{"id":139794,"date":"2021-05-31T09:05:59","date_gmt":"2021-05-31T17:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=139794"},"modified":"2021-05-31T17:35:50","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T01:35:50","slug":"david-foster-wallace-deep-into-the-mercenary-world-of-take-no-prisoners-political-talk-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=139794","title":{"rendered":"David Foster Wallace: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

From 2004 on John Ziegler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction. <\/p>\n

* It\u2019s near the end of his \u201cchurn,\u201d which is the industry term for a host\u2019s opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show\u2019s nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they\u2019re drawn into the program and don\u2019t switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience \u2014 if only because so many of the listeners are driving \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

* One reason why callers\u2019 voices sound so much less rich and authoritative than hosts\u2019 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\u2019s voice, removing raspy or metallic tones, and occurs automatically in Airmix. There\u2019s no such processing for callers\u2019 voices.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 Saddam\u2019s 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.\u2019s gotten on-air so far, and the consensus in Airmix is that it\u2019s resulting in some absolutely first-rate talk radio.<\/p>\n

* Be advised that the intro\u2019s stilted, term-paperish language, which looks kind of awful in print, is a great deal more effective when the spiel is delivered out loud \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

* It is true that no one on either side of the studio\u2019s thick window expresses or even alludes to any of these objections. But this is not because Mr. Z.\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cWe\u2019re better\u201d \u2014 strenuously \u2014 or that he does not believe it\u2019s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating. An obvious point, but it\u2019s one that\u2019s often overlooked by people who complain about propaganda, misinformation, and irresponsibility in commercial talk radio.<\/p>\n

* One of the more plausible comprehensive theories is that political talk radio is one of several important \u201cgalvanizing venues\u201d for the US right. This theory\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re 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 \u201970s but has (why not admit the truth?) nothing like it now is what lends many of the left\u2019s 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<\/p>\n

* Why is conservatism so hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw? It can\u2019t 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\u2019t this kind of right-wing populist verve to the Reagan eighties. Did it start with Gingrich\u2019s 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 \u2014 that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what\u2019s supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you\u2019re him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it\u2019s got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family\u2019s computer. Your kids\u2019 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\u2019s moving away because he can\u2019t afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver\u2019s licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president\u2019s ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country\u2019s been directly attacked, and people aren\u2019t supporting our commander in chief.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you\u2019re saying \u2014 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\u2019re speaking. ) Plus ideally what you\u2019re 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 \u2014 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\u2019re discussing. And it gets trickier: You\u2019re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you\u2019re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech\u2019s ticcy unconscious \u201cumm\u201ds or \u201cyou know\u201ds, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say. You\u2019re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English \u2014 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\u2019t be too slow, since that\u2019s low-energy and dull, but it can\u2019t be too rushed or it\u2019ll 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…<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cHe really pushed my buttons\u201d). <\/p>\n

* \u201cWhy is talk radio so overwhelmingly right-wing? [It\u2019s] because those on the left are prone to be inclusive, tolerant and reflective, qualities that make for a boring radio show.\u201d<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s not the same as outright acting. A host\u2019s persona, for the most part, is probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.<\/p>\n

* National talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, Prager, Hendrie, Gallagher, et al. tend to have rich baritone radio voices that rarely peak, whereas today\u2019s KFI has opted for a local-host sound that\u2019s 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\u2019s Had It Up To Here. Kobylt\u2019s voice in particular has a snarling, dyspeptic, fed-up quality \u2014 a perfect aural analogue to the way drivers\u2019 faces look in jammed traffic \u2014 whereas Mr. Ziegler\u2019s tends to rise and fall more, often hitting extreme upper registers of outraged disbelief. Off-air, Mr. Z.\u2019s speaking voice is nearly an octave lower than it sounds on his program, which is mysterious, since \u2019Mondo denies doing anything special to the on-air voice except maybe setting the default volume on the board\u2019s channel 7 a bit low because \u201cJohn sort of likes to yell a lot.\u201d And Mr. Ziegler bristles at the suggestion that he, Kobylt, or Handel has anything like a high voice on the air: \u201cIt\u2019s just that we\u2019re passionate. Rush doesn\u2019t get all that passionate. You try being passionate and having a low voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cbrash\u201d and Chiampou him self calls \u201crabid dogs,\u201d which latter KFI has developed into the promo line \u201cThe Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio.\u201d 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\u2019s improbable that any middle aged man could really go around this upset all the time and not drop dead. It\u2019s a persona, in other words, not exactly fabricated but certainly exaggerated . . . and of course it\u2019s also demagoguery of the most classic and unabashed sort.<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* Robin Bertolucci wants the program to be mainly info-driven (according to KFI\u2019s particular definition of info), but she wants the information heavily editorialized and infused with \u2019tude and in-your-face energy. Mr. Ziegler interprets this as the PD\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019ll discuss his life and career. The best guess re Mr. Z.\u2019s brutal on-record frankness is that either (a) the host\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

* 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 \u2014 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\u2019s case, that any of his anger and self-pity is contrived \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

* Mr. Z. is consistently cruel, both on and off the air, in his remarks about women. He seems unaware of it. There\u2019s no clear way to explain why, but one senses that his mother\u2019s death hurt him very deeply.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019t believe everything you see and hear and read in the press. Given the axioms of conservative talk radio and Mr. Z.\u2019s own acuity as a media critic, this seems like a very strange thing to forget.<\/p>\n

* Mr. Z. has an observable preference for female callers. Emiliano\u2019s explanation: \u201cSince political talk radio is so white male\u2013driven, it\u2019s good to get female voices in there.\u201d It turns out that this is an industry convention \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cpretty much always prepping,\u201d at least during the times he\u2019s not asleep (3:00\u201310:00 am) or playing golf (which since he\u2019s moved to LA he does just about every day, quite possibly by himself \u2014 all he\u2019ll say about it is \u201cI have no life here\u201d).<\/p>\n

* Nobody ever ribs Mr. Z. about the manual golf ball thing vis-\u00e0-vis, say, Captain Queeg\u2019s famous ball bearings. It is not that he wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019d used the phrase \u201cwussification of America\u201d on-camera; and Mr. Z. was, let\u2019s just say, unamused, and gave the person a look that chilled him to the marrow.<\/p>\n

* He keeps saying he cannot believe they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

* \u201cAnd to top it off,\u201d Mr. Z. is telling [the intern] Kyra as her smile becomes brittle and she starts trying to edge away…<\/p>\n

* Plus of course there\u2019s 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\u2019s ghoulish fascination? And make no mistake \u2014 it is fascinating. The interview and face are riveting television entertainment. It\u2019s 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\u2019t mean the fascination is good, or even feels good. Aren\u2019t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed? If it\u2019s true that there are, and that we sometimes choose what we wish we wouldn\u2019t, then there is a very serious unanswered question at the heart of KFI\u2019s sweeper: \u201cMore Stimulating\u201d of what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From 2004 on John Ziegler: * His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction. * It\u2019s near the end of his \u201cchurn,\u201d which is the industry term for a host\u2019s opening monologue, whose … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1220],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139794"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139850,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139794\/revisions\/139850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}