Here are some highlights from this 1999 book:
* Ask anyone born before World War II about the role of radio in his or her life, and in the life of the country, and you will see that person begin to time-travel, with an almost euphoric pleasure, to other eras and places, when words and music filled their heads and their hearts. It is a lost world now, a place once overflowing with the music of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Arturo Toscanini, the jokes of Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Fred Allen, and the more sobering words of Franklin Roosevelt, H. V. Kaltenborn, and Edward R. Murrow.
* Millions of us born after World War II remember lying there in the darkness of our bedrooms, or driving around at night in our parents’ cars, listening to Sam Cooke, or the Beatles, or the Doors, and feeling illicit pleasures. The music transported us out of the house, out of our dull neighborhoods, and off to someplace where life seemed more intense, more heartfelt, less fettered. Even very hip pop and rock stars of the 1970s—Elvis Costello, Donna Summer, Queen—sang about radio with a sense of longing. As the fabulous Freddie Mercury put it on Queen’s classic “Radio Ga-Ga,” “I’d sit alone and watch your light/ My only friend through teenage night/ And everything I had to know/I heard it on my radio.”
The refrain then summed up the sadness, even a hint of betrayal, that radio had been displaced:
“You had your time/ you had the power/ you’ve yet to have your finest hour/ Radio.”
People who grew up with radio still pine for the old radio days, for their intimate relationship with the box in their living room or bedroom, for a culture without television. They miss what now seems like the simplicity of those times, the innocent optimism (even during the Depression and the War), the directness of the medium itself. But what they yearn for most is the way that radio invited them to participate actively in the production of the show at hand. A listener could ornament any radio broadcast, whether it was a political speech, Inner Sanctum, Fibber McGee and Molly, or the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, with appropriate visuals. This meant more than imagining the people and their expressions, the setting and its architecture and decor. It also meant that with words and tone of voice as your only clues (often reinforced by sound effects and music), you conjured up people’s emotional states, their motivations, the tenor of their interactions with others. You envisioned Mary Livingstone rolling her eyes at Jack Benny’s unfounded vanity; you winced as the entire contents of a closet cascaded out into a hallway; you even glimpsed the elusive, invisible Shadow. You had to fill in the other senses— taste, touch, and smell—also. Even though you might be lying on the living room floor, or lounging in a chair, you were anything but passive. Listening to radio was like being a child again, having stories read to you and being expected to have—and use—a vivid imagination. And what radio listeners miss most are these, their supple, agile, bygone imaginations. They miss their role in completing the picture, in giving individual meaning to something that went out to a mass audience. They miss the mental activity, the engagement, the do-it-yourself nature of radio listening. They miss having such a free-ranging role in giving mass culture its private and public meanings. They miss the kinds of conversations radio provoked, in which friends or family or co-workers talked together to fill in the blanks.
* When people sigh about radio, they are yearning for a mass medium that stimulated the imagination instead of stunting it.
* One primal experience those born before and after the Second World War share is lying in bed, sometimes with the covers just barely over our heads, listening intently to the box next to us. Maybe it was the darkness, the solitude, or being in bed, but the intimacy of this experience remains vivid; listeners had a deeply private, personal bond with radio.
* We also started listening when we were young, even before we became teenagers, and we often listened alone. Radio kneaded our psyches early on and helped shape our desires, our fantasies, our images of the outside world, our very imaginations. Unlike other major technologies—automobiles, airplanes, or trains—that move us from one place to another, radio has worked most powerfully inside our heads, helping us create internal maps of the world and our place in it, urging us to construct imagined communities to which we do, or do not, belong. While radio brought America together as a nation in the 1930s and ’40s, it also highlighted the country’s ethnic, racial, geographic, and gendered divisions. And radio hastened the shift away from identifying oneself—and one’s social solidarity with others—on the basis of location and family ties, to identifying oneself on the basis of consumer and taste preferences.1 Certainly it has played a central role, over the last nine decades, in constructing us as a new entity: the mass-mediated human, whose sense of space and time, whose emotional repertoires and deepest motivations cannot be extricated from what has emanated through the airwaves.
* Even today, in the age of TV and the Internet, Americans have learned to turn to radio to alter or sustain particular emotional states: to elevate their moods (classic rock, oldies), to soothe themselves (classical, soft rock, smooth jazz), to become outraged (talk and shock). Some modes of listening have helped constitute generational identities, others a sense of nationhood, still others, subcultural opposition to and rebellion against that construction of nationhood. Most modes of listening generate a strong feeling of belonging. Even as mere background noise, radio provides people with a sense of security that silence does not, which is why they actively turn to it, even if they aren’t actively listening.
* Most of us know that feeling, driving alone at night on a road or highway, surrounded by darkness, listening to the radio. Before so many of us installed tape decks and CD players in our cars or trucks, it was the voices and music on the radio that provided that lifeline we needed, pulling us out of the solitary night and toward our destination. We clung to it to stay afloat, sometimes letting our thoughts drift off, sometimes belting out some song at the top of our lungs (and even adding, in the supposed privacy of our cars, dramatic facial expressions and gestures we would never display before others), sometimes talking back to DJs or newscasters. Relief and pleasure came, too, from not having to work at making conversation, from not being obliged to talk back, and even from not having to pay complete attention.1 We were taken out of ourselves through radio, yet paradoxically hurled into our innermost thoughts. (Television, by contrast, just doesn’t do this.) We felt, simultaneously, an affirmation of the self—so wonderfully narcissistic—and a loss of self—such a joyful escape from scrutiny of the self—and the mixing of the two was often euphoric. Especially thrilling, back before the rise of FM, when 50,000-watt AM stations like WSBK or WABC could be heard for hundreds of miles, was cruising through Ohio or Connecticut or Texas and hearing stations several states away.
* [Benedict] Anderson asked how nationalism—the notion of a country with a distinct identity, interests, and borders to which one belonged—came to emerge so concretely by the end of the eighteenth century. And he insisted that while political states have borders, leaders, and populations, nationality and nationhood are imagined, because most of a nation’s members will never actually meet one another, “yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.” Furthermore, divisions based on class, race, and gender aside, people still manage, and still need to conceive of the nation “as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”3 In addition, the nation became imbued with a sense of destiny, and historical upheavals and discontinuities became part of a national story of historical continuity guided by and directed toward some larger, grander purpose. The most pivotal development, Anderson argued, that transformed hunks of populated territories into imagined communities of nations was the newspaper. Every morning, at roughly the same time, people read the same stories about the nation, its leaders, and some of their fellow citizens in the newspaper. It was this daily ritual of taking in the same stories, the same knowledge, at the same time as you knew those who shared your country were, that forged this sense of comradeship with unseen others. And the paper, through its stories and, later, its images, was a concrete representation—one you held in your hands every day—that such a nation did exist and did have particular, distinctive characteristics. Reading the newspaper may have been a crucial first step in cultivating this sense of national communion. But radio broadcasting did this on entirely new geographic, temporal, and cognitive levels, inflating people’s desire to seek out, build on, and make more concrete the notion of the nation. For it wasn’t just that this technology made imagined communities more tangible because people now listened to a common voice and a shared event at truly the exact moment as others around the region, or the country. Listeners themselves insisted that this technology enhance their ability to imagine their fellow citizens, as well as their ability to be transported to “national” events and to other parts of the country. Certainly advertisers and the networks, seeking to maximize profits by having as big an audience as possible, pushed radio to be “national” and promoted it ideologically as a nation-building technology. The sheer geographic scope that these new, simultaneous experiences now encompassed— when 40 million people, for example, tuned in to exactly the same thing—outstripped anything the newspaper had been able to do in terms of nation building on a psychic, imaginative level.
* People loved radio—and still do—because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, humans find it useful—in fact, highly pleasurable—to use our brains to create our own images. What we call our imagination is something the brain likes to feed by generating images almost constantly: that’s what imagination is, the internal production of pictures, of images. Autobiographical accounts from great conceptual scientists like Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, or Albert Einstein describe a process in which they did their most creative work using visual imagery, which was later translated into equations and theorems.
* Obviously, people’s visual imaging is richest when they aren’t being bombarded by interference from externally produced images (as they are, for example, when they watch TV). And the more we work on making our own images, the more powerfully attached we become to them, arising as they do from deep within us. Processing external visual imagery is a very different— and more passive—cognitive mode from imagining one’s own and, in fact, can often temporarily shut down, or at least overrun, the brain’s own visual imaging apparatus.
* when information comes solely through our auditory system, our mental imaging systems have freewheeling authority to generate whatever visuals they want.
* In part because of this physical response, listening often imparts a sense of emotion stronger than that imparted by looking. “Listening,” argues one researcher on perception, “is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”
* There is another reason people’s associations with the songs on the radio are so intimate and fond: people’s relationship to music is so emotionally intense. There is a physiological reason for this too: the brain’s musical networks and emotional circuits are connected. According to Mark Tramo, the auditory system of the brain feeds into the limbic system, the part of the brain from which we derive emotions and memory. The limbic system then generates a host of associations and emotional states. Once activated in a pleasurable way, the limbic system may want to sustain that level of arousal. When a DJ seeks to create the perfect segue from one favorite song to another, he is responding to his limbic system’s signal back to the auditory system, asking for more of the same.21 Cognitive psychologists suspect that there is a physiological explanation for why people like hearing the same piece of music, whether it’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik or “My Girl,” over and over. The brain apparently becomes accustomed to patterns of music based on exposure to different musical traditions and stores knowledge of certain kinds of musical sequences in groups of cells. Based on these stored connections, the brain will predict which notes will come next in a sequence. When this prediction is right, the connections between the brain cells where these sequences have been stored become even stronger. The more we listen to certain kinds of music, then, the more we learn to like it. While the brain seems to like the surprise that comes when musical expectations are violated—such as through syncopation, dissonance, or unusual melodies—evidence suggests that predictability produces more pleasure. Successful music in a range of styles handles this paradox by setting up our musical expectations and then toying with them before providing a familiar resolution.22 So the inevitability in music that the brain seems to like is both physiological and cultural, for our culture teaches us what is inevitable and what isn’t. As the science writer Robert Jourdain notes in Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, “For every musical style, there is a style of musical expectation.” He reminds us, too, of what we already know from everyday life: different people listen differently at different times, some looking for a stimulant, some for a tranquilizer, some for distraction, some for intensity and clamor.23 It also seems clear that most people’s musical tastes get established during adolescence. While people seek out more complex music as they grow up, many reach a point, sometime in adulthood, when their established mental groovings prevent them from enjoying new music, like punk or rap. Hence the success of “oldies” and “swing” stations.
* Most people listen to music to enhance, or travel to, a particular mood. Researchers have found that many people, often unconsciously, use various media to alter bad moods or sustain good ones, and men especially choose very involving media to blot out anxieties.24 This is one reason why the development of “formats” in radio became so successful—when people turn to the “country and western” or “modern rock” or “sports” station, they know exactly what moods and feelings will be evoked and stroked.
* There seem to be three major ways that listening to the radio activates us cognitively. First…we listen for information… Dimensional listening is another matter and is activated by a range of genres… The third way in which radio listening seems to bring forth certain cognitive and emotional modes is through associational listening. Here I’m drawing from recent models of the memory as an “associative network” in which concepts and images are linked together in our brains not according to some grand, chronological scheme but rather according to the often haphazard sensory relations that characterized an event or period in our lives. When one node in the memory is activated, it activates the other nodes with which it was associated at the time.25 Whatever I might think of the song “Incense and Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock (!), I can’t help but have the first few bars hurl me immediately back to 1967. Repeated constantly on the radio as I drove around with my boyfriend, went to work, or sunbathed at the beach, the song evokes a host of associations with past people and places. It was this ongoing auditory repetition that allowed radio to forge especially strong links in our memories between our personal lives and the broader sweep of popular culture.
* It was 1978. On the AM dial in New York City, from 11:30 at night until 5:00 in the morning, Bob Grant yelled, “You creep! Get off the phone!” or “You mealymouthed, pompous oaf,” to listeners who called in to his show. He insisted on the mandatory sterilization of welfare mothers with more than two children, suggested that rude taxi drivers be shot, and referred to criminals—or people he didn’t agree with—as “sickolas,” “mutants,” and “savages.”1 Meanwhile, over on the lower-frequency portion of the FM band, All Things Considered, then in its seventh year, featured an essay by the Los Angeles commentator Joe Frank: “When you’re a child, you’re so alive to experience. The world dazzles you, especially the world of living beings. Do you remember how you felt about ladybugs? I loved them. Whenever a ladybug would land on your arm or your shoulder or the back of your hand, you’d be very careful not to scare it away by an abrupt movement and you’d count the spots on its back to see how old it was.”2 These broadcasts couldn’t be more different—in their tone, their focus, and what they tried to address and cultivate in their listeners. Political talk radio and NPR were still in their infancy, their influence and their importance to their listeners barely imagined in the late 1970s when television was bringing the mass suicides in Jonestown, the disaster at Three Mile Island, and then the Iranian hostage crisis into people’s living rooms. And as talk radio and NPR became more established, and politically and culturally important in the 1980s and beyond, they continued, in form and content, to diverge in almost every imaginable way. Yet I’d like to suggest that they were mirror-image twins, each speaking to a profound sense of public exclusion from and increasing disgust with the mainstream media in general and TV news in particular. They both became electronic surrogates for the town common, the village square, the general store, the meeting hall, the coffeehouse, the beer garden, the park, where people imagined their grandparents—even their parents, for that matter—might have gathered with others to chat, however briefly, about the state of the town, the country, the world.
* “Talk radio and NPR have the same core values,” notes Jim Casale, a consultant and industry analyst. “They give people an in-depth understanding of the news that they can’t get elsewhere. They also get a perspective on the news—they get interpretation.”
* As Bob Grant’s vocal bullying and Joe Frank’s ode to a ladybug indicate, talk radio and NPR also offered very different models of manhood on the air. While NPR built on and elaborated the more socially conscious, antiviolent, aesthetically appreciative versions of manhood as articulated on free form, talk radio provided a platform for what can best be called male hysteria, a deft and sometimes desperate fusion of the desire to thwart feminism and the need to live with and accommodate to it.
* Talk radio and NPR also shared another trait: their celebration of sound as a medium and hearing as a sense. Much of talk radio—and this is particularly true of Don Imus, Howard Stern, and Rush Limbaugh—and NPR revitalized radio as a highly suggestive aural medium in which the calculated use of sound could create powerful mental images in listeners’ minds. The early producers at NPR felt that most people had lost the art of listening to radio and believed that if they used sound creatively, to evoke atmosphere and feel, listeners could come again to embrace—and possibly even prefer—news on the radio. Bill Siemering, the creator of All Things Considered, believed that public radio should be “an aural museum,” and NPR’s mission statement cast the “aural esthetic experience” as one that “enriches and gives meaning to the human spirit.”
* Don Imus and Howard Stern, both of whom had ensemble casts of characters supporting them, used sound effects (not the least of which are those produced by the human mouth), voice impersonations, sometimes graphic descriptions of what was going on in the studio, and uncontrolled giggling and laughter to convey a clubby atmosphere of fun. Rush Limbaugh, while not quite as dramatic, used the bass guitar riff from the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” to open his show, imitated the sound of a dolphin when trashing animal rights advocates, pounded his desk to make a point, and riffled his papers and clippings in front of the mike to evoke the feel and imagery of the studio.6This return to the image-making capabilities of pure sound…
* The initial problem with talk radio was that production costs were high, often quadruple those of a music format. The reason was simple: the format was labor-intensive, requiring the talkmaster, a producer, an engineer, a programmer, and a researcher. There were also costly telephone charges for longdistance interviewing. Because of these expenses, talk radio required a large urban market. The cost of conversion to all-talk sometimes ran up a station’s expenses by 300 percent. But ratings could go up by anywhere from 25 to 250 percent. Station managers also discovered that talk show audiences were extremely loyal—once they listened and liked what they heard, many got hooked. This, of course, was what advertisers needed to hear. In fact, once the genre became established, stations discovered that some advertisers were willing to pay twice as much to reach the talk radio audience because of what were called its “foreground” aspects—people didn’t use it for background noise, like they sometimes did with a music format. They paid closer attention; they concentrated on what they were hearing; and if a host with whom they especially identified, someone they trusted, read the ad copy, advertisers were convinced that sales were enhanced. “Thousands of AM stations, given up for dead in the 1980s, had nothing to lose by switching to talk.”
* Unlike TV in the 1950s and early 1960s, which sought to avoid controversy so as not to alienate its audiences, talk radio pursued controversy and, again in total contradiction to the earlier years, used this as a selling point to advertisers looking for loyal, large, engaged audiences. In other words, controversy and marketability were joined, so that talk radio developed a “financial dependence on sensation.” By 1995 one general manager of a talk radio station was able to give the following explanation for why conservative hosts dominated the air: Liberals “are genetically engineered to not offend anybody. People who go on the air afraid of offending are not inherently entertaining.”12 Most of the commentary about talk radio, whether journalistic or scholarly, has focused on two things: its rudeness—the threat it posed to civility— and its unrepresentative amplification of right-wing politics—the threat it posed to democracy. But what is obvious yet much less frequently discussed is talk radio’s central role in efforts to restore masculine prerogatives to where they were before the women’s movement. After all, over 80 percent of the hosts, and a majority of the listeners, particularly to political talk radio, are male.13Talk radio is as much—maybe even more—about gender politics at the end of the century as it is about party politics. There were different masculinities enacted on radio, from Howard Stern to Rush Limbaugh, but they were all about challenging and overthrowing, if possible, that most revolutionary of social movements, feminism. They were also about challenging buttoned-down, upper-middle-class, corporate versions of masculinity that excluded many men from access to power. The “men’s movement” of the 1980s found its outlet in talk radio. The talk on political talk radio, as well as the talk about talk radio, was, from the start, decidedly macho and loud. The imaginary audience, the one most hosts seemed to speak to, was male. And what these hosts and their audiences did was assert that talking over the phone, talking about your feelings and experiences, talking in often emotional registers, was no longer the province of women. These guys were going to take America’s traditional assumptions of associating talk, or “chatter,” with women and throw them out the window.
* Characterizing most talk show hosts’ abrasive style as “a verbal adjunct to street fighting,” Time acknowledged that their success stemmed in part from the fact that “the decade’s mood has become more aggressive.” Talk radio hosts helped build imagined communities that made quite clear who was included and who was excluded. The guy nobody wanted was the new male pariah of the 1980s, the wimp.15 No yes-men, mama’s boys here, beaten-down types who obeyed too eagerly, who had responded too sympathetically to the civil rights or the women’s movement. Hosts insulted and yelled at listeners like abusive fathers, and tough callers knew how to take it. In fact, talk radio proved to be a decidedly white, male preserve in a decade when it became much more permissible to lash out at women, minorities, gays, lesbians, and the poor—the very people who had challenged the authority and privileges of men, of white people, of the rich and powerful, and of heterosexuals in the 1960s and 1970s. Now it was payback time.
* Ronald Reagan, through his rhetoric, policies, and appearance, sought to change all that. Screw feminist politics and getting in touch with your feminine side, said the Reagan presidency. All that had done was make the country vulnerable and weak. It was time to reassert male supremacy. As if in response, Hollywood in the 1980s pumped out high-action, bloated-budget beefcake movies in which Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and others used their tough, muscled bodies to remasculinize America’s self-image, which played all too well into Reagan’s efforts to pump a great deal of testosterone into America’s foreign policy, the fight against crime, and the “war on drugs.” Battalions of Afghan soldiers, armies of invading space aliens, cadres of lethal drug kingpins, were no match for these rippled, tough-talking guys.
* The 1988 presidential campaign was all about manhood, with George Bush and his handlers working round the clock to jettison his “wimp” image, and Michael Dukakis getting pilloried in the press for looking like a little boy instead of a real man as he rode around in a tank and wore an oversized helmet. Wall Street insiders termed men with power “big swinging dicks.” The fear that American men weren’t “real men” anymore, and a determination on the part of many men to abandon certain traditional masculine behaviors and roles, coexisted with an insistence that some men were never going to respond to the women’s movement, period. But there were also genuine anxieties about and frustration with what came to be called political correctness toward women and people of color. Many men thought they were being genial when they kept telling a woman she looked nice or persisted in calling her honey—why were these women so sensitive all of a sudden? And just when white people thought that “blacks” was perfectly acceptable, they learned they should use the term “people of color” or “African American,” but not Afro-American. Diversity training and sexual harassment workshops became de rigueur in many workplaces So many white men came to feel that they were walking on eggshells, that they didn’t know what was right and wrong to say anymore, that they wanted a place where they, too, could exhale. Talk radio gave them that refuge. As one talk show host put it, “Today, you have to hyphenate everything. People have no sense of humor. Talk radio allows people to break away from that. As a host I can be like Grandpa—you know, ‘There goes Grandpa again’—I can say anything.”18 On talk radio the trend was the same as in many mainstream films—to take over public discourse, purge it of conciliatory, bland, or feminine tendencies, and reclaim it for men. But not men like Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw—well-groomed, decorous, polite types who told us the news without any passion and who, by their very demeanor, embodied goody-two-shoes men with money and influence, former presidents of the student council or captains of the debating team. No, the masculinity on talk radio was different, fusing over the years some working-class politics and sensibilities with the language and attitude of the locker room. There were clear exceptions to this—the suave, urbane Michael Jackson in Los Angeles, and Larry King, who by 1984 was reaching 3.5 million listeners nationally with his interview show. But Don Imus, Bob Grant, Howard Stern, and their many imitators would become famous for their verbal dueling, or for assuming the persona of a horny, insubordinate twelve-year-old boy. Growing at first out of the bitterness of political and economic alienation of the late 1970s and 1980s, some talk radio—especially the version offered by Stern and Imus—was a rebellion against civilization itself, against bourgeois codes of decorum that have sought to silence and tame the iconoclastic, delinquent, and defiant impulses in which adolescent boys especially seem to revel and delight. Here the transgressions of the unreconstructed class troublemaker were packaged and sold to an audience of eager buyers. But Imus and Stern were not just mindlessly celebrating pubescent anarchy for its own sake, although certainly at times it seemed that way. They, and Limbaugh, spoke to many men on the wrong end of power relations, men excluded from the upper levels of America’s social hierarchies, where restraint, rationality, good taste, good manners, and deference marked who was allowed in. They insisted there was a place—an important place—for disobedience, hedonism, disrespect, bad taste, and emotionalism. In Talk Radio and the American Dream, the only book on those early years of the format, Murray Levin describes talk radio as “the province of proletariat discontent, the only mass medium easily available to the underclass.”19 Focusing on two political talk shows in New England between 1977 and 1982, including the highly successful Jerry Williams Show, Levin found that callers felt themselves marginalized from media versions of the political mainstream, deeply distrustful of political and business institutions, and profoundly anxious about the collapse of community and civility.
* While television news and talk shows like Inside Washington and This Week with David Brinkley favored as commentators, experts, and guests those who were well-spoken, well-educated, influential, or famous, the radio version invited those with poor grammar, polyester clothes, bad haircuts, and only a high school education to hold forth on national and local affairs. Levin argued that the absence of those stiff protocols that restrained a commentator’s performance on television was key to talk radio’s spontaneity and informality, which were, in turn, key to the format’s appeal.21 Among callers—he taped 700 hours of talk radio—Levin found a discourse “preoccupied with emasculation,” a belief that the proper order of things now seemed inverted, so that crime, blacks, rich corporations, women, and inept bureaucracies all had the upper hand.22 The Iranian hostage crisis— and Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to overcome it—further exacerbated a sense that America had become weak, could be bullied, and was being compromised by soft-spoken new age guys. As with the linguistic slapstick of 1930s radio comedy, the “verbal martial arts,” as Levin puts it, assumed center stage here. Talk radio was a linguistic battleground, and few callers had the skills, or the position of authority, to deflect the verbal salvos and put-downs of the host. Yet they kept coming back for more.
* G. Gordon Liddy advocated the killing of federal agents, Ken Hamblin referred to James Brady as “that cripple,” J. Paul Emerson of KSFO announced that he “hated the Japs,” and Bob Grant called African Americans “sub-humanoids, savages.”
* This was part of the ongoing battle in America over control of public discourse, a battle that has always been based on class, gender, and racial antagonisms. Talk show hosts were not just storming the media citadel; they were thumbing their noses at bourgeois conventions about political debate, public dialogue, and who deserves access to the soapbox.
* “Stern brought talk radio to the rock generation.” He also helped pave the way for Rush Limbaugh’s brand of stream-of-consciousness political diatribe. Stern’s revisionist movie Private Parts sought to whitewash the depth of his racist, sexist, and vulgar remarks throughout his tenure on the air—his voice-over in the film kept claiming, “Everything I do is misunderstood”—but it was these very transgressions that made him a millionaire. So did his celebration of locker-room masculinity, bullying yet self-deprecating, working-class yet college-educated, quintessentially adolescent yet adult. “Listening to Stern,” noted the former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, “is the electronic equivalent of loitering in the men’s room of a bus terminal.”47 Apparently this was a place a lot of listeners wanted to go. The Stern of Private Parts was a mensch, like Woody Allen before Soon-Yi, who bemoaned the fact that he was “hung like a three-year-old,” threw up after he was forced to fire someone, only wanted to be loved by the public, and whose main targets were pigheaded and autocratic broadcasting executives.
* Stern was a linguistic stripper, teasing his audience that maybe today, maybe tomorrow, he would really take it all off, although it was often hard to imagine what boundaries were left to violate. He was also often very funny—not to my mind when he was humiliating women, people with disabilities, and blacks, although clearly others found this hilarious—but when he took on celebrities he thought were arrogant, hypocritical, or both. People with real distaste for many of Stern’s routines adored his skewering of Kathie Lee Gifford, Bryant Gumbel, and Tom Hanks’s bathetic acceptance speech when he won the Oscar for Philadelphia. Stern’s populism emerged especially when he ridiculed the self-importance and mediocrity of a celebrity culture that the rest of the media profited from, promoted, and took all too seriously. With celebrity journalism spreading like anthrax and the Hollywood publicity juggernauts ramming through all the media, Stern just said no. This was the antithesis of the TV talk show host, who had to suck up to celebrities pushing their latest “projects.” Stern gleefully flattened these hierarchies and exposed them as arbitrary and ridiculous. Stern’s on-air persona was that of the class troublemaker—and often the bully—in seventh grade, the guy who made fart noises during study hall and tried to snap girls’ bra straps in the cafeteria. He was obsessed with sex and was also relentlessly self-absorbed. One of the adjectives most frequently used to describe him was pubescent. This is telling in more than the obvious way. Because Stern assumed different identities at different times—one minute the insecure, almost feminized boy, the next minute the mouthy, arrogant stud—he enacted those swings between masculine and feminine, confident and abject, that young men really experience. The sound effects he used and verbal signatures of his cast all signified adolescent rebellion. They laughed often and loudly, creating an audio environment that signaled fun.49 While it’s true that his commentary seemed aimed at twelve-year-old boys, this characterization lets Stern off the hook. For his persona was also that of a grown man, a deeply cynical one at that, who hated liberal politics and who insisted that unreconstructed white men get back on top. He was antigovernment and anti-immigrant, and said the L.A. police were right to beat Rodney King.50 He combined adolescent humor about toilets, breasts, penises, passing gas, and jerking off with politically reactionary jokes that harkened back to minstrel shows and burlesque. He was especially determined to defy the liberal sensibilities about race, gender, physical disabilities, and sexual orientation that had emerged from the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s. He was also determined to expose the hypocrisy of a culture that is often prudish and pornographic at the same time.
* His defiance of all codes of decorum, his insistence that sex was something talked about in the open, and that nothing and no one was sacred made him very hip, very 1980s. Yet in his on-air comments to female and African American guests, he harkened longingly to the 1950s, when Jim Crow was still the law of the land and the objectification of women was both commonplace and celebrated. He told the Pointer Sisters that he wished he could be their “Massa Howard.” “The closest I came to making love to a black woman,” he announced, “was masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima.” Of newscaster Connie Chung, he said, “For an Oriental woman, she has big breasts.”
* Stern was a brilliant Peter Pan. He created a space where men didn’t have to overcome their socialization as boys—they didn’t have to grow up, leave Never-Never Land, and go back to that stuffy, Victorian nursery—at least not until the show was over. Moms and middle-class mores said that you had to learn how to be a gentleman, be polite to girls and deferential to superiors, learn how to make a living, and become a responsible and civilized young man. Not on Stern’s show you didn’t.
* Stern’s archrival was Don Imus, the real pioneer of the format. As early as 1971, when he was a DJ on WNBC in New York, Imus was offering irreverent, insulting humor between Top 40 hits. He became enormously successful, and Life magazine labeled him “the most outrageous disc jockey anywhere.” But his alcoholism seriously hampered his work, and he was fired in 1977. He subsequently returned to WNBC but became addicted to cocaine. It was not until 1988, after Imus had gone through a rehab program and got a new show on his old WNBC-AM station, now owned by Infinity and redubbed WFAN, that he reemerged as a major figure in talk radio.
* Imus has not escaped the adjective juvenile, and Dinitia Smith, writing for New York magazine in 1991, likened listening to Imus in the Morning to “being stuck in a classroom with a bunch of prepubescent boys while the teacher is out of the room. Imus lets the educated male who grew up in the sixties and was taught not to judge women simply by the size of their breasts to be, for one glorious moment of his day, an unreconstructed chauvinist pig.” As with Stern, for Imus nothing was sacred, and his show was replete with the de rigueur breast and penis jokes, attacks on homosexuals and African Americans, and tasteless characterizations of women, especially famous ones like Madonna, who was referred to as a “two-legged yeast infection,” and Monica Lewinsky, “the fat slut.”55 He was simultaneously infantile and autocratic; one of his favorite things to do was ban somebody “for life” from appearing on the show. In a show from 1990 Imus and the gang pretended to have Mike Tyson on the phone and had the heavyweight’s first utterance be a belch. In the safety of the studio, they all roared with laughter as someone imitated the champ speaking with a lisp. Then Imus turned to one of his favorite subjects, the people who run Simon & Schuster, his current publisher. One Judy Lee, who made the mistake of not returning Imus’s calls, came in for a thrashing, as Imus insisted she should be home, because her husband works hard all day and when he gets home “he has to cook his own dinner.” “What good is she?” demanded Imus. “She can’t return a phone call or bake a tasty meat loaf.” Wondering why Lee hadn’t returned his calls, Imus guessed “maybe she was shaving.” More recently, sidekicks have called in pretending to be an outraged Howard Stern. But the difference between Imus and Stern was that Imus was more explicitly political. “Imus,” notes the media critic Howard Kurtz, “meshed eighth-grade locker-room jokes with fairly serious talk from pundits and politicians.” He featured commentary by Jeff Greenfield, Mike Barnicle, and Anna Quindlen; read and deconstructed items from the day’s newspapers; and invited politicians on the show. He made national headlines when Bill Clinton, whom Imus had been trashing throughout the spring of 1992 as a “hick” and a “bubba,” appeared on his show and charmed listeners—and, temporarily, Imus himself—by holding his own against Imus and quipping that “Bubba is just southern for ‘mensch.’ “56 Imus expressed grudging admiration, and when Clinton won the New York State primary, some credited Imus’s endorsement as helping push him over the top. Imus’s stock as star-maker went up. By 1998 the show was less sexual and scatological, with much more emphasis on books, music, and political affairs. Journalists in particular feel that they can come on the show and say things about current affairs (especially the Lewinsky circus) that they can’t on TV. By the late 1990s Imus was syndicated on over one hundred stations in cities around the country and could also be seen on MSNBC, reaching over 10 million listeners and viewers. In focus groups Imus fans have said they especially like his parodying of public figures, bringing them down from their pedestals and stripping them of their aura. As one man put it, “He’s not afraid to poke fun at people and poke hard,” even with prominent political guests or media stars. This fan added, quite tellingly, that Imus in the Morning “gets me going real good.” Fans like this were sick of spin and news management, weary of the deferential constraints that bond journalists and politicians together in their staged minuets, and eager for a deflation of decorum and pretense. They wanted hierarchies flattened, and Imus obliged. They couldn’t say whatever they feel like at work; Imus could. Most TV morning show hosts, and certainly late-night talk show hosts, have to please and flatter their guests. Not Imus. The guest must entertain and inform him or be subject to his withering dismissals, and now that he has taken to plugging books he likes, single-handedly creating best-sellers, guests with books to sell are only too eager to please. For many of his listeners Imus has turned the tables on money, power, and entitlement, created a place where polite people in prestigious and influential jobs have to “suck up,” as Imus put it, to a man who breaks all the rules of bourgeois decorum. Imus in the Morning has also been a venue in which warring elements of masculinity spar, wound each other, and call a truce. Insults have been the primary form of jousting, and some of the most pleasurable moments in the show have come when Imus and one of his regular callers, like the Meet the Press host Tim Russert, take each other down a peg. Imus—who must, in real life, get sick of people “sucking up” to him—loves being razzed by men he respects. This verbal ritual of inflation and deflation is how manhood is most frequently tested these days, and Imus’s show stages the costs and pleasures of winning some verbal duels while losing others. Imus’s persona has been that of the unfeeling bastard, but his charitable work and oft-stated admiration for his wife show how insensitivity and empathy coexist in men. Nor does Imus present himself as a tough guy in control of his emotions. Although his tone is sarcastic, Imus insists that he handles stress poorly and is thrown into a bad mood when his friends are maligned, he doesn’t get to see enough of his wife, or his charitable work is criticized. Since the birth of his son, Imus has also been unabashed in his celebration of the pleasures of fatherhood. Imus embodies the extremes of manhood, from s.o.b. to doting dad, and thus shows that men can, and must, cobble together a male identity that draws from so many conflicting norms. Stern’s and Imus’s success as “shock jocks” raised alarm that radio was cultivating the worst in its white, male listeners by encouraging them to repudiate the achievements, however partial, won by women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and the disabled. But when the press itself, and much of the white male power structure in Washington, felt threatened by talk radio, this became a major story. And the man who made political talk radio a national concern, rightly or wrongly, was Rush Limbaugh.
* This ability to talk back to the radio, in utter privacy, while learning about other people’s point of view was key to listeners, who consistently pointed to another thing they liked about talk radio: it made them flex their mental muscles. Talk radio “gets people thinking,” as one fan put it, and listeners spoke animatedly about how they felt mentally more active while listening. Some felt especially revved up intellectually when their own views were challenged and they had to make a case for their side, even if just in their heads. They specifically liked being freed from the “visual distractions” of television. (This is particularly true for older listeners, who grew up with radio.) They especially enjoyed learning about “behind-the-scenes” aspects of news stories, insider information, more detailed background than television news gave them. Liberals liked to tune in to Limbaugh or Liddy to “see what the opposition is up to,” while conservatives tuned in to liberal hosts for similar surveillance reasons and “to hear how dumb liberals are.”
* But clearly talk radio taps into some people’s sense that they are being poorly informed, pandered to, and manipulated as an audience. As one man put it succinctly, “If the major media were doing their job, talk radio wouldn’t exist.” Some suspect that the network news has been so co-opted by corporate America that it can’t possibly tell the truth; others, and this is especially true of Limbaugh regulars, feel the news is too sensationalistic, too liberal, too superficial, or all of the above. “I don’t believe much of what I read in the newspapers,” reported one man, “so I listen to talk radio.” Another described the network news as “mostly fluff,” and still another cast it as “shallow … you can’t find anything out.” The media are out to get conservatives, insisted a conservative listener, and are “full of interest groups trying to present the news with their slant.” People understand that competition corrupts the news, that the networks news is “about ratings, about putting on a performance.” Others objected to what they saw as the arrogance of network reporters and anchors, who seem to position themselves above everyone else as insiders with superior knowledge. Phrases like “we believe” in a report grate on such talk radio fans, who regard these interjections as undermining claims to objectivity. Clearly, for some, there are class-based antagonisms to silk-suited millionaire anchors who seem to place themselves above everyone else. One man singled out Richard Jewell—whom the media unfairly cast as a suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing—as a classic example of someone who was tried by the media without adequate evidence. Many hated the local news’ promotional techniques, especially the practice of hyping a story hours before the news comes on—”Watch at 5:00 to learn information that could save your life!”—and then, at news time, putting the hyped story at the end of the news and having it last only ten seconds. “If I need to know something, I want to know it now, I don’t like being teased.” Others feel that they just don’t know who to believe in the news and find talk radio more credible. As one listener put it, when he’s watching TV or reading the paper, he might encounter one economist favoring one side of an issue, another favoring the opposite, and since this listener is not an economist, he has no basis for judgment—he can’t determine which expert is right or wrong. He concluded that “you might as well read nothing” as watch the news. His comments support studies of public cynicism and the news, which suggest that with so much oppositional commentary on television and on the op-ed pages, the audience tends to drop out of the debate; every possible response to a problem is picked apart, so all solutions seem ineffective and worthless.66
* One fan especially liked Limbaugh because he “articulates things in a way they haven’t been articulated before.” Limbaugh “fills in the blanks.” When conservatives hear Limbaugh, according to this listener, they say to themselves, “Why can’t I say it like that?” and “Yes, that’s the way I feel.”
* Limbaugh’s brilliance was in bringing humor, irreverence, and a common touch to what had been a pretty laced-up form, conservative commentary. This was no William F. Buckley. He was particularly skillful in his use of metaphors and had a talent for distilling issues to their most simple elements. He delighted in conjuring up vivid mental images of environmentalists as wacko tree huggers and feminists as combat-boot-wearing, goose-stepping “feminazis.” He zoomed right into signifiers of class privilege. Academics, for example, were the “arts-and-croissant, wine-and-brie crowd.” He nicknamed the anchor of CBS Nightly News Dan Blather. Clinton was “the Schlickmeister.”
* Between 1993 and 1995 Limbaugh discussed the liberal, mainstream media on well over four hundred days, with utterances like “The dominant media doesn’t portray the real truth of today’s society.” He drove home the term “liberal media” over and over, and castigated the press—rightly so—for their superficial and incomplete coverage of health care reform, and for their sensationalistic focus on the O. J. Simpson case. Limbaugh clearly hates the mainstream media, but by emphasizing that only on his show will you hear the real truth, he also promotes the insider status and veracity of his own show. He continues to emphasize that his is “the most listened to talk show, and deservedly so.” “Why do you listen to this program?” he rhetorically asks his audience. “Let me answer this. You will hear analysis here that you won’t get anywhere else.”71 Another of Limbaugh’s brilliant strokes was to provide an on-air political Elderhostel for those long out of the classroom who wanted and needed guidance in a media-saturated, spin-governed world. He labeled his show the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, and he addressed his listeners as if he sensed that they missed being educated, being privy to knowledge that others aren’t. He offered the Limbaugh Letter, a syllabus one could study and review. Limbaugh has been denounced for being a demagogue, but his real persona is that of pedagogue. He has brought his listeners into a spectral lecture hall and helped them see themselves as part of a literate community where everyday people, and not just elites, must have knowledge, because knowledge is power. And, as one listener indicated, “You have to listen to Rush over a period of weeks, and then you can see where he’s coming from.” This wasn’t a one-shot class; this was an ongoing seminar in which you didn’t just learn isolated infobits but acquired a broader framework that constituted a worldview. He would take often obscure, complicated stories and turn them into simple, easy-to-imagine overheads. While the network news and the newsmagazines increasingly addressed their audiences as consumers, Limbaugh addressed them as citizens. He read to his audience from The New York Times and The Washington Post, quoted from the network news, and juxtaposed these excerpts with hot-off-the-press faxes that he received from “inside” conservative sources who allegedly had the “real” truth. Limbaugh was also deft at flattering his audience. He encouraged listeners to see themselves as competent critics who could detect media bias, sensationalism, and superficiality. At the same time, they still needed a teacher. As he said in 1996, “I believe that the most effective way to persuade people is … to speak to them in a way that makes them think that they reached certain conclusions on their own.” Yet his caller screening practices gave preference to sycophants who offered very high teacher evaluations on the air. As Limbaugh told Howard Kurtz, “The purpose of a call is to make me look good.” Savvy callers knew it was important to play the courtier, and those who did usually didn’t get dissed. These flattering remarks—”It’s such an honor and privilege to talk to you”—laid lovingly before Rush’s feet seemed to serve as “sacrificial offerings to win acceptance and entry” into the “discursive kingdom” presided over by the great professor.
* He was a gender activist, an ideological soldier in the war to reassert patriarchy, to reclaim things as they “ought to be.” He himself lamented the state of masculinity in the 1990s. “On the one hand, we want men who are sensitive and crying, like Alan Aldas, and then, after so much of that, women finally get tired of wimps and say, ‘We want real men again!’ O.K., so now we gotta change, we’ve got to go back to tough guys, we’re not gonna take any shit. And our memories tell us, we go back to high school, look at who the girls went for—the assholes! The mean, dirty, greasy sons of bitches.”74 The ads on the show, for hair loss products, memory enhancers, and health care organizations that seek to prevent heart attacks, impart a worried subtext about emasculation that can, and must, be reversed. But Limbaugh is more than a throwback. He personifies a new kind of 1990s man, the antithesis of the allegedly new age, sensitive, feminized kind of guy. He is a male hysteric who skillfully uses his voice to signal the easy slide between rationality and outrage. Real men don’t eat quiche; they have a point of view and voice it. So Limbaugh deftly does blend “feminine” traits into his persona, because he gives men permission to get hysterical about politics. Here is a man who is emotionally unchecked, yet simultaneously reasonable, combative, and avowedly antifeminist. There is no equivocation here, no “on the one hand, on the other hand,” no genial, get-along stance. This is not the persona of the organization man who goes along with institutional idiocy because his boss says to. This is not some Dilbert forced to seethe in silence in his cubicle. No, this man loses it, his naturally deep voice shooting up an octave as he denounces something he thinks doesn’t make a lick of sense. When quoting from newspaper articles, especially a section he’s about to mock, Limbaugh theatrically lowers his voice, parodying the paper’s supposed aura of authority. As soon as his pitch zooms up, we know we’re back to Limbaugh, who interjects comments like “Idiocy! Pure idiocy!” or “Get this!” or “That can’t be!” Limbaugh, and many of his fellow hosts, attacked post-Vietnam media and corporate versions of masculinity; they attacked what Christopher Lasch labeled in the late 1970s the narcissistic personality, the bureaucratic operator desperately dependent on the approval of others who learns how to wear a variety of amiable masks to get by. Limbaugh’s special talent is how he flexes his vocal cords to enact this critique. He understands that radio needs clear auditory signposts that instantly produce an emotional reaction. It was this delicately calibrated balance between letting go and holding on that staked out the male hysteric as not just a reasonable but an enviable persona, a man more authentic, more in touch with the connection between his feeings and his ideas than circumscribed TV reporters or political spin doctors. Yet such an emotionally accessible and explosive guy has to maintain that he is still a real man. Hence the special importance of feminist bashing—for Limbaugh this is done through his regular “feminist updates” on the movement’s alleged idiocies—to the presentation of the male hysteric as appropriating some “feminine” prerogatives while still not acquiescing to women’s demands for equality. Because his hysteria requires that he come up with deliberately perverse assertions, he can charge, for example, that the controversy over smoking in the United States is really the fault of native Americans, since they grew tobacco here first.
* As the political cartoonist Jules Feiffer put it when he first heard All Things Considered in 1979, “You feel like part of some underground network or some kind of conspiracy. It’s like back in the sixties when you discovered someone else who’d heard Mort Sahl.”
* NPR was always torn between two goals. Would it be an aural pioneer, offering listeners new audio experiences, or would it provide hard news in more depth and detail than television did? Often All Things Considered in the 1970s succeeded in addressing both desires, but more frequently this debate divided the staff, one side deriding the network’s penchant for serving up nothing more than “ear candy,” the other side condemning the trend toward sensory and political conformity.89 By the mid-1980s the hard news advocates had won.
