Back in the late nineties, at the tail end of the Clinton era, I was living in the Winter Hill section of Somerville. Once a week, I walked to Star Market for groceries, where I would sometimes spot an elderly woman in a tattered raincoat placing small slips of white paper beneath the wipers of cars in the parking lot. I eventually succumbed to my curiosity and examined one. It warned, in shaky script, that America was on the brink of collapse due to immigrants, liberals, and homosexuals. Those who cared to learn the truth were exhorted to listen to a radio program called The Savage Nation, hosted by Michael Savage.
I had listened to The Savage Nation a few times, while mired in traffic, and though I did not believe that immigrants and liberals and homosexuals were plotting the demise of our nation—America happened to be enjoying the longest economic expansion in its history—I do remember being struck by the devotion of this woman, who, as a private citizen, had been inspired by Savage to scrawl this warning onto a piece of paper which she then Xeroxed and cut into hundreds of little squares and carried with her to various parking lots in and around Winter Hill.
So who was this Savage?
His real name is Michael Alan Weiner and he was, at that point in his career, a budding talk radio star with an unusual biography. He had worked as a gatekeeper for the psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary, and palled around with the Beats in San Francisco, bragging in particular about his relationship with the famous gay poet Allen Ginsberg. He had earned degrees in anthropology, botany, and nutritional ethnomedicine, and dreamed of becoming a stand-up comic in the mold of Lenny Bruce.
By the 1980s, Weiner had become convinced he was being discriminated against in academia because of his race and gender, a sentiment he commemorated in a poem called “The Death of the White Male.” He had developed a theory that undocumented workers posed an epidemiological risk to Americans and wrote a book about this, which was rejected by numerous publishers. Rather than give up, Weiner recorded a demo tape full of his rants and sent it out to 250 talk radio stations under the name Michael Savage.
In 1994, Savage landed a fill-in gig at KGO in San Francisco and quickly became the station’s most popular host. The slogan he adopted—“To the right of Rush and to the left of God”—suggested the zealous wrath Savage could summon amid his rambling stories. His philosophy, which he called “conservative nationalism,” consisted of excoriating Beltway elites and their global conspirators. He advocated the mass murder of Muslims, the mass deportation of immigrants, and a get-tough policy with the “homosexual mafia” and other “vermin.”
Savage’s equity resided in his ability to paint a vision of America that inflamed the darkest psychological precincts of his listeners. “It’s a weak, sick nation,” he preached. “A weak, sick, broken nation. And you need men like me to save the country. You need men to stand up and stop crying like a baby over everything … No wonder we’re being laughed at around the world.”
This was the belief system that animated the woman who haunted the parking lots of Winter Hill two decades ago. Those of us living amid the peace and prosperity of Clinton’s America looked upon her mission as pitiable and deluded. What world was she living in, anyway?
At that point, The Savage Nation was home to 20 million listeners. One of them was named Donald Trump, whom Savage would eventually dub “the Winston Churchill of our time.”
To understand the full significance of The Savage Nation requires a sustained look into the origins of radio in this country. The framers of the Constitution simply never envisioned a technology that could reach an audience of millions instantly. Many lawmakers believed the medium should be non-commercial and government run.
“American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic,” Luther Johnson, a Texas legislator, argued in 1926. “And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.”
Such concerns led Congress to pass the Radio Act of 1927, which established that the government owned the public airwaves, but that it would grant licenses to private companies to use them “if public convenience, interest or necessity will be served thereby.”
A decade later, FDR pushed for the creation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the airwaves. The FCC, “fearing a further commercialized, conservative-biased, and corporate dominated medium,” passed the Mayflower Doctrine in 1941, which required broadcasters “to allot a reasonable amount of time to the treatment of controversial issues” and assigned them “an affirmative duty to seek [and] provide representative expression of all responsible shades of opinion.” The FCC eventually replaced the Mayflower Doctrine with the Fairness Doctrine, which called for honest programming that afforded “reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.”
Opponents immediately painted the Fairness Doctrine as an assault on the First Amendment for allowing the government to exert editorial control. In practice, the Doctrine never required that programs be ideologically balanced, or offer equal time for opposing views. It simply forbid stations from airing a single perspective exclusively. Whether the subject was a national policy debate or a local referendum question, broadcasters had a duty to present viewpoints with which their listeners disagreed. This is why, over the years, groups as diverse as the ACLU and the National Rifle Association endorsed the Fairness Doctrine.
To put this in modern terms: the FCC wanted to make sure that stations didn’t become for-profit echo chambers.
Consider the case of the only TV station ever to have its license permanently revoked under the Fairness Doctrine: WLBT, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi. WLBT’s ownership not only supported racial segregation, but openly worked to oppose civil rights with groups such as the White Citizens’ Council, which operated a bookstore in the lobby of the station’s studios in downtown Jackson. The station provided a platform for those fighting the federal government’s efforts to provide African Americans access to voting, public schools, and other basic amenities. This was entirely permissible under the Fairness Doctrine. But the station also censored any views to the contrary.
In 1955, for example, the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, later named the first African American to the Supreme Court, appeared on the Today Show. WLBT refused to air the national feed, posting a sign reading Sorry, Cable Trouble. Station Manager Fred Beard explained that he had pulled the interview because NBC had become an instrument of “Negro propaganda.” The station routinely suppressed any coverage of the Civil Rights movement by feigning technical difficulties. It also refused to air entertainment programs that included African-American actors, or made even mild references to racial justice.
Civil rights groups, along with NBC itself, sent numerous petitions to the FCC, complaining that WLBT’s owner, Lamar Broadcasting, was in flagrant violation of the Fairness Doctrine. The FCC ruled, not once, but twice, in favor of Lamar. The only reason Lamar’s license was finally revoked, in 1969, was because a federal judge named Warren Burger ordered the FCC to do so.
To summarize: the FCC, though legally required to enforce the Fairness Doctrine, allowed a TV station to blatantly censor its news coverage and to act as a propaganda tool against racial justice and federal law for two decades. Only a legal opinion written by the eventual Chief Justice of the Supreme Court compelled the FCC to start doing its job.
Or consider the case of the investigative journalist Fred J. Cook. In 1964, he published a book called Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right, which infuriated conservatives. A man named Reverend Billy James Hargis used his daily show on a Pennsylvania radio station, Christian Crusade, to uncork a slanderous fifteen-minute tirade against Cook.
Cook requested a chance to respond, citing the Fairness Doctrine, which guaranteed citizens the right to respond to such personal attacks, on air. The station refused, citing the First Amendment right to Freedom of the Press. Cook sued. The case wound up in the Supreme Court, which sided, unanimously, with Cook.
The gist of the decision was that the rights of viewers and listeners took precedence over that of private broadcasters. “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail,” wrote Justice Byron White, “rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the government itself or a private licensee. It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here … There is no sanctuary in the First Amendment for unlimited private censorship operating in a medium not open to all.”
What you’re seeing in these cases is public servants struggling to prevent bad stories—fraudulent, biased, even malicious ones—from polluting our discourse. The Fairness Doctrine required that private broadcasters set aside partisan or profit motives to serve the public interest.
That idea perished with Ronald Reagan. As part of his wider effort to deregulate and privatize, he chose a former broadcast industry lawyer named Mark Fowler to head the FCC. “The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants,” Fowler argued. TV was “just another appliance—it’s a toaster with pictures.”
Emboldened by the legal opinion of two little-known judges, Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, Fowler stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine. Station owners quickly ditched public affairs programming and consolidated into monopolies. When Congress voted to reinstate the rule, Reagan vetoed the bill. In 1987, the FCC abolished the Doctrine. Later, it eliminated two corollary rules, one prohibiting on-air personal attacks, the second preventing broadcasters from endorsing political candidates.
It’s important to be clear, at this point, about the limits of the Fairness Doctrine. It was never intended as a panacea for the Fourth Estate. In practice, it simply discouraged station owners from hiring controversial hosts, because they feared the legal fallout: the requirement to air opposing opinions, the risk of fines, or a lost license. It was basically a spoiler plate for propaganda.
With the spoiler plate gone, conservative media roared to life. Station owners, some motivated by ideology, most by profit, stacked their schedules with silver-tongued ideologues. The moribund AM radio band came alive with ranters. In 1996, Fox News launched, offering viewers the same partisan formula on the picture toaster. This meant that a citizen could move through his entire day, from car to living room, from speaker to screen, hearing the same aggrieved agitprop.
But why did conservative hosts corner the medium so quickly? As with any market boom, the answer resides in a confluence of factors: a remarkably potent product, effective salesmen, and customers yearning for relief.
It’s worth starting with the question of audience. In 1951, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she argued that totalitarianism is, in fact, a kind of organized loneliness, one that takes root in societies where people feel angry and dislocated, left behind by capitalist expansion. People who lose this sense of identity and rootedness come to feel superfluous and this makes them frantic to find a “telos,” or a grand narrative, that will grant their life meaning and direction.
This is precisely what the most popular talk radio hosts did for listeners, and what inspired their fanatical devotion. They weren’t just providing three hours of blarney to banish the boredom of the afternoon commute. They were constructing a coherent and thrilling worldview. The central feature of this worldview was that our traditional institutions could not be trusted. Government was inept when it was not actually malicious and the only reason you didn’t hear more about this was because the rest of the media was in on the plot. Whether you realized it or not, you were in danger every single minute of every day—in danger of having your constitutional rights assaulted, of being taxed into penury, of being disrespected, dismissed, enslaved, even killed.
Hosts essentially mass marketed the victimology Richard Hofstadter described, aggrandizing the petty symptoms of cultural dislocation experienced by their listeners—older white men, mostly—into riveting epics of paranoia. While NPR brewed its weak tea of passive reporting, talk radio slung espresso shots of rhapsodic gaslighting. For years, I harbored a secret conservative talk habit and, if I’m being honest, a grudging admiration for its practitioners. This should explain my decision to write not one, but two, novels about talk radio hosts.
In a literary sense, they understood the concept of stakes, that listeners hungered for a sense of heroic urgency, what Virginia Woolf called “the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid.” Did Limbaugh and his comrades traffic in lies and innuendo? Sure. But ask any novelist what matters more: that you misled your readers, or that you brought them alive?
The reason our political discourse has shifted so dramatically to the right over the past half century is because conservatives have a narrative advantage, one instigated by talk radio: the willingness to tell bad stories for political advantage.
Think about climate change. What’s the story the left is stuck telling? That humans have been roaring drunk on fossil fuels for the past two centuries and are destroying the planet’s thermostat, thanks to our unsustainable lust for convenience. The only way to rescue ourselves is to redesign our lives so as to reduce the rampant consumption that is the cornerstone of American culture and economic health. The conservative counter-narrative is that climate change is a hoax cooked up by scientists and tree-hugging elites who want to make you feel guilty for driving your SUV. Which story would you rather believe?
How about the financial meltdown of 2008? The left’s version is that high rollers and predatory lenders, enabled by years of deregulation, turned mortgage debt into a massive profit source, exposing the corrosive greed at the heart of late-model capitalism. Wall Street CEOs made billions, while working- and middle-class Americans faced mass foreclosures and exploded pension plans. The right blamed the government for lending money to poor people.
The consensus view of the ensuing election was that Americans supported a sensible Democrat in reaction to eight years of Republican mismanagement. Talk radio portrayed Obama’s election as a coup d’état that would result in terrorists being set free among us, a tax on personal carbon use, confiscation of guns, and the importation of sharia law.
I kind of wish I were exaggerating. I’m not. In talk radio, conservatives found an incubator for lurid conspiracies that would be laughed out of any editorial meeting. These theories didn’t just reinvent the present, but the past. The New Deal and the Great Society programs weren’t designed to help citizens avoid hardship but to consolidate the nefarious powers of the State.
The Tea Party’s hysterical response to health-care reform wasn’t a function of corporate PACs with chartered buses. It had been gestating for decades on the AM dial. Hosts had trained their listeners to regard any effort to strengthen the safety net as an assault on personal liberty. With the coming of Obamacare, “Statists would control not only the material wealth of the individual, but his physical well-being,” host Mark Levin warned. A “politburo” would arise in which political appointees and bureaucrats decided “who lives and dies.” Within months, this abstract notion had taken shape as “death panels” to euthanize the aged.
Republican politicians knew this claim was hot air but promoted it anyway. Mainstream media outlets debunked it endlessly. But as we know, false claims repeated often enough calcify into truths, especially among the elderly. As of last year, 60 percent of Americans still believed death panels were real, or weren’t sure. Reporters devoted far more coverage to these false claims than the broadly popular measures actually contained within the Affordable Care Act.
This is what Nancy Pelosi meant when she told a room full of county officials, in 2010, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it—away from the fog of the controversy.” Talk radio hosts used the first half of this quote (“we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”) to stoke outrage about the bill’s allegedly secretive legislative genesis. Mainstream reporters then obediently threw this truncated quote back in Pelosi’s face, completing the loop. Her effort to condemn the fog of controversy was quickly consumed by it.
One of the reasons I’ve always been intrigued by the history of the Fairness Doctrine is because it embodies the war between two basics conceptions of American life: collectivism versus privatization.
Legislators imposed the Doctrine to insure that our discourse would take the form of a respectful exchange about issues of common concern. This is what Postman means when he talks about the quality of a culture being rooted in the Platonic idea of conversation. The repeal of the Doctrine reshaped American discourse into a series of arguments, mostly one-sided, and inevitably predicated on competing interests. That is, no longer a conversation at all.
Why did this happen? Because stories about competing interests proved far more seductive (and therefore profitable) than ones about shared goals. Successful talk radio hosts deftly pitted small businesses versus regulators, job creators versus unions, taxpayers versus bureaucrats, upstanding Christians versus catamites and abortionists. And so on.
The legislators and jurists who once spoke of the need to address “controversial issues” never envisioned a demagogue thundering for hours on end—nor a grid of howling pundits—as reasonable debate. In such media settings, the question is not: How do we solve this problem? It is: Whose agenda will prevail? Civic culture becomes a Hobbesian warzone.
To put it more broadly: capitalism needed a mechanism to shift popular attention away from the common good. Privatize ideology and you license all manner of privatization. Public lands become available for development and mining and drilling. Public schools give way to charters and vouchers. Public policy becomes a pig trough for special interests.
The current state of our prison industrial complex provides a rather transparent view of the process. The common good would be to reform criminal justice and reduce incarceration rates. But this conversation is drowned out by an argument about crime, one based on phony stats that pit law-abiding (read: white) citizens against dark-skinned assailants and immigrants. The private prison lobby contributes millions to help elect the law-and-order candidate. Among the first actions his administration takes is to rescind an order to phase out private prisons. Next, he enacts immigration policies that will fill private facilities with undocumented workers. A public crackdown becomes a private windfall.
To focus on the financial endgame, though, is to overlook that old woman who trudged around Somerville with her homemade leaflets, heralding the prophecies of Michael Savage. She wasn’t looking to pad corporate profits, after all. She was heeding a voice of divine revelation.
That sounds grandiose, but it’s the reason conservative talk overtook AM radio: because there was a whole flock of Americans yearning for the spiritual comforts of dogma. What the most popular hosts were selling, ultimately, was the illusion of moral surety. They were never wrong, never at a loss for words, never confused or troubled or sorry. To maintain this pose required neutralizing any voices of opposition. This is what made the Fairness Doctrine such a bulwark against talk radio.
There are certainly other factors that explain its proliferation. Deregulation and media consolidation made syndication cheap and lucrative. Events such as the terrorist attacks of 2001, and Obama’s election, spiked anxieties and ratings. But for conservative talk to thrive in the way it has required the forging of a new covenant, what amounts to an Unfairness Doctrine.
I mean by this that the Limbaughs and Savages of the world could only survive in a media landscape that allowed them to pose as journalists and experts without ever having to compete with actual journalists and experts, in which they could trumpet delusions and conspiracies without anyone to hold them accountable, in which they could craft a vision of America entirely insulated from the world of empirical fact or historical context. They had to be granted a safe space.
The glorious irony was that talk radio hosts used this safe space to insist that they were under siege, that the ideas they preached were, in fact, so disruptive to the status quo that elites would do anything to silence them. The promotion of this martyr complex was a rhetorical stratagem as old as the Bible (“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”) Talk radio hosts didn’t just inoculate their audience against criticism. They exhorted listeners to glory in condemnation. The establishment’s rejection of their claims became proof of their validity.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
To preserve their status as persecuted truth tellers, hosts had to create a suitable foil, the “liberal media” whose raison d’être was to spread disinformation to gullible Americans. Daniel Henninger, of the Wall Street Journal, put it like this: “Ronald Reagan tore down this wall [the Fairness Doctrine] in 1987 … and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.”
The link Henninger draws between the end of the Cold War and the rise of talk radio, though cheeky on his part, is no coincidence. For decades, conservative demagogues had vilified Russia and those who sympathized with the Communist cause. With the Evil Empire collapsing, Limbaugh and his comrades shifted their animus to a roster of domestic enemies. The goal was to convince listeners that everyone outside the reach of their voice harbored a corrupt agenda: politicians, media elites, academics, feminazis. Boil off the jocular bombast, and their skepticism aped totalitarian thought: dismiss any opponent as partisan, any inconvenient fact as left-wing propaganda.
But it’s important to recognize that the essential function of talk radio was never to advocate for conservative positions. It was to build loyalty among listeners, so as to grow an audience for the sponsors. The most efficient way to do this was to get “dittoheads” to stop thinking for themselves, stop asking questions, stop exercising their critical faculty. The end was profit; the means was indoctrination.
As entertainers, talk radio hosts succeed because they push limits. Some of this is Marketing 101. When you’re hawking survivalist kits to senior citizens, you have to find a way to ratchet up the threat level. But talk radio hosts were the first media figures to grasp the implications of an unregulated marketplace, that journalistic integrity was irrelevant, even undesirable, in a pure attention economy.
Trump himself understood this intuitively, in part because he came of age as a tabloid celebrity in the New York City of the Seventies, where the most controversial voice on the airwaves was Bob Grant, a pioneer in the world of conservative talk radio.
Grant, who landed his gig on the liberal WMCA thanks to the Fairness Doctrine, blamed America’s descent into “third worldism” on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and proposed a mandatory sterilization program to lower the birthrate among poor women. He was fired repeatedly for offensive remarks, only to be rehired. The more outrageous he became, the higher his ratings.
Grant’s success underscored the quality Trump admired in his Manhattan mentor, Roy Cohn: shamelessness. To Cohn, the ultimate sin committed by his former boss, Joseph McCarthy, wasn’t falsely accusing Americans of being Communists, or ruining thousands of lives. It was expressing shame. This is the precise moral outlook that talk radio has injected into the cultural bloodstream for the past 30 years.
“Anything down there about your souls?” Ishmael is asked by an acquaintance, after signing on with Ahab. “Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any … No matter though, I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”
Trump didn’t invent lying or hypocrisy or corruption. He simply imported the shameless self-promotion he flaunted in the worlds of real estate and entertainment to politics. In fact, he entered the arena with an advantage that virtually no one in the old guard media and political classes recognized: the GOP base hungered for a politician whose voice echoed the ones they tuned into daily. Talk radio had been transmuting despair into triumphant rage for decades. Trump merely inherited its audience share.
In the past decade, the nexus of conservative media has migrated online, and lurched far enough to the right to openly embrace white nationalism and conspiracy theorists. One need look no further than Trump’s prophet, Steve Bannon, the former editor of a website that specializes in both.
Trump got to know Bannon as a guest on his talk radio program, where the two conducted an open-air courtship. When Trump’s campaign began to implode, he recruited Bannon to run the operation specifically because Bannon understood the power dynamics of the reactionary right’s new media ecosystem—that a significant percentage of voters had been radicalized by talk radio and were therefore impervious to outside influences.
Bannon recognized that the Internet could be used to convert the conservative echo chamber into a bio weapons lab, where partisans viralize disinformation. That old woman with her homemade Michael Savage leaflets still existed. She still had time on her hands. Only now she had a computer and a Facebook page and Twitter. And she wasn’t alone. She was part of a movement.
It’s impossible to say for certain what our political landscape would look like if the Fairness Doctrine hadn’t been rescinded. Clearly, the advent of satellite radio and cable television would have complicated any regulation predicated on the scarcity of public airwaves.
It’s much more apparent what the influence of conservative talk radio has been over the past 30 years. Those shocked by the rise of Trumpism simply weren’t tuned to the right frequency. They had no idea that tens of millions of Americans had come to identify “leadership” with rambling narcissists and “courage” with outbursts that gave voice to their own inhibited bigotries. The targets Trump chose (“the media!,” “the global elites!”), the crude branding (“Lyin Ted,” “Crooked Hillary”), the catch phrases (“politically correct,” “rigged system”)—all of it derived from talk radio.
I don’t listen to the genre much these days. I don’t have to, really, because so much of its paranoid ideation has bled into the mainstream. The last time I tuned in was a month or so after the election. The first caller identified himself as a Teamster and life-long Democrat who bolted the party to back Trump. He now considered Democrats to be Communists, and was furious about the “paid protestors” showing up at town hall events to support Obamacare. If liberals continued on this path of violence, he vowed that he would be “the first one out on the street.”
The next caller applauded the Teamster’s courage. “The last guy you had on,” he told the host, “he learned how to not to be a Democrat through talk radio. Not because of Obama. He started listening to you and you’re his answer. And, you know, everybody gets a brain at a different time in life. I got mine when I was 25. So welcome aboard, buddy, and start talking it out, talking to people about talk radio, because that’s what helped people get Donald Trump as president.”
Trump is no more the engineer of this tectonic shift than he is a real estate magnate. He’s the front man for a movement that took root and grew in direct correlation to the rise of talk radio. The GOP establishment embraced the medium because it helped shape hyper-partisan, misinformed voters who could be counted upon to embrace a politics of resentment over economic uplift. What they got in the bargain was a president who talks like Rush Limbaugh on the stump and thinks like a dittohead off it, a man who responds to accusations that he colluded with our chief foreign enemy by accusing his predecessor of spying on him. When asked to produce evidence, he can only point to the ranting of a talk radio host.