The Guardian Unlimited out of the UK recently featured me extensively in a piece headlined “Shock jocks: voice of America or voice of hate?”
“To the strains of Rule, Britannia! morphing into the old Soviet national anthem, one of America’s most popular talk radio show hosts launched into what has become a daily diatribe against Britain’s home secretary, Jacqui Smith, for banning him from the UK this week for hate speech,” Guardian correspondent Chris McGreal wrote from Washington.
McGreal later quoted me at length, noting that shock jocks like Savage regularly “claim that they’re just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,” said Rory O’Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio. “It’s all bound together so when it’s convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it’s all just a joke. But when it’s not, they say they’re giving you information that you need.”
AND:
O’Connor says conservative talk radio taps in to a disaffected but vocal minority. “This movement was born 20 years ago out of a sense of victimisation and voicelessness by a reasonably large segment of the population, and clearly Limbaugh and the people who followed him tapped in to some real sentiments of people who felt they weren’t being heard,” he said. “There is a minority of the American populace which is angry about these issues. Savage has 8 million listeners but we are a country of 300 million people. It’s a large niche audience but there is no way a majority of the people agree with him. But does it make a difference? Yes. They succeeded so widely that the conservatives they backed ended up controlling the [Bush] presidency, both houses of Congress and the supreme court.”
AND finally, on the subject of immigration reform:
The subject consumed the talk shows. In June 2007 an opinion poll showed that immigration had supplanted Iraq as the leading issue under discussion on the shows. “They forced this right to the top of the public agenda. They spent months denouncing the proposed legislation. They rebranded it as “shamnesty” not amnesty. Savage dubbed the bill the “i-bomb” and vowed to “derail this train of treason” Now with that type of talk it’s not surprising members of Congress, including conservative Republican senators, not only hear from these people but are threatened by them,” said O’Connor.
