The Host

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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.”

Old formats spewing old stereotypes; remain closed for comments

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Today’s edition of the media-mogul Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post featured a cartoon that has drawn extensive (and I would say deserved) criticism from the blogosphere for its portrayal of a monkey shot dead by police officers with the caption "They'll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill." The cartoon has also been severely criticized by civil right leaders, such as the Rev. Al Sharpton.

The New York Post is standing behind the cartoon and its artist, Sean Delonas, claiming that it is was meant to imply that the stimulus bill recently signed into law by President Obama was shoddily composed and may has well have been written by a monkey. It also attempts to parody a violent pet chimpanzee that was shot dead by police officers in Stamford, CT on Monday. However, America's culture of slavery and certainly its connection to racist sentiments is not as far behind us as Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan may believe.

Allan has issued a statement claiming that, ""The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy." Allan continues this verbal march of ignorance by stating that "again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."

Though it is possible that the artist's intentions were as Allan states and lacked a malicious intent, it remains a poor reflection on Delonas and Allan's poor education in American cultural history. This tactic of turning a blind eye towards a very recent past in which African Americans were compared to primates, presumed to lack the same intellectual abilities as whites, and were bought and sold as property seems at best an ignorant oversigh and at worse an outright racist act.

The Post cartoon itself and the Associated Press coverage remain closed for comment. Instead, users on news aggregation sites like Digg are reposting the story and commenting on these sites. A write-up on The Huffington Post reveals some 4078 comments on the story.