Take Talk Radio - Please!

David Foster Wallace is always a pleasure to read, and his long essay on talk radio, which appears in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly, is no exception. He's especially adept at drawing out the way talk radio exists at an intersection of broadcasting technology, political-economic maneuvering, and social changes.

In profiling one Southern California talk-radio host, Wallace provides a kind of pocket guide to modern radio broadcasting. He touches on the war between FM and AM (didja know AM is dominated by talk because music doesn't sound good on AM wavelengths?), discusses electronics which can allow 15 minutes of speech to be broadcast in 13 minutes, and shows how FCC rulings intended to allow increased concentration of media companies also encouraged highly partisan broadcasts. Wallace grounds everything on the bedrock fact that talk radio, despite its right-wing hosts' rhetoric about being outside the mainstream, is in fact a giant business utterly beholden to its owners and commercial supporters.

This point (and the array of evidence behind it) has a paradoxical effect on me. On one hand, I somehow feel less threatened by political views which are only or largely the effluvium of the machinery of capitalism. On the other hand, that same machinery operates to prevent the production of alternative views and to encourage widespread adoption by the "market" of the talk-radio host's now-mainstream views. Where's the out? Wallace doesn't provide one, as is his po-mo want, and concludes his piece with a shy vote in favor of reasoned doubt over clamorous certainty. I'm not sure that'll take us very far.

(From a somewhat different angle, I have also written a blog post on this article on After School Snack.)