by Tom Pantera
Columnist

In the last few months before the presidential election, and intermittently after, I made a conscious effort to listen to talk radio. Obviously, I’d heard a lot of talk radio before; I go back far enough to remember when Rush Limbaugh first came to the Fargo-Moorhead radio market. But I figured if I was going to feel as strongly as I do about some of my own political positions, it behooved me to at least try to listen to the other side.

And after a few months of doing that, I think I should get big props for not driving my car off the road out of sheer anger.

Back when we had the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which basically mandated that both sides in a political debate should get air time, there wasn’t nearly as much talk radio. It was just too complicated to produce, which isn’t to say it actually was complicated. It was just sort of a pain in the butt. But once the Fairness Doctrine was mothballed, talk radio blossomed like a rancid flower.

There were great predictions made about what a democratizing force it would be for the body politic, how it would give the common man a voice. And for radio station management, it filled air time in a particularly attractive way.

For one thing, it has the virtue of being cheap. All you have to pay for is a guy, a microphone and a few phone lines. No remote broadcasts, no dealing with record labels, and it had the potential to generate listeners who, before its advent, used radio as nothing more than background music. It was a programmer’s dream.

Instead, it’s become a haven for loonies, cranks and tinfoil hat wearers of all persuasions. It’s coarsened and hyper-heated political discussion in this country. It’s a boil on the butt of civil society.

Am I being extreme? Maybe. But a couple of months of being sentenced to listen to people like Sean Hannity will do that to you.

I mention Hannity because not only is he a particularly odious specimen of talk radio host, but he also happens to be on-air at the time I usually drive to campus. I can take Limbaugh only in very tiny doses; familiarity has bred not just contempt, but boredom with his shtick. Hannity isn’t much different, but at least he hasn’t been around as long. There’s a possibility, however slight, that he may say something I haven’t heard him say before.

What’s most infuriating about Hannity and his fellow travelers is that their methods are so transparent. Most of the callers who get through to him spend the first minute or two talking about how much they love him. Maybe – maybe – once an hour, they’ll let through a caller who disagrees with him, but even when they do that the caller is generally out of his league. You should never try to beat a man at what he does for a living and while Hannity’s line of work as the mouthpiece of the right wing is odious, you have to admit he’s pretty good at it. (Not that it’s hard to be good at whipping up the yahoos; in a world where Glen Beck still has a radio show, it’s pretty obvious it doesn’t take much in the way of smarts or talent to thrive in that business.)

Aside from packing his show with people of like mind, Hannity has a few well-worn rhetorical tactics he regularly trots out. My favorite is when, toward the end of a discussion, he phrases a question so that he can demand a simple yes-or-no answer. Never mind how complex the question is, he finds a way to dumb it down enough to make his point but be useless as far as exposing any ideas. Some of those questions are of the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife variety, while others are of the do-you-like-mom-and-apple-pie variety. Either way, he wins and the caller loses. And when anybody else tries the tactic on Sean, he doesn’t take the bait.

I talk about Hannity only because I’ve become the most familiar with his work. There’s another guy down here in Columbia, a local who’s a staunch Libertarian, that drives me even crazier, but that’s mostly because his IQ doesn’t seem quite as large as his hat size.

The other thing that drives me crazy is the advertisers some of these shows attract. It’s really almost amusing; the talk radio hosts traffic in fear more than anything, and when it comes time to pay the bills, they hawk online security programs, methods to get your recalcitrant child to behave and other such products. It’s a festival of terror.

Ironically enough, talk radio has shown us the limitations of a free, unregulated market, which is something most talk radio hosts love. Absent the fairness doctrine, talk radio has become a sinkhole of paranoia and thinly disguised hatred. That’s because that’s what sells; that’s what attracts ears and ears are what the advertisers pay for. Attempts to start liberal talk radio just haven’t worked. I’m not sure why, but compare the numbers of right- and left-wing talk radio hosts and you’ll see the balance tilts heavily conservative.

It sure as hell hasn’t become the megaphone for the common man everybody thought it would be. Instead, on the national level it’s been taken over by people who are either cynical, stupid or both. Things aren’t much better on the local level, although Mike McFeely (disclaimer: he’s a personal friend) does some good, serious, useful work.

Amazingly enough, though, it seems to be retaining its power. Even though talk radio was one of the outlets through which Republicans convinced themselves they’d win the last election, and that proved to be not just illusory but harmful to their chances, people still listen to it.

Well, most people anyway. I’ve heard enough.