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November 13, 2003
During my recent terrorist mission in New York, the fastest of the fast-class, Cynthia Cotts, assigned me the mandatory task of reading this article, from the current issue of Harper's:
TURN ON, TUNE IN
Toward a Progressive Talk Show (p. 44)
By Thomas de Zengotita
"Progressives are realizing that right-wing media in the United States is a force we must now reckon with directly.…The question is: how do we strike back?" Harper's Magazine Contributing editor Thomas de Zengotita answers this by providing a detailed plan for a new talk show, which he hopes will "move serious political substance into the libertarian space created by Comedy Central." The main reason why progressives have failed in "TalkShowLand" is on account of established format and talent. Zengotita calls for not only a new type of show but a new group of people to "identify a target market and aim at it specifically." In short, "we need the hungry young" to push the envelope and go beyond satire and skits. As an example, Zengotita provides a play-by-play setup of the type of talk show he has in mind, one that is "narrowly targeted" to the "best and brightest of our young people."
That's all that Harper's puts on its website about this seven-page commentary… pitched into the datasphere by de Zengotita as a "proposal."
The author has the chutzpah to suggest that the comatose left — he uses the word progressives to describe its ranks — in the United States can be revived… on the airwaves! You can't just shake a stick at a proposal like that. I can't anyway. So I've posted my response — "Talk Radio Manifesto" — at the new campus of the Authentic Journalism renaissance… Salón Chingón. And I've carved out a comments area at BigLeftOutside to invite you, kind reader, into the coliseum. Let the games begin!
Here's the lead from the contributing editor of Harper's:
"American progressives are now realizing that right-wing media must be directly challenged. Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes have dominated the political-opinion landscape, essentially unopposed for too long. The question is: How to strike back?
"Major players are conferring over this question. Al Gore is talking to Comcast. Podesta is talking to Kirsch. AnShell is talking to Liu. Franken is talking to AnShell. And Norman Lear is talking to everybody.
"The diagnosis is this: Conservatives succeed and progressives fail in TalkLand because progressives are too nice and have complex views that can't be reduced to sound bites reeking with attitude and entertainment value.
"That's not all wrong. The complex part is right. The sound-bites part is sometimes right. But the nice part is over, and the entertainment part is just wrong. The reason progressive talk shows have failed is that they've taken established figures — Cuomo, Donahue — and squeezed them into established formats…"
De Zengotita then goes on to describe his proposed "format" for the progressive talk show of the future… although, regarding that horrible word, "format," I am duty bound to séance the late Paul Goodman for a call-in. Paul, you're on the air:
"By 'format' I mean imposing on the literary process a style that is extrinsic to it."
Thanks, Mr. Goodman. Now, on line two, we've got Bertolt Brecht… You're on the air, Bert. Does what Paul just said apply to radio?
"Radio is one-sided when it should be two… The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life… it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers."
The first big star that left Talk Radio must sign is the public. As Brecht said back in 1932, radio should "organize its listeners as suppliers" of the on-air material. And, ya know what, investors? That labor pool comes a lot cheaper than those of us who call ourselves "talents." The entire genre of talk radio, talk TV, "America's Funniest Home Videos," reality TV, etcetera, comes, albeit in mutated forms, from that simple formula: Harness the energy of the audience by making the public into the star of the show. The problem has been that Commercial and Public Radio alike have never allowed that to happen as Brecht envisioned. However, if the investors want a left Talk Radio to succeed, they're going to have to open the floodgates to the listeners as never before.
Like it or not, Talk Radio is the realm of the humans, of the mass, of what we used to call the masses. Talk Radio is the antidote to the hierarchical star systems of Hollywood, TV, electoral politics, and the slumber-inducing discourse that passes for "journalism" in American newspapers and magazines. It's the one place in the media where the hoi polloi can push back against the tyranny of format, where Howard Rheingold's "smart mob" can reestablish the good ol' American disorder upon which this once great nation was built.
De Zengotita's proposal is good, damn good, but it's missing the most important ingredient: The People, also known as listeners, also known as Arbitron ratings points. The proposal literally "screens" them out of their rightful stake in the project that will be, after all, on their airwaves.
If you want to participate in the countercoup to take back the media for the people, this article is a good starting point. De Zengotita gets specific. He offers his ideas for the "concept and cast" of the ideal talk show of the future (featuring a duo he calls "The Host" and "The Person Who Actually Knows Stuff" or "PWAKS"). He also includes a "sample of regular segments" of the sorts he thinks America would like to hear.
Fascinating stuff. Has anybody else (other than the fast-class Cotts) read it? I think de Zengotita is spot-on with about 80 percent of his suggestions. He describes his ideal host as a cross between fictional "Hip Hop Journalist" Ali G, the somewhat fictional talk show host Jiminy Glick, and the authentically non-fictional Mort Sahl. (Webmaster Dan Feder, 23, asked me last night "who's Mort Sahl?" so I regaled him with the tale of a night at the Bottom Line when I was Dan's age and Abbie Hoffman dragged me backstage to meet the political humorist Sahl and Professor Irwin Corey… Backstage, all great comics are depressed, but we won't get into that here…)
According to de Zengotita (a name I keep repeating because it's fun to type), his imaginary talk-warrior has to bring still more to the battlefield…
The guy who hosts this imaginary talk show (de Zengotita, insists he must be an "unmasked signifier" and thus, a male… a discrimination that deeply, deeply, offends me, sisters… unless it means that they give ME the microphone) must also be well armed to discuss The Frankfurt School, the X-Men (and presumably the rest of the Marvel Universe), the manifold collected works of Michael Foucalt, and TV's Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer ("Into every generation a top-rated left-wing talk-radio host is born… Right-wing demons are pouring out of the hellmouth… Grab yer Luddite weapons, Scooby gang… it's time to save the world… again…"), and must fill the very tall order of making "political engagement seem cool again."
Well, all that "stuff" can't be crammed in a few months of studying, it has to have already been lived, but de Zengotita's money point has merit: The host must bring authentic gravitas to the talk microphone while not losing the persona of Bart Simpson. Think of Bart as the host and Lisa as the PWAKS, and the corresponding anarchy that would ensue. Or, alternately, of the swashbuckling violence-prone Buffy as host and the high-tech Wicca, Willow, with an entire Scooby gang as PWAKS.
De Zengotita adds to this fantasy an on-air sidekick that, as previously mentioned, he calls the PWAKS, the "Person Who Actually Knows Stuff," who "sits at the table with the Host during the show — laptop ready, files and facts catalogued, likely websites in the directory. PWAKS monitors the proceedings, foraging for pertinent information…."
Okay, now, let's get to the 20 percent of his proposal that bites (probably because the Harper's contributor, although obviously a very smart guy, may not have hosted much AM Talk Radio himself, which is, as liberals finally admit, a close but distant parallel universe that pushes and pulls upon all worlds outside of it, including yours and mine)…
The weak link in his proposal has to do with what "radio people" call demographics.
De Zengotita says that the "core demographic" which is "the base for a renewed progressivism in this country is made up of young people" for whom "a fusion of high and popular culture" is "a way of life."
So far, so good: He's right that it's young people who will make or break any lefty talk show project, and that the highbrow-lowbrow dialectic is already basic to American culture, but his description of this target audience is far too narrow, and, dare I say, much too yuppie to break out of the ghetto of the snotty minority with expendable cash and credit cards. De Zengotita says of his target audience:
"From interns to associates, these people drive the culture industry — media, arts, nonprofits, the academy… The people we are after went to the best schools in the country, but, with notable exceptions, they are — for reasons the show will take up — abysmally ignorant. The good news is that they know it, and, unlike their even more ignorant and apathetic fellow citizens, they are embarrassed about it. They feel guilty for not knowing more history and economics, for not really knowing how things stand in the world. They have been exposed to enough — in some half-remembered course, in an essay, or in a book review — to know that the facts are on our side, but they can't keep track of them, can't deploy them spontaneously in argument."
Ahem:
I stipulate that de Zengotita's proposal might well find a niche on television and make a profit for the TV broadcaster that airs it. But I'm not interested in television. It's too, well, over-formatted. The crack in the mediating system, today, is in radio. As for radio, his dream "demographic group" ain't any kind of vanguard that's gonna change the politics of the country: not for a New York minute.
The crack in the over-mediated system exists, right here, right now, not on TV, but on radio — really, AM radio, egads — where the latent American Left is going to rise or fall as a mass media force, very soon, as a result of various projects that have yet to fully uncloak. And, sorry: If you put all the people who "went to the best schools in the country" and who "feel guilty" over the wisdom that was robbed from them while they wasted their parents' money at the university, or who wasted their own futures with exorbitant student loans in order to be able to go to those "best schools," all of them together won't amount to a blip on Arbitron's screen.
The final score of the radio game is measured in audience ratings and shares. The lefty talk project must show demonstrable ratings within 12 to 18 months or those very nice sanitation workers who get up earlier than the rest of the world will, instead of listening to the early morning host, be picking him and her up on the curb and throwing them into the compacter.
Let me please repeat: If you think about radio, you have to think of the measuring yardsticks of "ratings" and "shares." It's an up or down system, merciless, and final in its judgments.
To get that rating and share, you need to look to the great unwashed, to the uppity proles, to all of us who are working construction, slaving in restaurants, driving cabs, or underemployed… plus the young single moms and the secretaries being chased around the office by the married boss, and the boss' wife, too… plus the 10 percent of Americans who weren't born in the United States, but who live there… plus… plus… plus…
Let's look at some US Census data, to help us understand why all the people who went to the "best schools," even added together, do not make for a successful talk radio base.
I repeat: Click this link and look carefully at the long horizontal chart that resembles a snake with a pig in its belly.
Scroll down, on that chart, to the category of the 201 million Americans who are "18 years and over." A full half of them — 100 millon or so — have no more than a high school diploma and one-third of that group has less. Another 40 million attended college but never graduated. Right there, you have 70 percent of your potential adult audience without a college degree.
Your entire pool of potential listeners with bachelors, masters, or advanced degrees is only 47 million Americans (some of whom probably lied to the census takers, inflating their resumes; did former New York Stock Exchange president Richard Grasso fill out his census form, for example?). De Zengotita's target group accounts for less than a quarter of your 18-and-over group… and if you, kind radio producer, start reaching for 17-year-olds and younger — for they always have resided in the "entry-level talk listener" breeding grounds of Howard Stern's and Rush Limbaugh's audiences; they are the most censored demo in the country — your higher education caste makes for only a measly 17 percent of the people.
Seventeen percent, and sinking… That's no base from which to start, especially if it means alienating all the increasingly class-conscious white trash, black, and Latino youths who, together, will make the only possible progressive majority to come.
Consider, also, how many of those college grads will never abandon their market-niche identifying with NPR's "All Things Considered" (gag me), or those who are already comfortable fat cats and GOP donors who are the core of the enemy's base. A radio talk show aimed at those comfortable liberal people will get lots of good press in its early days from the New York Times and The Nation alike — but that's all it will get: the Arbitron monthlies and quarterlies will start, very soon, to be dreaded inside the radio network; something akin to the Bataan Death March. The project will be dead-in-the-water within 18 months, and… adios, pendejos.
You cannot capture the comfortable yuppie target audience he describes and still be, as de Zengotita urges, "angry and bitter." You could try to fake it, and a few suckers will fall for it (Sucker. Born. Every. Minute. Yada yada.), but the suckers are a rather small audience and, anyway, they do not live on the back streets or in the trailer parks where the massive potential audience lives.
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| Photo: Sue me, too, please, FOX! |
Talk Radio is about Class War, or it dies.
"Angry and bitter" is only somewhat about race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or identity politics, or even "war and peace" matters like Gulf War II. You might be "angry and bitter" about those things, but if your target audience is part of the economically comfortable mostly-white minority, they'll still choose NPR over AM Talk… unless — and this is the best free advice I'm offering — they get to break bread with blacks and Latinos on your frequency.
"Angry and bitter" is about worrying about the rent check, the bills, the kids, the spouse, the boss who is an asshole, and the dominant zeitgeist feeling that you are alone against a big machine that you neither understand nor have time to try to understand.
The magic of Talk Radio never came from Roger Ailes or other dilettantes who simply saw a market niche and took it. The granddaddy of Talk Radio is the aforementioned Abbie Hoffman: Talk Radio has long used the "identifying signifier" of one human being, with apparent courage, with real, obvious, uncouth, sweat and tears, with personal problems, with hang-ups and resentments, who is willing to be an authentic individual in an era of mass conformity, and who is thus demonstrably beating, every single day on the air, the odds, and is thus destroying the illusion by which the machine maintains control.
You may legitimately disagree that Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh have courage. But you can't disagree that their publics believe that about them. Nor can anyone make a credible case that either man is not a unique individual against a machine as he defines it. I would venture that both have more courage than we liberals like to admit, which probably explains, in the case of Rush, the need for OxyContin and "the soldier's drug" known as tobacco.
A person listens to radio one set of ears at a time. Radio — like all musical and audial experience — is a dark, lonely, medium. It is blind. The listener is like Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil… the blind superhero: the theft of vision leaves his and her sense of hearing enhanced.
Hey! We have another call! George Orwell on line three. Hiya, George. You have somethin' to add to what I'm sayin'?
"In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually."
Radio appeals to dark, lonely, people, and to that solitary part of each one of us. And we, who fit that description, happen to be the majority. We're not a silent majority. We are an unheard majority. Our screams from the torture chamber are not heard across the lake. But we keep screaming. We, the People, have no voice, nor access, in the mass media. We are justifiably pissed about it. And we are really fucking pissed at all the consequences, and suffering, and the daily assault of annoyances and imposed humiliations, that have come from the disempowerment that is the corporate mass media's mission to inflict upon us.
The successful Talk Radio host must be like Rambo at the end of the first movie: Spraying machine-gun fire at the giant computer that maintains control over the battlefield. He and she want to know: "Do we get to win this time, General?" It's not enough to shoot at the machine: He and she must destroy the machine, and visibly so. He and she must be willing to die. He and she must also be willing to kill. Anything less would be inauthentic.
Authenticity is not the easiest path — it's the only path. Authenticity is the means and the ends: to win that great, unwashed, audience of "People Who Are Fucked Over" (or, "PWAFOs," as de Zengotita might term it). We, the PWAFOS, are the majority. Deal with it. Or spend millions… tens of millions… hundreds of millions… of dollars… to fail.
There's also a fatal flaw in de Zengotita's concept of the PWAKS (the "Person Who Actually Knows Stuff"), when he conceives her as a single individual. Sure, someone like Andrea Daugirdas, 25, or Sunny Angulo, 23, or various others of the youthful fast class to whom I've given scholarships, could become an "identifying signifier" for all the people who know stuff. But one person with a modem will never, ever, beat a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, invested listeners with modems. A single teenager with a modem in the listening audience will have the same "reach" when it comes to downloading the knowable stuff as the PWAKS in the studio. That teen doesn't need a PWAKS. He and she need to be part of an army of 'em.
What left Talk Radio needs, instead, is what in the olden days was called a "community organizer" to, yes, be at the Internet controls, but, also, to be simultaneously using that Internet to organize the youthful masses who also have modems to help with the fact-checking scrutiny against the professional simulators of the machine. Chávez of Venezuela calls this phenomenon "Bolivarian Circles." Perhaps its time for Talk Radio to spur decentralized "Jeffersonian Circles" up in Gringolandia, sort of like "Meetup.com" minus Howard Dean. For that you need an organizer, not a glorified cyber-librarian.
De Zengotita is right, with a lead pipe guarantee, about the need for his ideal U.S. Talk Host to come from anywhere but the establishment. Hear ye, hear ye…
Hollywood stars, or washed-up politicians, or smileys who are pretty and handsome enough to have careers on television, will never be able to cut this path through the over-mediated forest. They already have too much stake in the status quo. They don't burn to get to the other side enough. If your radio host is sufficiently "angry and bitter," but, also, overly handsome or pretty, find an ugly photo to use in the publicity, and refuse to lend that personality to TV appearances for at least the first two years: You need a publicity photo that is at least as ugly as those of Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. You need, I repeat, an "identifying signifier" and not an "unmasked signifier" to lead the ugly American majority out of authoritarianism.
Now, some yuppies are not, actually, shits, and therefore are not offended as they read these words (you know who you are). They don't "feel guilty" for not knowing what they should know: they feel "angry and bitter" that their supposed stake in the system has not brought them even that bit of knowledge to be able to speak coherently and to be heard. If they're white, like the majority of comfortable folks, they want a Talk Radio program that also includes black and Latino listeners, with ample phone calls on the air from their pigmented paisanos, a flood of phone calls, constant phone calls, not "screening audience contributions" as de Zengotita proposes, but, rather, an audial anarchic live coliseum with lions and gladiators where the callers literally overrun and have the power to change the direction of the show, a space where even partly-conscientious white folks can imagine themselves as together, in the painful darkness of their daily realities, with young blacks and Latinos and Asians who don't normally come, or get invited, to their houses.
That "imaginal togetherness" must also be converted, soon enough, to an authentic togetherness. Otherwise it won't be real, and listeners will tune out and go back into their Baudrillardian, Virilian, bunkers.
Back to the Census: As of the year 2000, there were already 35 million Latinos in the United States… 20 million of them were Mexicans… millions were and are borinqueños (also known as Puerto Ricans), and a whole lot of 'em are Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans, Brazilians, Peruvians, and more… That's one out of eight Americans… The fastest growing demographic "group" in the country… By the end of this decade there'll be 43 million Latinos in this country… by 2020, the Census estimates, 55 million (and the Census has always underestimated Latino projections in the past)… by 2030, when your child born today will be 26 years old, one out of five Americans will have Latino roots… and 40 percent of the country won't be white… and that's not even counting the people who hid from the Census takers because they are considered "illegal" or because, like me, they consider it their duty every ten years to avoid being counted by the government.
Your Talk Radio network of the future must begin to speak Spanglish: to weave in some words in español, ¡muy bién!, ¡chingón! ¡putísima, y vestido en blanco!, and maybe some phrases em português… muito bom!, as an "identifying signifier" both for those who grew up speaking Latin American and who, as immigrants, had to learn at least broken English… and, also, for those listeners who only speak English but who now understand that America will become, in their lifetimes, a somewhat bilingual nation, and feel vocabulary-impaired for the future: "¡Soy Rush Limbaugh, por 'Enganchado a la fónica'!'" For 260 weekdays a year, there ought to be a Spanglish word of the day, in which Groucho Marx's duck drops down and quacks each time it's mentioned, as the host makes callers try to pronounce it with style. The show's website can update the glossary each day. A year later, the linguistically challenged young American will already have a gigantesco vocabulary to spice up daily life and expand his and her possibilities at the dating game.
You had better get your attorneys researching whether you can say "Chinga tu madre, chinga tu padre, y chinga tus abuelos también" on the air. And if it's a gray area under the law, push the goddamn envelope and provoke a confrontation. An early fight with the FCC is mandatory for your network. Forget NPR, and think Eminem (and please read that linked essay naming Marshall Mathers as "journalist of the year for 2002," carefully, to have a hope of "getting it"). It ain't rocket science: Howard Stern already did it, albeit in a half-and-half inauthentic manner. Imagine what someone who wanted to do it as a mission could accomplish for the First Amendment.
It's also not sufficient for the talk host to merely be well read, and schooled, in highbrow and lowbrow pop culture. The host has to be all over today's hard news like a cheap suit. If your host can't opine credibly on at least half the featured topics on, say, today's , he or she will fall behind the audience, and lose the immediacy that is the essence of good radio. Because those are the themes that the callers want to know more about in the immediate present (and, yes, they also want to laugh away the tensions created by the way the Commercial Media spins "news" stories by jerking their emotional chains): The events that are happening on that day, at that moment, in the news, are your most important daily fodder. Being funny and entertaining, but not also journalistically on top of the agonies and defeats surrounding current crises and events, will not win the day. It's not an either-or dialectic: You need to do both extremely well to cut through the media fog and homestead a new space on the airwaves.
Back to the central point of this memo, which is that our real core target audience will be found in the young masses (and not in the young elites): Investors tend to push media projects to pander to the consumers with expendable cash. If they do it here they will lose their investment. Don't do it. Draw a line in the sand and stand your ground. Remind them, insistently, that Rush Limbaugh built his very profitable empire not by selling SUVs but, rather, by hawking "Hooked on Phonics" and other inexpensive trinkets for working families. That's your target demographic, not the rich kids. Shhhh. Come closer, and let me whisper America's best-kept secret in your ear: MOST YOUNG PEOPLE DID NOT GRADUATE COLLEGE! We concluded that the university and its fiscal demands were, um, interfering with our education.
My final advice to all the big shots who are "talking to each other" about getting a project like this on the air is this: Please don't dawdle. There's an "election" next year waiting to be stolen if you hesitate.
Do it authentically… Which means leaving ample room for the listening public — the callers and emailers — to break all pre-planned formats and change the history of your show, making it their history, too.
And do it…
Now.
You have nothing to lose but your democracy.
Al Giordano is an angry, bitter, underemployed, and court-protected online journalist reporting from somewhere in a country called América. Formerly publisher of Narco News and political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, Al spent the early 1990s as a daily AM talk radio host in the United States. Al will grant some email and radio interviews on the themes raised by this essay via al@bigleftoutside.comSpecial thanks to guest voices (in order of appearance): , Dan Feder, Mike Krauss, Sarahy Flores Sosa, and Stuart Cox.
Quotes from Bertolt Brecht and George Orwell borrowed from Radiotext(e), edited by Neil Strauss and Dave Mandl (1993, Semiotext(e), Brooklyn, New York).
© 2003 Al Giordano
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