Clearly, research on the social capital of talk radio listeners also supports an enrichment explanation.

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Extemporaneous Blending: Conceptual Integration in Humorous Discourse from Talk Radio

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Cognitive Science professor Seana Coulson writes in 2005:

* When speakers produce language, listeners use that linguistic input along with background and contextual knowledge to set up simple cognitive models in mental spaces (Coulson, Semantic Leaps). Similarly, when people look at cartoons, or, indeed, the events of the world, they partition the input into different mental spaces, each structured by cognitive models from a relevant domain.

* Presumably, it is no accident that frame blends were first noticed in the context of humorous examples. The possibility of creating novel concepts from familiar ones is obviously conducive to humor. As Arthur Koestler writes: “To cause surprise the humorist must have a modicum of originality—the ability to break away from the stereotyped routines of thought. Caricaturist, satirist, the writer of nonsense-humour, and even the expert tickler, each operates on more than one plane. Whether his purpose is to convey a social message, or merely to entertain, he must provide mental jolts, caused by the collision of incompatible matrices. To any given situation or subject he must conjure up an appropriate—or appropriately inappropriate—intruder which will provide the jolt.”

* In a study of political cartoons, I have noted that blending is frequently used to project a modern-day politician into a ridiculous scenario that helps illustrate the cartoonist’s political position (“What’s”). For example, during the sex scandal that led to former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, a cartoon by Jeff MacNelly depicted Clinton in a scene that most Americans associate with eighteenth-century President George Washington. Legend has it that when George Washington was a boy, he chopped down a cherry tree on his father’s farm. When his father discovered what had happened, he went, furiously, to his family and demanded to know who had chopped down the tree. Knowing that he would likely receive a spanking for his honesty, Washington stood up and said, “I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down the cherry tree.” In the cartoon we see a toppled tree and Clinton, dressed in Colonial garb, wielding an electric chainsaw. He says, “When I denied chopping down the cherry tree I was legally accurate.” The use of blended structure in the cartoon thus highlights the disanalogy between public perception of Washington as honest to a fault and Clinton as someone who had appropriated legalistic tactics to deceive those around him.

* To address the use of conceptual integration in conversational jokes, an excerpt from the syndicated radio talk show Loveline is analysed below. The show, based in Los Angeles, encourages its listeners to phone the radio station to ask questions about sex, drugs, and relationships. The show has two hosts, Dr. Drew, a board certified physician who specializes in treating patients with drug addiction, and Adam Carolla, a comedian known for lowbrow humor. The show frequently has celebrity guests, such as actors and musicians, whom the hosts interview when there is a lull in the calls. The bulk of the show, however, consists of conversations between the hosts and their callers, as well as conversations between the hosts themselves, in which they make fun of their callers’ problems. Columnist Marc Fisher described the show in his column “The Listener” in the Washington Post: “A comedian, Adam Carolla, and an actual physician, Drew Pinsky, sit in the studio, trying to be unbelievably cool. Virtually anything goes in their moral universe. They talk about their own experiences with drugs and sex. They get serious when confronted with potential suicides, domestic abuse or fools having unprotected sex. But kids who want to know about which drugs to mix, young people boasting about their experience with threesomes and more, men and women looking for approval for promiscuity—all get a condoning, even celebratory welcome. Carolla is not above the occasional rape joke. And “Dr. Drew” seems to get his kicks out of young people describing their artificial ecstasies.”

The excerpt analyzed below comes from an episode of Loveline that aired live on 20 February 2002. The caller, a teenaged boy, after describing a sexual encounter he had, has asked the doctor if he might be suffering from a medical problem. The caller claims to have had two orgasms in a row during oral sex with his girlfriend. The somewhat incredulous hosts’ subsequent discussion of the boy’s experience runs as follows:
[1] Adam: Well listen, the Lord was kind to you that day.
[2] Dr. Drew: He spoke directly to him.
[3] Adam: Drew, do you think anything’s wrong with the guy?
[4] Dr. Drew: No, no, no.
[5] Adam: Well listen just enjoy it.
[6] It happened to you once.
[7] It’ll be like some sort of a Holy Grail you chase for the rest of your life.
[8] But y’know count yourself among the blest.
[9] It happened to you once and that’s more than it’s happened to me.
[10] Dr. Drew: Well this could be some kind of a Purgatory,
[11] sort of a Sisyphus like [pause]
[12] constantly trying to recreate that and
[13] never quite achieving it.
[14] Adam: It is sort of a strange thing that
[15] you have this incredible sort of never–ending orgasm once and then
[16] end up chasing it like it was Moby Dick for the rest of your life.
Even the most cursory reading of the transcript suggests that the hosts’ humor relies heavily on conceptual blending, as the caller’s sexual experience is construed with frames and cultural models that originate in religion, mythology, and literature. For example, in (1), Adam compares the boy’s second orgasm to a miracle bestowed by God. The mappings in this blend are outlined in table 3. In the generic miracle input, God bestows a miracle on a faithful member of his flock. Of course the precise characterization of the miracle differs from occasion to occasion. Famous miracles in Christian lore include turning water into wine, walking on water, and raising a man from the dead. The composition of the orgasm from the sex input with the miracle from the miracle input is part of what makes Adam’s comment in (1) funny. Moreover, hyperbolically framing the orgasm as an
act of God subtly conveys Adam’s skepticism about the boy’s story.

In (2), Dr. Drew expands on Adam’s joke about God by saying, “He spoke directly to him.” Again, the alleged experience is understood by blending a cognitive model of the boy’s sexual encounter with a model of God speaking to a faithful follower. Just as a miracle is construed as an unlikely occurrence, so too is an occasion of God speaking to a follower. In the Bible, God speaks audibly only to prophets such as Moses and saints such as Paul. By framing the caller as the recipient of a message from God, Drew somewhat ironically implies that the boy
has saintly properties that caused him to be singled out in this fashion. The irony derives from the fact that, in the modern era, claims to conversational interactions with God are treated as a sign of mental illness.

The Holy Grail is typically thought to be the vessel that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper and that subsequently Joseph of Arimathea used to catch Christ’s blood as he hung on the cross. In the Arthurian legends, a knight (in some accounts Sir Percival and others Sir Galahad) is bound to go on a quest to retrieve the Holy Grail. In the Arthurian legends, this quest for the Grail was considered the highest spiritual pursuit. Consistent with the miracle and the message blends, Adam’s Holy Grail blend has the effect of imbuing the boy with knightly qualities and the orgasm with spiritual properties. The contrast between default affective responses to each of the inputs, coupled with the abstract commonalities needed to set up the blend, creates the comic effect.

The characterization of the boy as having been singled out by a deity for a unique experience is made explicit in (8) when Adam says, “But y’know count yourself among the blest.” Moreover, in (9) Adam’s utterance suggests a certain skepticism surrounding the possibility that the experience the caller described will ever be repeated.

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JUST BE YOURSELF? TALK RADIO PERFORMANCE AND AUTHENTIC ON-AIR SELVES

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

When you are an actor, you are performing, and sometimes in the course of performance, you can allow natural parts of yourself to come through.

As a radio host, you are also performing, but you can often allow large parts of yourself to come through that would recognizable by friends and family.

I’ve rarely had anyone who knew me comment that my performance on Youtube was unrecognizable to them.

Dr. Helen Wolfendon writes in 2012:

* There is a standard piece of advice that talk radio presenters almost always get when they start working on-air: “Just be yourself”. It sounds easy, especially when you hear people every day who are good at it. But more often than not, as soon as you are sitting in the studio by yourself, trying to talk into the microphone, the words that come out and the way they come out sound nothing like you expect – or the way the advice suggests. There are exceptions to this; people who can step up to the microphone and sound as if they have been there forever. But for many people it is a struggle – and with good reason. The advice belies the complexity of the task at hand.

* The modern style of radio presentation has been described as “personality radio” (Geller, 1996; Guilfoyle, 2002). This refers to broadcasters who build a relationship with their audience, based on embedding their authentic self – their personality – into their on-air presentation. These presenters are highly desirable to radio managers because, the theory goes, they attract and keep audiences. The reality is likely to be much more complicated than that. Personality has always been a nebulous term and the “self” is also a tricky concept to unpack. But given that a radio presenter’s livelihood will depend on it, it is worth delving into the complexities.

* The essence of the problem is contained within the expression, “Be yourself”. It assumes that human beings have a single identity, a single personality. “Be yourself”, in the singular, does not leave any space for more sophisticated understandings of self, which have long gone beyond the unitary (Blumer, 1969; Cooley, 1922; Mead, 1934; Sullivan, 1953). So it would be reasonable for a presenter to ask: “Which self?” Added to the unitary self is the implied requirement for the “authentic” self. Montgomery illustrates the complexion of authenticity within a broadcasting context:

“Because broadcast talk by its nature takes place in the mediated public sphere, it is frequently – to a greater or lesser extent – staged for performance: and the performed character of the talk displays itself in various ways – for instance, in the pre-allocation of turns, in the reactions of a studio audience, or in a perceived sense of scriptedness. ‘Authentic talk’ in the public sphere might, by contrast, be seen as the reverse of this. It is a condition to which some kinds of broadcast talk aspire, in which traces of performance are effaced or supressed.” (2001, pp. 397-8)

* For the first decade of the 21st century, the ABC’s approach to presentation was encapsulated by the highly naturalistic imperative of “personality radio”. There had been a move away from the more remote, “objective” and authoritative presentation tradition inherited from the BBC. Now presenters were being encouraged to tell their own stories, to bring their lives and experiences into the programme content, and to allow listeners to build a connection with a “real” person – to have a “conversation” with the listener. Why the shift? The authentic self, as embodied by the conversational presentation style, is attractive to radio producers and station managers, “presumably because its verbal forms project in the public sphere in a cluster of values widely held to be desirable: egalitarianism, informality, intimacy, greater possibilities for participation, and so on” (Montgomery, 2001, p. 398).

* The radio studio is a very strange environment. As a presenter, your job is to sit in an often padded room, in front of a microphone and a complicated technological console, and speak to—as Paddy Scannell describes it—the “unknown, invisible absent listeners”. This is a challenge which Scannell describes as the “fundamental communicative dilemma for broadcasters” (2000, p. 10). But even though the radio “product” is produced in this strange environment, for the listener who hears it in his or her everyday listening context, it must feel warm and familiar.

* off-air, the appropriate self deployed to match social circumstances is much more automatically drawn out or elicited by the social context. By comparison, the on-air context, at least initially, has much or all of that information missing. What a presenter is required to do is appropriate his or her understandings from off-air social contexts to apply on-air…

* Jon Faine produces fresh talk by working largely unscripted. Faine presents Mornings and The Conversation Hour on 702 ABC Melbourne. Faine is something of a stalwart in the ABC and several participants reference him in their interviews and consider him a role model.

HW: Do you think of the on-air work as a performance?

JF: Oh there’s no doubt it is… Geoff Rush was on The Conversation Hour one day and at the end of it we sort of had a bit of a chat and you know I was star struck and terribly excited and he said “No no no. What I do,” – this is Geoffrey Rush speaking, he said – “someone writes a play and I learn it. I rehearse it for several weeks and then I perform it for maybe an hour and a half in front of three or four hundred people, night after night after night, for a season. And I think that’s hard.” He said, “But what you do, no one writes anything for you, you don’t have a rehearsal, you perform for three and a half hours live, in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and then you do a completely different show the next night, the next day.” (J. Faine, interview, January 23, 2008)

Faine is able to contrast his own performance with that of an actor – even better, he is able to have the actor, who is one of Australia’s finest, do the job for him. This exchange between Faine and Rush can be considered in the context of two people who are at the top of their respective crafts, contrasting the different elements of performance in each of their practices. Faine demonstrates the authenticity of his performance by highlighting the freshness of the content as well as the talk and the unrehearsed delivery. Faine would generally consider himself to be the “animator” and the “author” of his performance, but not always the “principal”. He recognises that the nature of the role means that sometimes he “has to ask the mongrel question”. Faine says, “I’m performing a role. I don’t mean performing a role theatrically, I mean performing a role in society. It’s… the ABC’s obligation and role of keeping people accountable in decision making…” He says that he is “not a belligerent person but on-air [he] can be” (ibid).

* The elements of unpredictability and risk are inversely proportionate to the familiarity of the space, and it is reasonable to claim that the more desirable kinds of “authenticity” become more available as a presenter becomes more relaxed and familiar with their programme.

* As a radio presenter you have a job to do, an obligation to the people who have bothered to switch you on. If you are in the chair, no matter what your personal dramas are at that point in time, you still have to meet your responsibilities to the audience and of course, the organisation who is paying you. It is a more complicated “set
of observers” that a presenter has to serve than just the “invisible absent listener”. Fidler also recognises that the fact that “it could all go horribly wrong at any given time” is part of the authenticity of the performance.

* James Valentine is the presenter of Afternoons on 702 ABC Sydney. Valentine offers a particularly articulate description of what is happening on-air:

JV: You’ve always got to think about it from the point of view of the listener. Here’s a person stuck in traffic with an AM radio in their dashboard. What does this sound like? And so unless you’re thinking about it in that sort of perspective all the time then you’re not going to be creating interesting things that come out of the dashboard and soon as you’re thinking like that you’re thinking as a performer thinks. That’s what performers think like.

According to Valentine, you effectively “perform as yourself” which is not the same as “being yourself”. “Performing yourself” further complicates the notions of authenticity and naturalness inherent in the “be yourself” injunction. Valentine points out that it takes time to learn how to do it; to become familiar with this strange social context and to work out an appropriate self for it. He says “With all of these sort of things, what… increases is your base level. The more you do it the higher your base level gets.” He also recognises that the presentational self must at some level, be other-directed, because it is only through reciprocity that the presenters needs are met.

JV: “I’ve got the biggest ego in the world, you know, but I also know that that ego’s not going to get served unless I’m there for the audience and unless I understand what the audience is wanting. And unless…it’s all about them. If I make it all about them I get my jollies.”

* Talk radio presenters in the ABC are often on-air for shifts of two hours, some as long as six. Over this daily duration, five days a week, forty weeks a year, it is difficult to sustain a self that is highly alien to the selves used in other social contexts.

* from a presenter perspective, it is critical that the presentation does not sound like performance – and in some cases cannot feel like a performance either.

So what is it? It is clear that for these presenters, there is an active projection of the self for the audience: a “best” self, a self at the top of their form. As in all such presentations of the self, the projection is a function of the relationship, and what the presenter would like the relationship to be, and what it will be allowed to be by their audience. The relationship is not of a friend or confidante or family member or new person you-met-at-a-party, though no doubt presenters cannibalise any or all of these for the purpose at hand. The relationship is of broadcaster to audience. The audience is known through the presenters’ own history in the community of listeners, through conversations with talkback callers, outside broadcasts, and the sheer imaginative cast of emotionally intelligent minds. This audience is understood and related to in the same instant as individual and community, and in the constantly shifting play of gender, class, culture, geography, in-group and out-group nuances within a conversation which is sometimes actually two-way, but is more often a complex and reflexive interactive process in which the audience can only be imagined.

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