by Ira Glass
(He never leaves his chair during breaks, for example, not even to use the restroom.)
It is worth considering the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient.
EDITORIAL ASIDE It’s hard to understand Fox News tags like “Fair and Balanced,” “No-Spin Zone,” and “We Report, You Decide” as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel’s conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seem dim, humorless, and stodgy.
Never before have there been so many different national news sources—different now in terms of both medium and ideology. Major newspapers from anywhere are available online; there are the broadcast networks plus public TV, cable’s CNN, Fox News, CNBC, et al., print and Web magazines, Internet bulletin boards, The Daily Show, e-mail newsletters, blogs. All this is well-known; it’s part of the Media Environment we live in. But there are prices and ironies here. One is that the increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has—rather counterintuitively—created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options. Another is that the ever-increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which “the truth” is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.
EDITORIAL ASIDE Of course, this is assuming one believes that information and spin are different things—and one of the dangers of partisan news’s metastasis is the way it enables the conviction that the two aren’t really distinct at all. Such a conviction, if it becomes endemic, alters democratic discourse from a “battle of ideas” to a battle of sales pitches for ideas (assuming, again, that one chooses to distinguish ideas from pitches, or actual guilt/innocence from lawyer’s arguments, or binding commitments from the mere words “I promise,” and so on and so forth).
This fragmentation and confusion have helped give rise to what’s variously called the “meta-media” or “explaining industry.” Under most classifications, this category includes media critics for news dailies, certain high-end magazines, panel shows like CNN’s Reliable Sources, media-watch blogs like instapundit.com and talkingpointsmemo.com, and a large percentage of political talk radio. It is no accident that one of the signature lines Mr. Ziegler likes to deliver over his opening bumper music at :06 is “. . . the show where we take a look at the news of the day, we provide you the facts, and then we give you the truth.” For this is how much of contemporary political talk radio understands its function: to explore the day’s news in a depth and detail that other media do not, and to interpret, analyze, and explain that news.
Which all sounds great, except of course “explaining” the news really means editorializing, infusing the actual events of the day with the host’s own opinions. And here is where the real controversy starts, because these opinions are, as just one person’s opinions, exempt from strict journalistic standards of truthfulness, probity, etc., and yet they are often delivered by the talk-radio host not as opinions but as revealed truths, truths intentionally ignored or suppressed by a “mainstream press” that’s “biased” in favor of liberal interests. This is, at any rate, the rhetorical template for Rush Limbaugh’s program, on which most syndicated and large-market political talk radio is modeled, from ABC’s Sean Hannity and Talk Radio Network’s Laura Ingraham to G. G. Liddy, Rusty Humphries, Michael Medved, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz, Dennis Prager, and, in many respects, Mr. John Ziegler.
PURELY INFORMATIVE It’s true that there are, in some large markets and even syndication, a few political talk-radio hosts who identify as moderate or liberal. The best known of these are probably Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, and Doug Stephan. But only a few—and only Stephan has anything close to a national audience. And the tribulations of Franken et al.’s Air America venture are well known. The point is that it is neither inaccurate nor unfair to say that today’s political talk radio is, in general, overwhelmingly conservative.
(whose show is really only semi-political)
Quick sample intros: Mike Gallagher, a regular Fox News contributor whose program is syndicated by Salem Radio Network, has an upcoming book called Surrounded by Idiots: Fighting Liberal Lunacy in America. Neal Boortz, who’s carried by Cox Radio Syndication and JRN, bills himself as “High Priest of the Church of the Painful Truth,” and his recent ads in trade publications feature the quotation “How can we take airport security seriously until ethnic profiling is not only permitted, but encouraged?”
Mr. Z. identifies himself as a Libertarian, though he’s not a registered member of the Libertarian Party, because he feels they “can’t get their act together,” which he does not seem to intend as a witticism.
KFI AM-640 carries Rush Limbaugh every weekday, 9:00 A.M. to noon, via live ISDN feed from Premiere Radio Networks, which is one of the dozen syndication networks that own talk-radio shows so popular that it’s worth it for local stations to air them even though it costs the stations a portion of their spot load. The same goes for Dr. Laura
Spot load is the industry term for the number of minutes per hour given over to commercials. The point of the main-text sentence is that a certain percentage of the spots that run on KFI from 9:00 to noon are Rush/PRN commercials, and they are the ones who get paid by the advertisers. The exact percentages and distributions of local vs. syndicator’s commercials are determined by what’s called the “Clock,” which is represented by a pie-shaped distribution chart that Ms. Bertolucci has on file but will show only a very quick glimpse of, since the spot-load apportionments for syndicated shows in major markets involve complex negotiations between the station and the syndicator, and KFI regards its syndicated Clocks as proprietary info—it doesn’t want other stations to know what deals have been cut with PRN.
Schlessinger, who’s based in southern California and used to broadcast her syndicated show from KFI until the mid-nineties, when Premiere built its own LA facility and was able to offer Schlessinger more-sumptuous digs. Dr. Laura airs M-F from noon to 3:00 on KFI, though her shows are canned and there’s no live feed. Besides 7:00-10:00 P.M.’s Phil Hendrie (another KFI host whose show went into national syndication, and who now has his own private dressing room and studio over at Premiere), the only other weekday syndication KFI uses is Coast to Coast With George Noory, which covers and analyzes news of the paranormal throughout the wee hours.
In White Star Productions’ History of Talk Radio video, available at better libraries everywhere, there is footage of Dr. Laura doing her show right here at KFI, although she’s at a mike in what’s now the Airmix room—which, according to’Mondo, used to be the studio, with what’s now the studio serving as Airmix. (Why they switched rooms is unclear, but transferring all the gear must have been a serious hassle.) In the video, the little gray digital clock propped up counting seconds on Dr. Laura’s desk is the same one that now counts seconds on the wall to Mr. Ziegler’s upper left in the studio—i.e., it’s the very same clock—which not only is strangely thrilling but also further testifies to KFI’s thriftiness about capital expenses.
Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.
Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the
past decade, the industry’s revenues have increased by more than 10 percent a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow. Some of this extreme profitability, and thus the structure of the industry, is due to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows radio companies to acquire up to eight stations in a given market and to control as much as 35 percent of a market’s total ad revenues. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the ’96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive). And these radio conglomerates enjoy not just substantial economies of scale but almost unprecedented degrees of business integration.
Clear Channel bought KFI—or rather the radio company that owned KFI—sometime around 2000. It’s all a little fuzzy, because it appears that. Clear Channel actually bought, or absorbed, the radio company that had just bought KFI from another radio company, or something like that.
Example: Clear Channel Communications Inc. now owns KFI AM-640, plus two other AM stations and five FMs in the Los Angeles market. It also owns Premiere Radio Networks . It also owns the Airwatch subscription news/traffic service. And it designs and manufactures Prophet, KFI’s operating system, which is state-of-the-art and much too expensive for most independent stations. All told, Clear Channel currently owns some one thousand two hundred radio stations nationwide, one of which happens to be Louisville, Kentucky’s WHAS, the AM talk station from which John Ziegler was fired, amid spectacular gossip and controversy, in August of 2003. Which means that Mr. Ziegler now works in Los Angeles for the same company that just fired him in Louisville, such that his firing now appears—in retrospect, and considering the relative sizes of the Louisville and LA markets—to have been a promotion. All of which turns out to be a strange and revealing story about what a talk-radio host’s life is like.
(Which means that the negotiations between KFI and PRN over the terms of syndication for Rush, Dr. Laura, et al. are actually negotiations between two parts of the same company, which either helps explain or renders even more mysterious KFI’s reticence about detailing the Clocks for its PRN shows.)
It turns out that one of the reasons its old Koreatown studios are such a latrine is that KFI’s getting ready to move very soon to a gleaming new complex in Burbank that will house five of Clear Channel’s stations and allow them to share a lot of cutting-edge technical equipment and software. Some of the reasons for the consolidation involve AM radio’s complex, incremental move from analog to digital broadcast, a move that’s a lot more economical if stations can be made to share equipment. The Burbank hub facility will also feature a new and improved mega-Prophet OS that all five stations can use and share files on, which for KFI means convenient real-time access to all sorts of new preloaded bumper music and sound effects and bites.
As the board op, ’Mondo Hernandez is also responsible for downloading and cueing up the sections of popular songs that intro the John Ziegler Show and background Mr. Z.’s voice when a new segment starts. Bumper music is, of course, a talk-radio convention: Rush Limbaugh has a franchise on The Pretenders, and Sean Hannity always uses that horrific Martina McBride “Let freedom ring/Let the guilty pay” song. Mr. Z. favors a whole rotating set of classic rock hooks, but his current favorites are Van Halen’s “Right Now” and a certain jaunty part of the theme to Pirates of the Caribbean, because, according to ’Mondo, “they get John pumped.”
N.B. Mr. Z. usually refers to himself as either “Zig” or “the Zigmeister,” and has made a determined effort to get everybody at KFI to call him Zig, with only limited success so far.
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For obvious reasons, critics of political talk radio concern themselves mainly with the programs’ content. Talk station management, on the other hand, tends to think of content as a subset of personality, of how stimulating a given host is. As for the hosts—ask Mr. Ziegler off-air what makes him good at his job, and he’ll shrug glumly and say, “I’m not really all that talented. I’ve got passion, and I work really hard.” Taken so for granted that nobody in the business seems aware of it is something that an outsider, sitting in Airmix and watching John Ziegler at the microphone, will notice right away. Hosting talk radio is an exotic, highpressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.
“Passion” is a big word in the industry, and John Ziegler uses the word in connection with himself a lot. It appears to mean roughly the same as what Ms. Bertolucci calls “edginess” or “attitude.”
To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious umm’s or you know’s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English—the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.
Part of the answer to why conservative talk radio works so well might be that extreme conservatism provides a neat, clear, univocal template with which to organize one’s opinions and responses to the world. The current term of approbation for this kind of template is “moral clarity.”
The only elocutionary problem Mr. Z. ever exhibits is a habit of confusing the words “censure” and “censor.”
It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is real joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, etc. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by expressions like �
�He really pushes my buttons”).
This, too: Consider the special intimacy of talk radio. It’s usually listened to solo—radio is the most solitary of broadcast media. And half-an-ear background-listening is much more common with music formats than with talk. This is a human being speaking to you, with a pro-caliber voice, eloquently and with passion, in what feels like a one-to-one; it doesn’t take long before you start to feel you know him. Which is why it’s often such a shock when you see a real host, his face—you discover you’ve had a picture of this person in your head without knowing it, and it’s always wrong. This dissonant shock is one reason why Rush and Dr. Laura, even with their huge built-in audiences, did not fare well on TV.
(as the industry is at pains to remind advertisers)
The exact-timing thing is actually a little less urgent for a host who’s got the resources of Clear Channel behind him. This is because in KFI’s Airmix room, nestled third from the bottom in one of the two eight-foot stacks of processing gear to the left of ’Mondo’s mixing board, is an Akai DD1000 Magneto Optical Disk Recorder, known less formally as a “Cashbox.” What this is is a sound compressor, which exploits the fact that even a live studio program is—because of the FCC-mandated seven-second delay—taped. Here is how ’Mondo, in exchange for certain vending-machine comestibles, explains the Cashbox: “All the shows are supposed to start at six past. But if they put more spots in the log, or say, like, if traffic goes long, now we’re all of a sudden starting at seven past or something. The Cashbox can take a twenty-minute segment and turn it into a nineteen.” It does this by using computerized sound-processing to eliminate pauses and periodically accelerate Mr. Z.’s delivery just a bit. The trick is that the Cashbox can compress sound so artfully that you don’t hear the speed-up, at least not in a nineteen-for-twenty exchange (“You get down to eighteen it’s risky, or down around seventeen you can definitely hear it”). So if things are running a little over, ’Mondo has to use the Cashbox—very deftly, via controls that look really complicated—in order to make sure that the Clock’s adhered to and Airwatch breaks, promos, and ad spots all run as specified. A gathering suspicion as to why the Akai DD1000 is called the Cashbox occasions a Q: Does the station ever press ’Mondo or other board ops to use the Cashbox and compress shows in order to make room for additional ads? A: “Not really. What they’ll do is just put an extra spot or two in the log, and then I’ve just got to do the best I can.”
