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?