The Host

Photo courtesy of danicamarica via Flickr and Creative Commons

In her 2004 piece on “the American imagination” and radio, Susan Douglas writes about the particularly personal relationship that radio listeners have had with the medium throughout the 20th century. “Radio kneaded our psyches early on and helped shape our desires, our fantasies, our images of the outside world, our very imaginations. Unlike other major technologies…radio has worked powerfully inside our heads, helping us create internal maps of the world and our place in it, urging us to construct imagined communities to which we do, or do not, belong.”

What Douglas suggests is that there is something particularly invasive and simultaneously personal about the medium. The illusion experienced by the listener is that you may be the only one (an image reinforced by numerous romanticized narratives about radio, such as the classic movie Pump Up the Volume which features the voice of a young Christian Slater beaming into the minds and hearts of a Gen X audience searching for meaning). And even though the voice on the other end may be consciously aware that they are speaking to an audience, there is a loneliness and uncertainty to that very concept.

Commercial talk radio, unlike the pre-1980s radio Douglas describes or the pirate radio Slater’s character is operating, is a beast whose primary aim is profit. However instead of pure entertainment, something that obviously conveys to listeners an objective of sensationalism in exchange for ad revenue, contemporary talk radio occupies that space which David Foster Wallace refers to as the “meta-media” or “explaining industry.”

Under most classifications, this category includes media critics for news dailies, certain high-end magazines, panel shows like CNN's Reliable Sources, media-watch blogs like instapundit.com and talkingpointsmemo.com, and a large percentage of political talk radio. …this is how much of contemporary political talk radio understands its function: to explore the day's news in a depth and detail that other media do not, and to interpret, analyze, and explain that news.

Wallace’s brilliantly crafted essay on talk radio host John Ziegler stitches together the complex landscape in which this brash, unapologetic, and essentially predictable personality operates. His claim that talk radio is “a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give,” is elegantly explored through a framework that touches upon big issues such as public policy, commercial practices, race relations while simultaneously weaving in the heavy influences of individual personalities and interpersonal relationships.

Ultimately Wallace makes many of the points I have found myself repeating – although he makes them far more elegantly than I ever could – about whether or not talk radio is journalism. “The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler's job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible.”