openpolitics.com

It’s near the end of his “churn,” which is the industry term for a host’s opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show’s nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they’re drawn into the program and don’t switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience—if only because so many of the listeners are driving—but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a five or six percent audience share.

..  One reason why callers’ voices sound so much less rich and authoritative than hosts’ voices on talk radio is that it is harder to keep telephone voices from peaking.

.. The Nick Berg beheading and its Internet video compose what is known around KFI as a “Monster,” meaning a story that has both high news value and tremendous emotional voltage. As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic glee, all of which the Nick Berg thing’s got in spades.

.. Whatever else they are, the above-type objections to “We’re better than the Arab world” are calls to accountability. They are the sort of criticisms one might make of, say, a journalist, someone whose job description includes being responsible about what he says in public. And KFI’s John Ziegler is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved.

..  Another is that the ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which “the truth” is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen.

.. Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.

.. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the ’96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive)

.. “Passion” is a big word in the industry, and John Ziegler uses the word in connection with himself a lot. It appears to mean roughly the same as what Ms. Bertolucci calls “edginess” or “attitude.”

.. Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.

.. Part of the answer to why conservative talk radio works so well might be that extreme conservatism provides a neat, clear, univocal template with which to organize one’s opinions and responses to the world. The current term of approbation for this kind of template is “moral clarity.”

.. The Cashbox can take a twenty-minute segment and turn it into a nineteen.” It does this by using computerized sound-processing to eliminate pauses and periodically accelerate Mr. Z.’s delivery just a bit. The trick is that the Cashbox can compress sound so artfully that you don’t hear the speed-up, at least not in a nineteen-for-twenty exchange (“You get down to eighteen it’s risky, or down around seventeen you can definitely hear it”).

.. KFI and the syndicator regard this show’s audience as basically frightened, credulous, and desperate. (ad-wise, a lucrative triad indeed)

.. by calling a certain toll-free number. If you call, it turns out there’s a $4.90 S&H charge for the free month’s supply, which the lady on the phone wants you to put on your credit card. If you acquiesce, the company then starts shipping you more Enzyte every month and auto-billing your card for at least $35 each time, because it turns out that by taking the thirty-day trial you’ve somehow signed up for Berkeley’s automatic-purchase program—which the operator neglected to mention. And calling Berkeley Nutraceuticals to get the automatic shipments and billings stopped doesn’t much help; often they’ll stop only if some kind of consumer agency sends a letter.

.. But it’s hard not to see KFI’s relationship with Berkeley as another indication of the station’s true regard for its listeners.

.. Phil Hendrie Show, which is actually a cruel and complicated kind of meta—talk radio. What happens every night on this program is that Phil Hendrie brings on some wildly offensive guest—a man who’s leaving his wife because she’s had a mastectomy, a Little League coach who advocates corporal punishment of players, a retired colonel who claims that females’ only proper place in the military is as domestics and concubines for the officers—and first-time or casual listeners will call in and argue with the guests and (not surprisingly) get very angry and upset. Except the whole thing’s a put-on. The guests are fake, their different voices done by Hendrie with the aid of mike processing and a first-rate board op, and the show’s real entertainment is the callers, who don’t know it’s all a gag—Hendrie’s real audience, which is in on the joke, enjoys hearing these callers get more and more outraged and sputtery as the “guests” yank their chain.

..  In other words, the talk host’s persona and appeal are deeply, totally populist, and if it’s all somewhat fake

.. “If we were KIIS-FM, and we had a new Christina Aguilera song, and they played it heavy on the morning show and the afternoon show, wouldn’t you still play it on the evening show?

.. By way of post-meeting analysis, it is worth noting that a certain assumption behind Ms. B.’s Christina Aguilera analogy—namely, that a criminal trial is every bit as much an entertainment product as a Top 40 song—was not questioned or even blinked at by either participant.

.. This is doubtless one reason for KFI’s ratings éclat—the near total conflation of news and entertainment.

.. Mr. Z. on talk radio as a career: “This is a terrible business. I’d love to quit this business.” On why, then, he accepted KFI’s offer: “My current contract would be by far the toughest for them to fire me of anyplace I’ve been.”

.. To be fair, though, there truly are some dubious, unsettling things about the Dateline interview, such as for instance that NBC has acceded to O.J. Simpson’s “no editing” condition for appearing, which used to be an utter taboo for serious news organizations.

 

.. Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed? If it’s true that there are, and that we sometimes choose what we wish we wouldn’t, then there is a very serious unanswered question at the heart of KFI’s Sweeper: “MoreStimulating” of what?