Talk Is Cheap

Rush who?

A quote on Twitter a few months ago from comedian and podcaster Dana Gould made me ponder a how ephemeral a career in talk radio is.  Gould was talking specifically about Rush Limbaugh, about a year after the radio commentator's death.

"[I'm] thinking about Rush Limbaugh and how, now that he’s dead, you never, ever hear about him," Gould wrote.  "No one mentions anything he did. Because what he did had no value. It contributed nothing worthwhile to the culture. Nothing of lasting value. He just made anger. Every day. Rising, blooming and fading like a fart. Then he died and was instantly replaced by a fleet of little replicas, farting fake fury five days a week. Creating nothing of interest or artistic value to anyone. Seriously, what an awful way to make a living."

Of course, talk radio hosts like that are a dime a dozen.  Limbaugh was hardly the first right-wing talk radio host on the American waves, in fact.  Many others had come and gone before Limbaugh went into national syndication in 1988.  The most obvious example is Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest with his nationally aired radio show in which he espoused pro-fascist, anti-Semitic views in the 1930s.  No one remembers him today, as well they should not.  Ditto Walter Winchell, the broadcaster from the 1940s and 1950s, who equated civil rights with communism and urged Americans not to get the polio vaccine.  Even if people don't talk about Limbaugh now, many remember him, but their memories will fade, and eventually a generation with no direct memory of him at all will come along.

And when I talk about talk radio hosts being easily forgotten and disposable, I'm not just talking about conservatives.  Liberal talk-radio hosts are just as forgettable.  Gould's remarks made me think of Ed Schultz as an example.

From 2005 to 2014, Schultz was a leading progressive voice on talk radio, a reputation which he parlayed into a television program on MSNBC for six years beginning in 2009.  Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I watched him religiously and hung on almost every word he said.  When Schultz was fired from MSNBC in 2015, I continued listening to him on his podcast.  Then in January 2016, just before Schultz was to start a new news commentary program on another TV network, he mocked Martin O'Malley - my 2016 Democratic presidential candidate - and said that nobody had tuned into the most recent Democratic presidential debate to hear O'Malley.  Realizing he called me a nobody, I stopped listening to him.  And I decided not to tune in to his new show on this other network.

This other network was RT America, the U.S. arm of Russia Today, the Russian national television channel.  Available mostly through the Internet, it aired commentary aimed at skewering the establishments of both major parties . . . and Schultz ended up not just complimenting Putin, a man he once ridiculed, but he also consistently praised Trump.  His commentary on Hillary Clinton became more vicious than it had even been on MSNBC, though it might interest you to know that, when he was a guest on MSNBC prior to getting his own show on the channel, he consistently defended Hillary.  Ed was for her before she was against her.

Schultz died in 2018, and even though I was sad to hear the news, I had moved on from his shtick long before.  At least Limbaugh was consistent and had a core ideology.  Schultz, who had actually started out as a conservative Republican, didn't seem to have any rock-solid beliefs.  He simply adjusted his views to the moment.  Yes, he genuinely abandoned his conservative views when he realized they were bunk, but as a leftist, he veered between establishmentarian and populist opinions based on what his audience and his employers wanted him to say and do. A different set of commentators took over the old time slots he'd once had on MSNBC, And life went on and everyone moved on.   

Truth be told, Schultz was not the sort of commentator known for deep political thought.  With legal abortion on the line now, it might do well to remember this incoherent explanation from Schultz of his views on abortion:  "Now, as far as abortion is concerned, in my heart I'm a Christian. I'm against it. But we're livin' in a country where the majority rule and I'm not, as a talk show host, overturning Roe v. Wade."

I'm left asking how many talk show hosts ever overturned any Supreme Court decision.

Here today, gone tomorrow.  An icon in life, a trivia question in death.  That's the way it is in the talk-radio business.  And that goes or TV talk show hosts also; someday, we'll forget about the current crop of TV talk-show hosts on cable news after they're gone.  And even though he's still alive, does anyone really talk about Chris Matthews anymore?

Beck-Ola

Fox News made a lot of liberals happy for a change this week. The so-called "fair and balanced news" channel announced that Glenn Beck's show, on at 5 PM Eastern, will end later this year.

I'm not happy. I'm very upset . . . about having to wait so long before it ends!

The Beckster, as Ed Schultz likes to call him, has the third highest-rated show on cable news, but Beck's ratings have been plummeting recently as Beck himself has gotten weirder. He's suggested, among other things, that both George Walker Bush and Barack Obama have been helping to bring about a new pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East by refusing to bomb the ruins of ancient Babylon during the Iraq War. Seems Beck thinks the caliphate's capital is to be established there.

Some of Beck's recent theories of world domination by enemies of America sound like they came right out of James Bond movies or Saturday morning television cartoons, but Beck has been under protest from liberal activists virtually since his Fox show began in January 2009. Remember that Beck - on another Fox show - declared in July of that year that President Obama had a "deep-seated hatred for white people," and in August 2010 Beck famously told people who were dropped from unemployment benefits after 99 weeks to work at McDonald's if they had to, even though the fast-food chain had more job applicants than jobs. His Austin Powers-redolent world government theories were only part of his problem.

Anyway, enough advertisers pulled their TV commercials from the Beckster's show to encourage Fox to drop him, although Beck and the network will (reportedly) continue to work together to develop new programming. Beck is going behind the scenes, where he likely won't be heard from again, and he's treating this career change like a promotion.

It's a Pyrrhic victory in one respect. Beck goes against noted MSNBC wild man Chris Matthews, who answers Beck's wild theories on a regular basis, in the same 5 PM Eastern time slot, and even today he trounces Matthews's "Hardball" show in the ratings. So even as Matthews rants against Beck, Beck still gets more viewers. I suppose more people found out the truth about Beck by seeing the rerun of "Hardball" at 7 PM Eastern, or maybe people suddenly started to find Beck moronic on their own and stopped watching. But mostly, it was likely the petitioning against Beck's advertisers that did him in. That's the same reason Beck's radio show has been dropped from so many stations.

Beck's impending departure from Fox and his diminished presence on radio comprise a blow against the right's toxic gibberish, and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post suggests that Beck's raging paranoia against the system is less of a factor in the body politic now that the economy is slowly recovering. However, the campaign against Beck only treated a symptom. The disease, in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and that Long Island Irish Nazi Sean Hannity - all of whom can be as loony as Beck and also are just as mean-spirited - goes merrily on. Right-wing talk shows will never die. Remember, this is America.

The Doctor Is Out

Score one for decency.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger announced that she is ending her radio show at the end of the year. She told Larry King that her decision has nothing to do with the racial slur she emitted on the air last week, but rather to regain her right to free speech. Says the not-so-good doctor: "The reason is I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I'm sort of done with that."

In other words, she's afraid of losing advertisers.

Say what's on her mind and in her heart? I never thought she had either. Even the Tin Man and the Scarecrow had one or the other, and, when it comes to facing adversity she herself created, Dr. Laura has about as much courage as the Cowardly Lion.

A friend of mine who's a nationally known journalist - I'm not mentioning any names - was one of many who put pressure on getting Schlessinger off the air, and Dr. Laura's appearance with King was her way of insisting the she's jumping rather than being pushed. I don't know how Schlessinger is going to speak out for the mean-spirited social values she's championed all these years without a microphone - her Web site, I assume - but if she uses the opportunity to offend anyone else, she'll be called on it.

Incidentally, though Schlessinger apologized for using the N-word, what she said afterwards was almost as offensive. She thought that once Barack Obama was elected President, black people would realize that racism is dead and stop complaining - this in light of racist political rallies over the President's spending plans. She sounds like the Rush Limbaugh fan who once declared, "[Limbaugh] is right. Racism in this country is dead. I don't know what the (pluralized N-word) are going to complain about now."

Oh ,well, I hope this is over, because we're waging two wars simultaneously, and there's no time for fighting. (Get it?)

Now that Dr. Laura is showing herself the door, now's a good time to put the pressure on other right-wing talkers to make a less-than-graceful exit. Let's go after Glenn Beck next.

Don't Call the Doctor

When I heard that Dr. Laura Schlessinger used the N-word eleven times, I had one question: WTF?

I certainly wasn't LOL.

Schlessinger - whose doctorate is not in psychology but in physiology, the study of the functioning of living systems - was asked by a black woman on how to deal with the apparent racism of her white husband's friends, and the not-so-good doctor saw nothing wrong with the N-word because black comedians use it all the time. Schlessinger could have stopped there, but she complained how, when white people say the N-word, "it's a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it's affectionate."

Schlessinger - who obviously never paid very much attention to the viciousness of such stand-up comedy - offended the caller, who called her on using the N-word. Schlessinger proceeded to use it repeatedly, complained about being taken out of context and told the caller that maybe she shouldn't have married outside her race. To her credit, Schelssinger admitted that what she said was wrong, but didn't actually she was sorry, and that she was trying to make "a philosophical point."

Schlessinger - whose doctorate doesn't require her to discuss anything related to deep thought - must be on another planet. I understand her point - black people use the N-word in popular entertainment and no one complains. How does she know a lot of black people don't find that offensive? Why does she think that black comedians on cable television and their largely black studio audiences reflect black America? And if Schlessinger - whose mother was an Italian war bride of an American Jewish soldier who served in the Second World War - can't recommend ways to deal with adversity in mixed marriages, why would anyone should ask her for advice?

Schlessinger - who keeps making me insert clauses following her surname that are punctuated by hyphens - ought to get out of her radio station studio and listen to what black people really think. And if she wants to make philosophical points, maybe she should read Plato or Freud so she can learn how to think before she speaks.

I can't believe that Schlessinger - who was once endorsed by odious right-wing pundit Cal Thomas as a standard bearer of family values - is likely to remain on the air. I'm calling her by another N-word. Neanderthal.

Goodbye Paul Harvey

It seems highly ironic that, even as Rush Limbaugh was offering his usual mix of blather and bluster, all devoid of intellectual content or even basic fact - he misquoted a line in the Declaration of Independence and attributed it to the Constitution - Paul Harvey, the dean of conservative radio commentary, died at ninety. This is sad, and for more reasons than one. One big reason is that Harvey, despite his provincial Midwestern outlook, was in fact a fair-minded guy. He told President Nixon to get out of Vietnam after realizing that the war was unwinnable, and he opposed - yes, opposed - censorship during the 1985 Parents' Music Resource Center controversy over dirty rock lyrics. (Harvey was in radio when you couldn't use dirty words like "cancer" and "syphilis," and feared that a slippery slope would result once folks started banning a few dirty words.)

Harvey was lampooned for his staccato delivery and his . . . , . . . , . . . , long pauses (couldn't resist), along with his penchant for reading ads from his sponsors (a time-honored practice in American talk radio, actually), but he was no rabble-rouser, he was very direct and unpretentious, and he was very much the archetypal Midwesterner, and for that he will be missed.

Good day! R.I.P.