Andrew Sullivan on Air America, in good form.
Franken's Time
Why Liberal Talk Radio Fails
Well, I tried my hardest. Last week I tuned in to the newest phenomenon in America's polarized polity: liberal talk radio. It's called Air America and has as its flagship broadcaster, Al Franken, a smart and sometimes funny former Saturday Night Live cast member, turned auteur of such profound tomes as "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot." His show, "The O'Franken Factor," in its very title, takes aim at pompous but irresistible right-wing blowhard, Bill O'Reilly, and in its slogan, "Drug-Free Radio," at the talk radio legend, Limbaugh, who became addicted to vast quantities of prescription painkillers while keeping America safe from liberals, terrorists and "feminazis." I tuned in because watching American political debate slip down another few notches into moronic name-calling is a) something I get paid for and b) er, well, it can sometimes entertain.
I see no reason to object to screechy lefty radio. It's a free country. There's plenty of screechy right-wing radio. In its first few days, the new network even had a few moments. It was enjoyable to hear Michael Moore try and fail to apologize to Al Gore for endorsing Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, thus ensuring the presidency of George W. Bush. It was amusing to listen to Franken's follow-up host, Randi Rhodes, wrestle Ralph Nader to the verbal ground, telling him to give up his candidacy in 2004. But then I realized I was enjoying liberal-bashing by liberals! D'oh! Then there were a few amusing moments as Ms Rhodes tried to get a caller on the air, only to find that the phones weren't working. Yep. Talk radio with no listener call-ins. They make the CIA look on-the-ball.
But the deeper problem, I'd argue, is that there's something about American left-liberalism, as most of its articulate defenders cherish it, that can ever really be comfortable in a talk-radio format. Why? Well, here's how Franken described his show: "a battle for truth, a battle for justice, a battle for America itself ... Not to be grandiose about it." Notice the qualifier. On conservative talk radio, where pontificators pound the table, rouse the "ditto-heads" who call faithfully in to echo the latest anti-liberal calumny, the irony is on mute. It's there, all right. Anyone who has ever listened to Rush Limbaugh infers the irony from his manner, his grandiose self-mockery which is expressed in unapologetic self-promotion. Limbaugh gets what camp is actually about: for all its silliness and hyperbole, it never lets down its pretense at being serious. Franken couldn't sustain the conceit for more than a sentence. He had to hear his own pomposity and prick it. He couldn't let his listeners believe he was so un-hip as to actually believe this self-loving boilerplate guff. And so he deflated it. No fair! We need the illusion! So for three hours, you could hear the air slowly seep out of the talk-radio trial balloon.
Educated liberals, after all, decry populism. A large part of their self-esteem is bound up in believing themselves better educated and more enlightened than the average person, certainly smarter than, say, George W. Bush. So actually getting on the air and engaging in irresponsible, shameless spin and ideology goes against the grain. Conservatives, in general, are happy to confess their biases. Liberals like to think their biases are actually reality. That's why they are much happier on, say, the BBC or, in America, on National Public Radio, which bores and uplifts the average listener into eventual submission to centre-left orthodoxy. And they're objective, of course. There is no bias at the BBC or NPR. Just professionalism!
So liberal radio - in its purest form - already exists. And taxpayers subsidize it. The same goes for liberal television. It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC. The difference is that this liberal bias is filtered through the prism of condescension rather than through the conservative experience of cultural elite alienation. The reason Fox News works is that its anchors and journalists are still obviously angry at being outsiders to the mainstream media culture. So they have an edge. They're still fighting. They're still angry. And that's why they're more fun to watch. On CBS, the hacks and pretty faces are getting pay-checks and saving civilization. In other words: they're boring.
And here, of course, is where left-wing populist radio does have a chance. At some point, the media culture may tip in enough of a rightward direction (thanks to Fox, Drudge, talk-radio, etc etc) that the establishment may eventually become conservative. At that point, the liberal media could become a genuine insurgency. It's still a long way off, but you can see the potential. Already, Air America only really has an edge when it's hammering away at the increasingly smug denizens of the conservative establishment. Al Franken has only really come alive when bashing O'Reilly or Limbaugh. And the reason we listeners or readers or viewers are on his side is because he's a bit of an underdog up against these multi-millionaire conservative populists. When Fox News began, it was hard to to root for it, if only because it was so alone, and so marginalized. Now, however, it's the king of cable news and talk. And ripe for attack.
Alas, the other missing ingredient for liberal media is intellectual firepower. On this, the left has actually gone soft. In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes. And when you look at the political parties today, it's only the Republicans who are really still fighting over ideas. Only conservatives are battling each other over fiscal policy, or on abortion, or on gay marriage. The Democrats are only arguing over how to get back into power. Internal debates are almost non-existent. Remember the Democratic primaries? Zzzzz. Compared to the the rifts between supporters of free trade and of restricting immigration, between the libertarians and the Christian right, between the foreign policy realists and neoconservatives, the debates among the Democrats are beyond tedious. So they tend to go only on the attack against the president and anything to do with him, without much intellectual fiber in reserve.
And on radio, ideas do still matter. You don't just need insults (although they help), or gimmicks (though they're fun), or personalities (indispensable). You need arguments. And when you listened last week and heard one Air America radio host after another infer from the grisly murders in Fallujah that the U.S. should obviously get out of Iraq as soon as possible, you wondered whether these people were truly serious. Here's one line from Randi Rhodes that stuck in my head: "The most secure place in Iraq is the airport. So use it. Get out." That's an argument? Sure, there are equivalent no-brains on the right. But not as many. And not as universally. Until the left manages to marshall an intellectual brigade that is not trapped in post-modern jargon or Michael Moore-style incoherence, it won't be able to match the right on the airwaves. Getting on the air is not enough. Getting an intellectual grip would help. |
