Posted on 05/31/2008 9:09:51 AM PDT by jjw
Over the years whenever anyone asked how my radio show was going my stock answer always has been: "Well, they haven't told me to stop."
Earlier this month, they told me to stop. As a master of nuance, I took it as an inkling things weren't going well.
So last Saturday, after nearly eight years of holding forth for three hours from 9 a.m. to noon on WFLA, 970-AM, I concluded my final broadcast.
Some friends have suggested I was canceled because of the perception that I am some kind of liberal, as if pointing out on a regular basis we are led by a buffo in the White House and believing in the U.S. Constitution somehow defines me as a radical, liberal, troublemaking wisenheimer.
It is true that some listeners have accused me of being a pinko Commie, usually right after I suggested that Global Warming was a serious problem, or maybe it's a bad idea to execute people who might be innocent, or perhaps it might be nice if after torturing terrorism suspects we let them talk to a lawyer and see the evidence against them.
You know, crazy, wacky, insane, extremist ideas like that.
Marx & Engels
On the other hand, since this is the dollars-and-cents business of radio, I also know if I went before the microphone every week and starting reading the complete works of Marx & Engels, including "The Communist Manifesto" (in the original German), and I was pulling in huge ratings, not only would Clear Channel have left me on the air - they would have syndicated the show across its more than 1,110 stations across the country.
In all fairness to my moonlighting employers, although it's disappointing to lose my radio perch, I can't really complain too terribly much.
For nearly eight years I was given a forum to shoot my mouth off on whatever annoyed me at the moment. In case you're curious, not once in all that time did anyone from station management ever tell me what I could or couldn't talk about.
Talk Radio? Really?
I was treated very decently by Clear Channel. I worked with a number of first-rate broadcasters and a litany of terrific board-op/call screeners, most notably my last partner Kevin Green.
If I have any beef, it is this: "Talk radio" remains something of a misnomer.
Call it the "Limbaugh Defect," but all too often the last thing many callers were interested in was talk, or (at the risk of being accused of heresy) a conversation.
More often than not callers merely wanted to give a speech, or a sermon, or a diatribe.
To disagree, to have a different point of view was to invite accusations of being a dreaded liberal, although in my experience 99.9 percent of the time the caller couldn't even provide a definition of what a "liberal" is. These were hardly Algonquin Roundtable moments.
Callers who decried the "liberal" New York Times, for example, would, with some prodding, admit they've never read The New York Times. Is it any wonder why I drink?
Still the job was great fun. I'll miss it, although I now get to sleep in on Saturday mornings.
Oh, and one more thing - I still believe we need to get rid of all the guns.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.
Being a regular 970 in the truck listener I would about break my finger turning this guy off on Sat AM. Glad he is gone. Would rather listen to more of the inane fishing show than him.
I'm cool with that. Arrogance has it's rewards.
Hopefully there will be a fatwah against people who can't capitalize as well.
I would expect McCain to be quicker on the draw shutting down conservative talk radio than Mullah Obama would be. The Little Admiral (McCain) has been fuming and fussing for years as talk radio calls him on all of his actions as he dances to the puppetmaster Soros pulling his strings.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1365722/posts
What I found disturbing about Garrulous Squealer was reading an interview a twin cities rag did with him more than ten years ago. Up to that point I had been a fan of his purchasing and enjoying a number of his books. The interview, pre-Bush, revealed a very bitter and possibly psychologically twisted man. Responding to a question about politics he went off on a screed against Republicans. Not just pols, but all Republicans.
I lost a lot of respect for him right there. His screed was so unbalanced it was completely at odds with the picture he had concocted of himself as the mild-mannered, whimsical satirist he had sold to the public. Furthermore he had to know that a great percentage of the people he wrote about in his books were Republicans. Yet he felt no remorse in categorizing all of them as mean, awful people.
Yes, I agree, that liberal mean streak was buried in Keillor the whole time, no doubt. But it didn’t show in the early years.
He teased Lutherans, which I thought at the time was probably a sign of his secular liberalism, but he did so with good humor and in a way that I thought showed reasonable restraint and fondness for their foibles. It reminds me of Anthony Trollope’s good-natured teasing of the foibles of Anglican ministers and bishops, which I never found offensive when I was an Anglican, because I understood it as amusing play with human eccentricity, not attacks on the Church as such.
I have lately taken an interest in etymology, the study of the origins of words (the origin of the word "etymology" is of course Greek - and it means "true meaning"). Outside the US, and historically inside the US, the definition of the word "liberal" was consistent with its etymology; you would expect "liberalism" to be related to "liberty" - and it was.99.9 percent of the time the caller couldn’t even provide a definition of what a “liberal” isBut the political meaning of "liberal" changed sometime in the past, into the dreaded "L-word." I knew from reading about FDR that Roosevelt quite unselfconsciously used the term to apply to himself, and FDR was of course an "L-word" type of "liberal." William Safire dates the inversion of the meaning of the word "liberal" in America to the 1920s.
It doesn't surprise me at all that this writer adduces that sort of statistic to that issue. First because the inversion of the meaning of the word patently was intended to cause confusion - and second, because Mr. Ruth seems to be an "L-word" "liberal" himself. And such a person can be relied upon to systematically shed heat but not light on the issue of the meaning of the "L-word."
Conservatives have somewhat solved the confusion by using the term “Classical” liberal.
Scratch a liberal and under his thin skin is a socialist. Dig a little deeper and you will soon find the Marxist nuclear fuel rod that drives everything he says and does.
A liberal in ***never** satisfied. Why? Answer: Because each additional social welfare program is merely a stop on the train line. Marxism is the final destination for all of them.
Today I heard Rush Limbaugh say that liberalism was our nation’s **most** serious threat. (one of his archived shows) Good for him! It is.
Finally, all Marxists lie.
BOR had him on his show one time, and questioned him in BOR’s usual pressured way.
I think GK had never been forced to answer questions before, and he looked like such an idiot that I actually felt a little sorry for him.
Conservatives have somewhat solved the confusion by using the term “Classical” liberal.the inversion of the meaning of the word [liberal] patently was intended to cause confusion
True, but that cannot be the total solution. In fact, there cannot be a total solution, as long as the socialists are in a position to continuously jerk us around with new meanings and new, deceptive words like "swiftboating."Which is why I have been so interested in the question of how to delegitimate the subversive conceit that journalism is objective . . . and why I was so excited when I recognized what should have been the obvious fact that journalism was transformed - nay, almost invented - by the Associated Press. The claim of journalistic objectivity apparently only traces to the advent of the AP, because prior to that time newspapers didn't systematically trade news reports, and didn't really have news sources that the rest of the public could not in principle have access to. So it was only the advent of the Associated Press that put the "news" in "newspaper."
The AP is a mechanism which effectively homogenized the newspapers by transforming all of them from opinion journals which also carried news into newspapers which also carry opinion. And the non-local news which they carry, their primary stock in trade, comes from a single source - and all newspapers have a financial stake in the idea that those reports are reliable. So, not in the interest of the public nor in the interest of truth but in the interest of the newspapers and of the AP, all journalists made the questioning the objectivity of any journalist a taboo subject. The public violation of which taboo is punished by expulsion from the fraternity of "objective journalists."
The business of the AP and all of its constituent newspapers is to seduce the public into thinking that the latest report, available only from the AP, is of crucial importance. On rare occasion - such as on 9/11/01 - that actually was arguably true. But in general, it is a gross exaggeration of the value of such reports. And it has the deleterious effect of distracting the public from things which are true and important to reports which are of lesser reliability and generally of lesser significance. And the "liberal" politician aligns himself with the propaganda wind which that bias of journalism creates.
BTTT
Ah ha! Yes! An epiphany!
A journalist can never be objective because everything is processed through his worldview. Everyone has a religious, political, and culture worldview that can **never** be neutral.
For some years now, I have been hammering that education (government, private, or homeschool) can never be religiously, politically, or culturally neutral. The content and consequences of any type of education can not be neutral for the reason that it is **impossible** to have a *neutral** worldview. Thank you for drawing my attention to journalism. I see the same concept applies.
As the opportunity arises, I will push forward the idea that it is impossible for a journalist or his journalism to be religiously, politically, or culturally neutral in content or consequences.
And it has the deleterious effect of distracting the public from things which are true and important to reports which are of lesser reliability and generally of lesser significance. And the "liberal" politician aligns himself with the propaganda wind which that bias of journalism creates. Journalism is like a spot light. It directs the readers attention or obfuscates those things the editor wishes to be ignored. The editor and journalist does this in three ways.
The first is the individual news story:
The journalist can control the story simply through the terms he uses. For instance, does he use the word "farm" or "compound"? The word, farm, is warm and fuzzy sounding, while "compound" has a sinister feel. Does he use the word "euthanasia" or the term "death with dignity"?
The second is in the control of what news gets covered:
Time and space are finite, and there is great power in controlling what news is covered and what is ignored. Have you noticed that the outrages occurring in our government schools were ignored until we had the Internet, Fox News, and talk radio? We didn't hear about these stories because the Liberal/Marxist editors consciously or unconsciously **chose** to ignore them. They have and are doing this because their decisions about how to use the space and time available is filtered through their worldview.
Finally, there is the destruction and creation of language:
Journalism is a major factor in pushing forward and solidifying the Orwellian destruction and creation of language. Some examples are the words: liberal, progressive, death with dignity, gay, democratic, fair, compassionate, Borking, or, ( as you pointed out) "swiftboating".
Some will argue that journalism can be "fair and balanced." It can't.
Binary decisions regarding content are made continually. One side wins the other loses and there can be no compromise. For instance, does the reporter wear an American flag lapel pin? It is impossible to both wear and not wear the American flag pin in the same time and space. It is impossible to ignore and cover a particular school outrage in the same time and space.
The content or absence of certain news stories has non-neutral political, religious, and cultural consequences.
An epiphany!Which is why I have been so interested in the question of how to delegitimate the subversive conceit that journalism is objective
A journalist can never be objective because everything is processed through his worldview. Everyone has a religious, political, and culture worldview that can **never** be neutral.
For some years now, I have been hammering that education (government, private, or homeschool) can never be religiously, politically, or culturally neutral. The content and consequences of any type of education can not be neutral for the reason that it is **impossible** to have a *neutral** worldview. Thank you for drawing my attention to journalism. I see the same concept applies.
Indeed, I would argue that they are mutually reinforcing - that the idea that the teacher's way is the only way is of a piece with the idea that the journalist is objective. In either case the student is blandly assured that he can safely take the word of third parties for what is important. No thank you, this "student" is willing, nay eager, to learn - but only from a philosopher, not from a sophist.I agreed with your entire post.
If you liked post #31 above, it's not unlikely that you would find this thread, which has been well received by some, to be of some interest.
Thanks for the ping, c_I_c. BUMP! BUMP! Good conclusion to the thread.
I just finished reading your 2005 email exchange with Daniel Ruth, yet another Liberal Talk Show Host I've never heard of. In fact when I saw the headline in the Ping from Conservatism_Is_Compassion, I thought he was actually referring to Dr. Ruth (LOL).
...But this actually does prove a point that great Talkers like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, and Mark Levin have often made in either their broadcasts or writings (and even a point I made myself back in 2002, when the announcement was made to launch the now bankrupt Air America): Who in their right mind is going to endure three hours of Liberal non stop whining and complaining? The one thing I do find rather extraordinary is the fact this dude's show lasted eight years.
The larger point is that because most Socialist Liberals are devoid of any type of innovation, except that of repackaging and rehashing tired, old socialist junk and putting a nice, shiny ribbon on it (as they're attempting to do with Barack Obama as their Spokesperson), their 'brand' of talk doesn't pass the smell test.
the word is won’t, not can’t.
the fatwah will also take those who can’t read between the lines.
Actually, I think it's more like "doesn't know when or why".
G.A.F.L.
ALL CAPS JUST FOR YOU!
You may want to check out some English classes:
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