Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

by Charles P. Pierce

  Harrison is glowing with pride now over how his organization handed its most important award to a guy who, inside the government and out, has counseled murder. “People who don’t understand this don’t understand the First Amendment. Even people who claim to defend the First Amendment don’t understand it,” Harrison continues. “This is an ongoing battle because if we don’t understand the First Amendment, we don’t understand America. The process of America is very different than the flag or the president or the government. Presidents or governments are very dangerous whether they are American or Soviet or whatever. Names don’t mean anything. Processes mean things. The spirit in which something is done means something.”

  Everybody in the room sits up a little straighter. Heads nod. Chests puff out a bit. It’s hard to know how many of those present actually buy the bafflegab that Harrison is slinging them—that Gordon Liddy was what Mr. Madison had in mind, and that they are information warriors of free expression, keeping the Enlightenment values of the founders alive between jokes about Hillary Clinton’s hindquarters and the 5:15 traffic report. Some of them may in fact believe that Harrison is correct in his lemonade libertarianism about the great beast Government, that there is no true difference between the authoritarian ambitions of, say, Bill Clinton and those of Leonid Brezhnev. It’s impossible to gauge the effect of all that blather at the end about America being a “process” and about “the spirit of things,” probably because it sounds like de Tocqueville filtered through Tony Robbins.

  One hungers at this point for someone—anyone!—to come out and make the simple point that talk radio exists because it makes money. “The trick is to be what your bosses also call revenue,” confides a consultant named Holland Cooke. This comes like a cool breeze, cutting through the stagnant self-congratulation of Harrison’s quasi-profound rambling. “If you are good at this, you could be bulletproof.”

  Talk radio is a very big fish in a very small barrel. It has a longer history than is usually believed. It probably dates back in its essential form to the likes of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest from Michigan, whose career cratered when he abandoned his support for the New Deal in favor of nativism and (ultimately) anti-Semitism. As it has evolved, talk radio is a conversation between Coughlins.

  Many markets took up talk radio in the 1950s and 1960s, when it coexisted with AM Top 40 radio. As the music moved over to the FM dial, talk filled the void on AM. But the format did not truly explode until 1987, when, in the deregulatory fever of the Reagan years, the Federal Communications Commission revoked the Fairness Doctrine. This rule, adopted in 1949, had required licensed broadcasters to air all sides of the debate on controversial issues.

  Some very farsighted young conservative leaders saw the demise of the Fairness Doctrine as a way to develop a counterweight to what they perceived as the overwhelming liberal bias of the rest of the mass media. Even some liberal groups joined in, attacking the regulation on First Amendment grounds. (Ironically, some older conservatives argued for the retention of the Fairness Doctrine, which they had used for years in order to be heard.) After a favorable ruling in a federal court, and after Reagan vetoed a revival, the Fairness Doctrine was dead. Talk radio exploded on the right. As more and more stations became the property of fewer and fewer companies—the repeal was only a small part of the general deregulation of the public airwaves—the medium’s ideology hardened like a diamond. These days, the conservatives’ dominance of AM radio is overwhelming.

  According to a 2007 joint study by the Free Press and the Center for American Progress, on the 257 stations owned by the five largest owners of commercial stations, 91 percent of weekday talk programming is conservative. On an average weekday, the study found, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk is broadcast, but just 254 hours of what the study called “progressive” talk. Ordinary demographics wither in the face of this juggernaut. A 2002 study focusing on Eugene, Oregon, the crunchy-liberal home of the University of Oregon, found that the local stations pumped out 4,000 hours of conservative talk per year, none on the other side. This is nothing short of a triumph in how we choose up sides in our national life.

  (Today, the Fairness Doctrine is what conservative talk radio hosts use to scare their children at bedtime. The conference was alive with terror that the newly elected Democratic Congress might bring the beast back to life. Almost every speaker warned ominously of that possibility, even though Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, already had rejected it out of hand.)

  Since right-wing populism has at its heart an “anti-elitist” distrust of expertise, talk radio offers the purest example of the Three Great Premises at work. A host is not judged a success by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the ratings needle. (First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.) If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert (Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough) and, if the host seems to argue passionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true simply because of how many people are listening to him say it (Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it). Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

  Talk radio was the driving force in changing American debate into American argument. It moved discussion southward from the brain to the Gut. Debate no longer consists of thesis and antithesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other in between commercials for male-enhancement products.

  Talk radio provides a template for the clamorous rise of pundit television and for the even swifter interactivity on the Internet. And, because the field of play has moved from the brain to the Gut, talk radio has helped shove the way we talk to each other about even the most important topics almost entirely into the field of entertainment. In doing so, it has created a demand for inexpertise—or, more accurately, anexpertise—whereby the host is deemed more of an authority the less he is demonstrably polluted by actual knowledge.

  After an extensive study of talk radio, and of the television argument shows that talk radio helped spawn, Professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis came up with a set of rules for modern American pundits:

  Never be dull.

  Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.

  The American public is stupid; treat them that way.

  Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.

  “Television is an emotional medium,” Cline explains. “It doesn’t do reason well. This is entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse. Never employ a tightly reasoned argument where a flaming sound bite will do. The argument of the academic is sort of dull, but a good pissing match is fun to watch. To admit anything more complicated is to invite the suggestion that you may be wrong, and that can never be. Nuance is almost a pejorative term—as if nuance means we’re trying to obfuscate.”

  There is some merit in being skeptical of experts. It is one of the most American of impulses. It drove almost all of the great cranks in our history. However, there is something amiss in the notion that someone is an expert because of his success in another field as far from the subject under discussion as botany is from auto mechanics. If everyone is an expert, then nobody is. For example, Rush Limbaugh’s expertise as regards, say, embryonic stem cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book, but his views on the subject are better known than those of someone doing the actual research, who, alas, likely is not as gifted a broadcaster as he is. Consequently, Limbaugh’s opinion is as well respected. Often, the television news networks—CNN is particularly fond of this—will bring on an assortment of talk show hosts to discuss issues even though, on the merits of the issues, most of them are fathoms out of their depth. But they all are good enough at what they do to stay
on the air, so enough people must agree with them to make what they say true.

  “Human beings,” says Cline, “are storytelling creatures. We structure reality in terms of narratives. In other words, we start at Point A and get to Point B, and everything in between is called hope. If you’re a human, you’re a storyteller, a story believer, and that’s just the way it is.”

  By adopting the ethos of talk radio, television has allowed Idiot America to run riot within all forms of public discourse. It’s not that there is less information on television than there once was. (Whether there is less actual news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that “fact” is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story quoted a producer for Hardball, the exercise in empty bombast hosted by Chris Matthews that precedes Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC, who said that she heard from more than a hundred people a day who aspired to be television pundits. “We call them street meat,” she said.

  “There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people’s fears and saying to them, ‘This is what you should be scared of, and here’s whose fault it is,’ and that’s what they get—two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, ‘Damn right. It’s those liberals’ fault,” says Olbermann. “Or, it’s those—what’s the word for it?—college graduates’ fault. Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success.”

  However, following the pattern laid down by talk radio, Fox has managed to break off a larger segment of a smidgen of a piece of the audience than MSNBC has.

  The conference itself is something of a giveaway. Twenty-two percent of those responding to a 2003 Gallup poll considered talk radio their primary source of news, and here was the cream of the industry, all together, three blocks away from Ground Zero. The country was at war. The climate was in disarray. The economy was tanking. What promised to be a sprawling presidential election was just gearing up. Over the course of the weekend, there are dozens of small workshop sessions, all of them about running a better talk show, about building your brand, about the latest breakthroughs in technology. “Programming a News Talk Station in Interesting Times” dealt with the damage to the brand done when cranky old Don Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s” and was forced to absent himself (briefly) from the airwaves.

  “We have a liner card in the studio that says, ‘As edgy as you can get with the kids in the car,’” explains Heather Cohen, the director of programming for GreenStone Media. Jack Swanson, of KGO in San Francisco, said he’d have fired Imus and then resigned, too, “for allowing it to happen.” David Bernstein, the programming chief of the progressive Air America network, disagreed with his fellow panelists.

  “The dude got fucked,” Bernstein explains.

  This is a trade show, nothing more. You can learn a great deal about how to talk on the radio, but very little about anything you might be talking about. Wandering the halls over the course of the weekend, Todd Bowers, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, is reduced to buttonholing whomever he could find just to talk about the wars, and the issues confronting his fellow soldiers, topics that most assuredly will come up on the call screener back at the station.

  “Most of them thanked me for my service,” he says.

  “Talk radio is the biggest con to be perpetrated ever,” explains a host named Lionel—né Michael Lebron—who works for the perpetually struggling Air America network. “We create the veneer that we know what we’re talking about, a veneer of expertise. We pontificate on TV. This TV guy called me and asked, ‘What do your listeners think?’ I don’t know. We talk to people who have nothing better to do than listen to us.” This cri de coeur was not well received by those in attendance, many of whom, one suspects, saw in their mind’s eye a naked emperor walking off toward Battery Park.

  It becomes obvious that there are no workshops on the issues because there really isn’t a need for them. Most of the people present know exactly what they believe, because what they believe is fundamentally defined by their niche. They have chosen up sides, and what is most important is that what you say is what your side believes. A good talk radio host is playing a role; he knows what the team expects of him—he “skates his wing,” as hockey coaches say. That said wing is usually the right one is a function of the fact that modern conservatism recognized early on the importance of vicarious politics in America—understood that everything is entertainment now, and what matters is not how much you know, but how well you can entertain your portion of the audience. This depends on how convincingly you can portray the character you play on the radio.

  Rush Limbaugh brilliantly created the template. He constructed an entire universe with himself at its center, and he sold memberships to it, every day for four hours, on the radio. With his listeners self-identified as “dittoheads,” Limbaugh created a place with its own politics (where Hillary Clinton may have had Vince Foster snuffed), its own science (where tobacco has no connection to lung cancer), and its own physical reality (Rush is a roué who makes Errol Flynn look like a Benedictine monk). He created a space for vicarious reality at its highest level, and lesser hosts have been scrambling to keep up ever since. And he sold it like the radio pitchman he once was.

  (In fact, the track record indicates that when the world he’s created comes into contact with reality, Rush fares rather less well. His TV show was a debacle. A guest shot hosting Pat Sajak’s late-night show ended with him nearly booed into the Pacific and sweating like a whore at high mass. And he had a brief stint as an NFL analyst on ESPN that foundered when he divined a liberal conspiracy to promote the career of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. You see, McNabb was black and all the baby John Reeds in press boxes throughout the NFL were pushing him out of some devotion to affirmative action. This wasn’t any more loopy than most of what Limbaugh said about the Clintons, but football analysts are a harder sell than most political editors, and Limbaugh was laughed off the air. He has since largely eschewed events not of his own devising.)

  When Limbaugh got caught sending his maid out to score his dope, one of the most pathetic drug busts since Joe Friday was running down the hopheads on the old Dragnet TV show, his hold on his audience remained unbroken. This was largely because listeners didn’t choose to associate Rush Limbaugh, the character on the radio, with Rush Limbaugh, the actual person who gobbled OxyContin like M&M’s, even though the radio character regularly inveighed against people just like himself. The great thing about living vicariously is that you only take on yourself the admirable aspects of the person through whom you are living vicariously. Their flaws don’t exist in you; therefore, their flaws don’t exist at all. Thus can Limbaugh pop pills, Bill Bennett gamble with both fists and a steam shovel, Newt Gingrich chase tail all over Capitol Hill, and Bill O’Reilly engage in creepy phone-stalking that would have embarrassed Caligula, while all four make a comfortable living talking to America about the crisis in the nation’s values. More than anything else, the “culture war” is a masterpiece of niche marketing. Buy Us, not Them.

  In 2003, the psychologist Paul Ginnetty examined this dynamic in Newsday, focusing on Limbaugh’s show but analyzing the appeal of the entire genre, what he called “the potent narcotic of reassuring simplicity.”

  “Many of [the callers] probably also derive a sense of inclusion and pseudo-intimacy via this electronic fraternity of kindred spirits,” Ginnetty wrote. “They get a chance to feel smart when the master seems to agree with them, failing to see that it is actually they who are agreeing with him.”

  (It’s possible that Limbaugh will finally be done in by getting old. In the vicarious life, nobody’s getting old, and a talk show host who reminds his audience that they’re doing just that, usually because he’s aged out of the valuable twenty-five-to-fifty-four demographic
, as Limbaugh has, is not long for the airwaves. This would certainly account for Limbaugh’s serial marriages, his detention for illicit possession of Viagra in the Dominican Republic, and his endless bloviating about his studliness and his golf game—as though those two pastimes weren’t self-evidently oxymoronic. The end is near.)

  The issues do come up, mostly in the plenary sessions held in a vast movie theater within the hotel complex. The Great Talk Show Rumble is a desultory affair. There are eight panelists, four on either ideological side. (That the organizers managed to find four liberals in the place would be the biggest upset in New York that weekend outside of Rags to Riches’ winning the Belmont.) Onstage, smiling like a guy you’d change cars on the subway to avoid, is Gordon Liddy, so the panel actually comprises seven panelists and one felon. A good-hearted soul named Jack Rice is alleged to be the moderator, but he rather loses control early on when a guy named Jerry Doyle says of Hillary Clinton, “She’s just so full of shit.” And we’re off.

  Things get little better. As the discussion turns to the war in Iraq, one of the liberals on the panel, a lovable goofball named Stephanie Miller—the daughter of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 running mate, William Miller—achieves a certain level of bipartisan amity when she announces that, in not forcing a quick end to the conflict, “The Democrats are pussies.”

  “I agree,” chimes in Lars Larson from the right end of the table. “Democrats are pussies.”

  Nothing moves. Nothing progresses. It’s all Kabuki bullshit, and the audience begins to stir with a certain level of boredom broken only when Liddy interrupts a discussion about tossing illegal immigrants into the clink in California by saying, “I am the only person here who’s actually done time in the LA County jail.” He had them there.

  Sean Hannity also talks about the issues, in his keynote address. Hannity occasionally seems to make an earnest attempt at avuncularity. He looks like the bouncer at an Irish bar in Southampton, the big lug in the golf shirt who throws you out for singing “The Rising of the Moon” atop the bar but, as he does so, presses a couple of drink tickets into your hand with a wink and tells you to come back next week.