Posted on 05/19/2003 10:05:43 AM PDT by Hugenot
NewsMax.com's John Rossiello interviews one of the all-time greats of talk radio.
This month talk radio legend Bob Grant marks his fifty-fifth year in broadcasting, continuing the style of opinionated talk radio that he pioneered, using a format that has transformed the industry into a political force to be reckoned with.
Today, broadcasts like WOR Radio's "Bob Grant Show" have become an indispensable source of both information and entertainment for listeners across the political spectrum. In fact, the New York-based talker's success has inspired so many imitators that his style has become a virtual blueprint for modern talk radio.
Over his more than five decades on-the-air, Grant has introduced millions of listeners to the kind of hot-button political debate that has become a staple of both talk TV and radio. Many, like myself, grew up in households where Grant's show was always on.
In fact, ever since I can remember, my mother was an avid listener of "The Bob Grant Show." (NewMax.com Executive Editor Chris Ruddy's mother was also a big Bob Grant fan.)
Just as Grant's unique style of broadcast journalism set the pace for the new generation of talk radio hosts, the talk legend's career provides inspiration for all aspiring young journalists.
Last week I had the opportunity to interview the King of Talk Radio about his life and times as a leader in America's most dynamic communications medium.
JOHN ROSSIELLO: This week marks your fifty-fifth year in broadcasting - others have come and gone, but you're still speaking with a vast audience in New York each day - how did it all begin for you?
BOB GRANT: Well, good question. It began as a result of my being in educational radio. Actually it went from being a teacher with the Board of Education to educational radio to commercial radio.
JR: What subject did you teach?
BG: History.
JR: What would you say was your favorite part of teaching history?
BG: Probably politics. I think it's exciting, I think it's what people are concerned with. I had some favorite politicians, but perhaps my most favorite was Ronald Reagan.
JR: Talk radio has really become a huge sensation and it's well known that you are a pioneer in that field. Many other programs have followed your example. Do you take pride in that?
BG: Not really. Quite frankly, to be perfectly blunt about it, I am annoyed that so many people have modeled themselves after me. Outside of one or two, not one of them mentions me.
JR: Do you think that's envy?
BG: On their part no they have no reason to be envious. There is no such thing as gratitude. There are several people, I won't even bother mentioning them, who really, in some measure, owe their start to me. Some people that I helped and that I was instrumental their beginning their careers, outside of G. Gordon Liddy there is no one that takes time to mention yours truly.
JR: Everyone knows that broadcasting has changed over the past 55 years. How have you been part of that change?
BG: I recall back maybe 20 years ago, my agent, who did a lot of traveling and listened to radio stations around the country, said, "You know everybody out there is imitating you. Everyone wants to do a Bob Grant."
I think that that has been part of the change, because when someone is successful, people say "Hey I guess it's safe to do what he's doing." But in the beginning everybody was afraid to be so honest, so blunt, to criticize the audience, to criticize the callers, to argue with people, to hang up on them, to tell them if he thought they were stupid. It just wasn't done. And now a lot of people have done it. They put their own imprint on it. but I know from other people telling me that they admit it they were influenced by me.
JR: And they should be.
JR: It's actually well known that you have influenced the outcome of several elections. Many in the media have tried to do that, but few succeed. How have you been able to succeed at it?
BG: I think the audience has come to respect my judgment, have come to have confidence that I'm telling them the truth. That's number one. Number two, I think I was able to make a logical case for the person that I wanted them to vote for. I think those two elements are what did it. And I know there's maybe three or four candidates that might not have made it, if not for me. I don't know for sure. Nobody can say that if it weren't for Bob Grant they wouldn't have made it, but a lot of people believe that and if that's true, and I think it is, the reason is that they were receptive to what I had to say.
JR: How would you describe your relationship with the callers?
BG: It's a very personal relationship - actually a personal relationship in terms of the dynamics on the air. I don't mean that I meet them afterwards and we have coffee together. Hardly. but what I mean is when I'm having a conversation with a caller, I'm not even thinking about the audience. I'm not even thinking of anything but my reaction to that caller. Therefore, if that caller gets on my nerves, he knows about it and if he knows about it, then the audience knows about it.
JR: What can you say about your relationship with Mario Cuomo?
BG: There is none, because I don't like him and he doesn't like me. He is a duplicitous individual in that I know that he made phone calls, very seriously complaining about me and wanted to put pressure on me, and yet I don't think he has come forward and admitted that. I used to like him. I used to like him a lot. But then after he became governor, I think his success went to his head and our personal relationship vanished. Now maybe some people would say that I was too hard on him, and maybe that's right. But that's the way I am, and I don't ever think about it except that you're asking me this question.
JR: What other politicians have you dealt with in your 55 year career?
BG: My work should really preclude my getting personally friendly with politicians of either party, really, because if I'm going to talk about them, if I'm going to make fair comment about them, then I really shouldn't be involved with them personally, because it might color my comments.
JR: What is your biggest fear as a broadcaster?
BG: I don't think have any!
JR: Really, not one fear?
BG: No. What is there to fear? I mean, no, as a matter of fact the best part of my day are the hours that that I am on the air. So, no. I may have had a fear in the past, but I no longer do, because long ago I realized that not everyone is going to like me and not to worry about what I say.
So when I make a comment, I know there are a lot of people in the audience who never call, but who probably don't like me. That's okay. I don't ask for them to like me. I only ask for them to listen, and this is something they don't understand. They say, "I listen to your program but I don't like you." I say, "Well, were you listening?" "Yes, I am, just about everyday." And I say, "Well okay, keep not liking me."
JR: What is your most memorable experience on the air in 55 years?
BG: Interviewing Ronald Reagan. At the time I interviewed him, it was his first interview as a politician. And when the PR firm representing him called my producer in 1965 and asked if I would like to have him on the program, my producer said we don't do show business interviews.
Then the guy said we don't want him to be on to talk about his last movie; he didn't even make a movie recently. He's going to run for governor of California. It was his very first interview on a telephone talk show as a gubernatorial candidate. He wasn't even officially a candidate yet, he was just running in the primaries.
JR: Are their any trends in broadcasting that you find disturbing or disappointing?
BG: Yes -- this obsession with so called diversity. And there's too many women on the air. Too many women have taken over, especially in television and it's so obvious what goes on. A guy goes in and applies for a job and doesn't get it because he is not a female. I think its over done. We are saturated with females. Now they even want to be doing sports. And I don't care who knows that I object to that. Yes, I am a male chauvinist.
JR: How much self promotion do you think a talk show host should do?
BG: I probably didn't do enough over the years, because I am still from the old school, where you are told not to brag about yourself, although I am trying to doing some of that. Today the style is different. Some hosts are constantly telling the audience how great they are. Good for them and they are very successful. God bless them. They are on the right side politically and we need all the help we can get in the media.
JR: What is your motivation to go every day into the studio and perform?
BG: Well hopefully, to build an audience and to maintain an audience. But outside of that, I don't have any illusions. I'm not going to change what goes on. We are slipping and sliding towards third-worldism. The country is being lost to diversity, foreign invaders and I have no illusions. I don't have the power to save people from themselves.
So, I just go in there and fight the good fight each and every day, and wait until the next day and try again. But I have no illusions about reforming people. It's not going to happen.
JR: What advice do you have for other talk show hosts?
BG: Well, I would say the same thing to them that was said to me when I started. And that is to be yourself, whatever yourself is. If you have a particular set of beliefs, be honest to the beliefs. Don't try to posture, be yourself.
JR: What do think that you would be doing if you weren't a talk radio host?
BG: I would like to be on the faculty of a university.
JR: What advice do you have for young journalists, like me, embarking on a career in journalism or even broadcasting?
BG: First of all, make sure that's what you want and if you're sure that's what you want, then devote yourself to getting it without any compromise. Never be afraid, always keep your eyes open for opportunity. And it is my belief that if you have some talent and you apply that talent, you will be successful.
You must never get discouraged, because this is a tough business. It's the most competitive business that anyone could go into. For every person on the air, there are thousands who are waiting for him to fall flat on his face. That is why you have to be true to yourself and you have to work.
Remember, there are no small radio shows, no show that's on at a nothing time. You make the most of it and you know what? In the long haul, it will pay off. I have seen it happen, it pays off. You just keep slugging.
So, does that mean he shouldn't be allowed to espouse his postion, or thoughts?
Have you ever listened to him?
He doesn't embarrass me.
So, does that mean he shouldn't be allowed to espouse his postion, or thoughts?
Of course not. But along with his right of free speech to say stupid things comes our right to speak up and say he's an idiot, and encourage others (particularly sponsors) to ignore him. I think we just went through this argument regarding someone else's stupidity, didn't we?
Snidely
Tom
I thought it was Howard Stern!
Tom
The success was not in Grant's firing from New York's WABC, the flagship of Disney/ABC's radio empire. FAIR, in fact, never called for Grant to be taken off the air--we called on Disney to publish its policy regarding on-air racial slurs, and to add anti-racist counterweights to Grant--and in any case, Grant was back on the air in little more than a week, on New York's WOR.
The success, rather, has been in reaffirming the values that FAIR has insisted on from the beginning: that racial slurs and calls for violence are not a healthy part of public discourse. Our reestablishment of these standards is demonstrated by the lies Grant now feels compelled to tell about his past statements.
The last straw for Disney/ABC was Grant's comment after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's plane went down in Bosnia (4/3/96): "My hunch is [Brown] is the one survivor. I just have that hunch. Maybe it's because at heart I'm a pessimist." Grant tried to portray this remark as a momentary lapse of taste. "I never wished Ron Brown dead," Grant told Newsday (4/19/96). "The only people I've ever wished dead were Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein."
But Bob Grant has long wished for--or gloated over--the deaths of his (disproportionately non-white) enemies. He prayed for Magic Johnson to "go into full-blown AIDS" (10/1/92); he commented that the black victim killed by a white mob in Howard Beach, Brooklyn "got what was coming to him." (12/9/92) His solution to a gay pride march (6/29/94): "Ideally, it would have been nice to have a few phalanxes of policemen with machine guns and mow them down."
Bob Grant has frequently called African-Americans names like "savages." He's used the slur to refer to everyone from black fraternities (who, because they left a mess on a New Jersey beach, represent "the savage mind, the primitive, primordial mentality"-- 7/15/93) to black churchgoers ("I can't take these screaming savages, whether they're in that A.M.E. Church, the African Methodist church, or in the street, burning, robbing, looting"-- 4/30/93).
Grant now puts a different spin on the word. "'Savage' has nothing to do with race," Grant told Larry King (Larry King Live, 4/30/96). "I was talking about people who were burning, robbing, looting in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, the first Simi Valley verdict. I was talking about people and their conduct, not people and their race."
Grant has long referred to whites as being "higher on the evolutionary scale" (12/13/93); he bemoaned the non-white majority in New York City (Newsday, 6/2/92): "To me, that's a bad thing. I'm a white person." Dismissing an African-American caller, he once snorted that "his kind...weren't intended to speak a civilized language." (9/16/93) Now Grant plays down his frequently expressed eugenicist views: "Can anybody really find somewhere where I made a statement in which I put down an entire race of people?" he asked (WPIX-TV, 4/29/96).
Grant's revisionist take on his own career is accompanied by a great deal of complaining about the unfairness of FAIR. But every time he (and his fans) insist that he would never make the kind of statements he used to regularly make, he reinforces our point that such language has no part in responsible radio speech.
http://www.fair.org/extra/9601/grantsuc.html
Where's my asbestos suit???
I agree. He used to be on locally here, after Rush, and he was so rude and mean to his callers. Our local radio station got a lot of complaints, because it wasn't long until they replaced him with Sean Hannity. Great improvement!
Carolyn
I gotta get outta here...
I agree. He may also have been responsible for the defeat of Flim Flam Florio in New Jersey because of the strong support he gave to Whitman and the constant battering heaped on Florio. Not long after her victory she "folded like a cheap camera" and turned her back on Bob Grant when she was pressured/blackmailed by a group of black clergy to keep her distance from Grant.
Bob Grant has one of the best minds of anyone in radio.
You obviously don't have a clue. Try and think before you blurt out such nonsense. Bob Grant is a great American, a patriot, a veteran and a prophet. To see that overpaid fratboy Hannity in his old spot is nauseating.
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