Posted on 05/07/2003 9:53:01 PM PDT by chance33_98
Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?
By Ken Olsen | for Tolerance.org April 25, 2003 -- Soon after 9.11, a talk radio host in northwestern Montana started airing claims that conservationists and environmentalists were linked to al Qaeda.
Station KGEZ had been vilifying environmental activists for nearly a year with labels like "Green Nazis" and "The Fourth Reich." Blaming them for economic downturns in the local logging and aluminum smelting industries, the station also broadcast names of local conservationists — and, in some cases, their home addresses — as well as the names of some businesses that donated to conservation groups.
Those named on the air had their cars vandalized and received hundreds of harassing telephone calls, some of which included broad threats to kill environmentalists. Bumper stickers with green swastikas or the slogan "Just Say No to the Green Nazis" started appearing on some of their doors.
Some people without direct ties to the environmental movement were openly critical of the station's harsh rhetoric, and they, too, were harassed and suffered property vandalism.
The ugly rhetoric may change — anti-Hispanic bias in the Southwest, anti-gay slurs in the Northeast, anti-Arab bias in the Midwest — but the fact remains: There are a phenomenal number of no-holds-barred hosts pounding their bullying pulpits on talk radio.
Tune the dial to find Hispanics being accused of being universally lazy. Dial up another station to hear gays bashed with fag jokes. Hit "seek" for another station and find people of Middle Eastern origin being referred to as "towel heads."
Commuters and others hear these drive-time slurs every morning and every night, but there remains a paucity of studies on how listeners are affected by the constant barrage of racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant, anti-almost everything not white and far right.
Observers say the problem is growing.
"A Lars Larson (in Portland) or a Michael Savage (on MSNBC) is doing it by spinning a half-truth into a truth-and-a-half, and it becomes gospel," said Paul Shively, former outreach director for Montana Human Rights Network. "Nobody looks for the sources."
Listeners, meanwhile, "go into the coffee shop and regurgitate it," he said. "If anything, it inoculates people to the hatred."
In response to the KGEZ problem, Flathead Valley residents called the Human Rights Network, which started recording the offending radio shows and compiling a detailed report on the station's broadcasts.
The group contacted local law enforcement and urged them to look at the harassment in a broader context instead of just considering the incidents individually.
"There did seem to be a link" between the harassment and the broadcasts, said Travis McAdam, a researcher with the Montana Human Rights Network.
"The vandalism of an office building, a confrontation in a public office, trespassing, people receiving hang up calls may each seem quite insignificant," Ken Toole, program director for the Human Rights Network explained in a letter to the local prosecuting attorney, sheriff and police chief. "But to the community being targeted (in this case, conservationists) they have a cumulative effect.
"Equally important: In this case we believe they point to a pattern of escalating tension which may result in more serious criminal activity."
The Human Rights Network's effort represents a rare attempt to document instances where biased talk radio prompts listeners to take inappropriate action.
A "divisive" medium All-talk radio with a decidedly strident bent has become more prominent in recent decades. Some experts blame the demise of the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine — which required equal broadcast time for opposing views — in the 1980s.
But Steve Rendall, senior analyst with media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and author of "The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error," said that's not accurate.
"Talk radio began as a seriously bankable format in the early 1960s," said Rendall, who first tuned in about 1963. "It was born in the backlash of a bunch of white guys on the right railing against the Civil Rights Movement, the women's movement and the peace movement. Forty years later little has changed."
Except, perhaps, the number of talk radio shows.
Talk radio is cheap to produce, and when broadcasters started using toll-free telephone numbers in the 1980s to make it easier for callers to participate, the popularity of the shows exploded. Some news stations started converting to the all-talk format, Rendall said.
National talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh have helped give the medium its marketing luster, but local drive time shows that broadcast traffic and weather reports along with gossip and bombast "are the rule," he said.
What's the effect?
“Talk radio can be one of the most divisive mediums in the nation,” Rendall said. “Some of these shows, to a greater or lesser degree, engage in kinds of bigotry by saying things like, ‘These peaceniks are traitors’ (or) ‘These black people are undermining our society,’ and they are bound to find some resonance with listeners."
Reinforcing prejudice? Researchers take different positions on whether biased talk radio simply reinforces values listeners already have or prompts them to action.
"People choose to listen to stations they tend to agree with," said Margaret Gordon, dean emeritus of the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. "Very few listen to stations where their views will be challenged."
In cases where angry rhetoric is aimed at gays or people of color, "I think it gives (listeners) the idea some of these ideas are acceptable," Gordon said.
But there's no hard data to make that case.
Part of the problem also is that newspapers and television don't cover talk radio, said Gordon, who teaches classes on news media and public policy. Almost no one has undertaken the expensive and difficult research on the effects of talk radio.
University of Washington communications professor David Domke, meanwhile, sees talk radio as a mobilizing influence — "getting people to act on feelings they already had," he said.
"Does talk radio reinforce stereotypes and prejudice? That's the million-dollar question. My take on that is yes," Domke said.
Perhaps the most definitive national study of talk radio's influence was conducted by David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of "Rushed to Judgment?: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior."
Barker took comprehensive voter survey data gathered by the National Science Foundation and tracked the attitudes of the same pool of voters over the course of three consecutive elections.
He found a definite link between what people heard and their political behavior, whether it be putting bumper stickers on their cars or sharing narrow-minded talk-radio views with others.
Talk listeners are more likely to vote than the general public, Barker said. But they tend to be "confidently misinformed," assuming, for example, that the Clinton administration ran a budget deficit instead of healthy surpluses.
A more "demanding" future In Montana's Flathead Valley, meanwhile, attention from the Human Right's Network and the news media appears to have slightly tempered the talk from KGEZ. The station no longer is treated as a legitimate news source, and it is less likely to name individual activists, said McAdam, the network's researcher.
Still, the station's website shows how difficult it can be to combat the all-talk format. The site continues to post a page dedicated to the "Fourth Reich" with links to things such as "Ecofacism: Lessons from the German Experience."
And, in stepping back to look at the future influences of hundreds of talk-radio stations across the country, University of Washington's Gordon sees only uncertainty.
"I don't know whether to be optimistic or pessimistic," Gordon said.
"Somehow we have to reawaken the American public and have them be more demanding about the information coming their way."
Veteran Pacific Northwest Journalist Ken Olsen is a 2003 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow.
>> DO SOMETHING 10 Ways to Fight Bigotry on the Radio FAIR's Challenging Hate Radio: A Guide for Activists outlines simple steps you can take to pressure stations to clean up their acts.
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>> DIG DEEPER :: Lighten Up! After hearing a bigoted comment on a morning radio show, the editor of Teaching Tolerance magazine reflects on the ups and downs of laughter inspired by bias.
:: Campaign to Block Radio Bias In 1996, FAIR launched a successful campaign to remove Bob Grant, a talk show host who had, among other things, repeatedly called blacks "savages," from New York's WABC, then the flagship of the Disney/ABC radio empire.
More recently, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation launched a less successful effort to keep radio host Michael Savage from getting a TV show on MSNBC. Certainly not tolerance-minded, Savage is known for his inaccurate rants against gays and lesbians and against immigrants to the U.S.
My point there being I hear so much about how we need balance on the airwaves, for non-captive audience, yet they want no balance in the schools. Makes ya wonder.
Grant was promptly hired by WOR, a few spots down the dial in New York. What is most interesting is that while Sean Hannity has been remarkably successful in recent years, he has never generated the kind of listening audience in New that Grant had in his heyday on WABC.
I love this. First the author cites a bunch of supposed bigoted remarks made by an unnamed host, and alleged acts of intimidation by unkown individuals. No sources are given, nor are the names of the hosts. Then a quote is thrown is specifically mentioning Michael Savage and Lars Larson by name, implying that they have made the kinds of bigoted remarks attributed to unnamed talk show hosts such as ‘These black people are undermining our society,’. No doubt these alleged remarks will be regurgitated in coffee shops and repeated as fact by liberals.
Another liberal lie. I was a Bob Grant listener in those days, and he addressed behavior, not race. It just happened that at the time a lot of the bad behavior was coming from an element of the Black community.
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