Shock Jocks

Charles M. Madigan, a self-described centrist writing in the Chicago Tribune, describes a thought he had while watching Glenn Beck the other day: “the thought came to me that we are in a very dangerous space where ideology, expression and rights are headed for a collision.”

To Madigan — as to many others — “The problem with Beck… is the size of the audience in the United States that actually knows nothing about nothing. This mass (my guess, about 12 percent of the electorate) is easily moved, the past summer and its continuing silly rhetoric on all kinds of issues indicate. They wear know-nothingness like a badge.”

Curiously, however, Madigan goes on to suggest that we “should not overreact” and instead “should actually turn up the volume so everyone can hear them better,” then concludes, “I know that makes me sound old-fashioned and silly, but there you are.”

Yes it does, Mr. Madigan — and there YOU are!

Is the star of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network teaming with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts in an attempt to buy the St. Louis Rams? Yes, says the Associated Press — and El Rushbo himself, who told the AP that
he is teaming up with Checketts in a bid to buy his hometown team, which currently boasts the NFL’s longest current losing streak. Limbaugh also said he and Checketts would operate the team. “Dave Checketts and I have made a bid to buy the Rams and we are continuing the process,” Limbaugh said.

Limbaugh, who hails from nearby Cape Girardeau but now lives and works in Palm Beach, Fla., once worked for the Kansas City Royals and is an avid sports fan. He also worked briefly in 2003 on ESPN’s NFL pregame show, but resigned after saying Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed.

Forbes magazine has estimated the Rams franchise has a value of $929 million — only twice the amount of Limbaugh’s latest multi-year shock jock contract.

Veteran media gadfly Michael Wolff finally gets around to asking, “Should I be worried about Glenn Beck?”

Wolff, who columnizes in Vanity Fair and also runs and blogs at newser.com, has what he calls “long experience,” but still somehow “can’t actually remember in the history of modern media a boycott of something because it’s too conservative.”

Hello, Michael? Don Imus? Michael Savage?? Did you miss the shock jock boycott memos?

Now, as Wolff writes, “that’s what’s happening to Beck. Nice-guy-oriented consumer brands are ganging up and pulling their ads from his show.”

Well, it couldn’t happen to a ‘nicer” guy!

“This is happening in spite of the one thing that usually protects even dubious media – big ratings,” observes Wolff. “It’s not hard to appreciate why these companies have dropped him. If you can advertise in myriad other places to similar effect, why get involved with someone so volatile as Beck?”

Why indeed?

Ari Melber has a smart piece in The Nation concerning NYT conservative OpEd columnist David Brooks and his contention that conservative
radio hosts “are, paradoxically, a lot like well-behaved children. They are
seen “splashed across magazine covers and endlessly profiled “but not
heard, politically, since they do not swing elections.”

“The talk jocks can’t even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries,” Brooks observed. Melber disagrees: “After the summer of townhalls and what’s shaping up as the autumn of GlennBeck… it is hard to see things through Brooks” bifocals,” he notes. Melber also mentions something obvious that no one else did — “As the top conservative at the Times and an alumnus of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, Brooks… is, unavoidably, in direct competition for opinion leadership with the “talk jocks” he knocks.

In this edition of the Your Call with Rose Aguilar on KALW-FM in San Francisco, featuring Shock Jocks author Rory O’Connor, we try to define the line between appropriate and inappropriate statements on the airwaves. What exactly qualifies as hate speech? And when hateful words go viral online, do broadcast regulations still matter?

Sometimes it seems as if the shock jock beat touches every corner of InfoWorld and MediaLand… the latest evidence involves the recent — and extremely controversial — decision by Scottish authorities to release on humanitarian grounds the Libyan man known as the “Lockerbie bomber.”

The decision has caused much public comment, including some by US FBI Director Robert Mueller, which occasioned an angry reply from former Scottish First Minister Henry McLeish, who also dismissed calls for a boycott of Scotland “as the brainchild of “certain newscasters and shock jocks,” as the Associated Press reported :

FORMER SCOTTISH PM TO FBI DIRECTOR: ZIP IT!

AP: former Scottish First Minister Henry McLeish slammed Mueller’s criticism as “wholly wrong” and said the FBI chief should keep his thoughts to himself.

“The Americans have a right to make their views known, but I think it was wholly wrong for the director of the FBI to speak in such striking terms, which were personal, and which made a direct attack on the Scottish criminal justice system,” said McLeish, who served as Scottish leader from 2000 until his resignation in 2001.

McLeish also disputed the notion that the Lockerbie bomber’s release would poison relations with the United States. Web sites have been set up in the U.S. calling for a boycott of Scottish goods and visits to the country.

“I don’t buy for a minute the idea that this is going to destroy our special relationship with the U.S., nor will it destroy trade between Britain and America,” McLeish told the BBC.

As for a boycott, “it would bother me if I thought it was going to happen,” he said, dismissing the idea as the brainchild of “certain newscasters and shock jocks.”

Scoobie Davis had an interesting post recently on the connections between cult leader Sun Myung Moon, whose media empire “has branched out to right-wing talk radio with the recent establishment of the Washington Times America’s Morning News program” and the Talk Radio Network (TRN), the leading talk radio distributor. Davis reports “TRN was founded by zany cult leader and radio talk show host Roy Masters and is currently run by Masters” son Mark.”

The co-hosts of the radio program are John McCaslin, a columnist and a former editor of the Washington Times, and veteran right-wing talker Melanie Morgan.

For more on Roy Masters as a purportedly “zany cult leader,” check out this ConWebWatch primer. The alliance between Moon’s media and the Masters” Talk Radio Network is, in Unification Church terminology, a “perfect marriage,”Davis notes.

The New York Times finally discovered — and covered — Internet shock jock Hal Turner, who has, as the Paper of Record at last recorded — “attracted attention from civil rights monitoring groups for his anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic pronouncements, and from authorities in Connecticut, where he was charged earlier this month with inciting violence against state lawmakers.”

And, oh yes — “Last week, Mr. Turner achieved a new level of notoriety after federal authorities charged him with threatening in blog posts to assault and murder three federal appeals court judges. “These judges deserve to be killed,” Mr. Turner wrote on his Web site, turnerradionetwork.com, which has since been taken down. “Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty.”

Shock Jocks blog to NY Times: — What took you so long?

Harold “Hal” Turner, the white supremacist New Jersey blogger and former radio shock jock who was recently arraigned on felony charges in Connecticut for urging his blog readers to “‘take up arms’” against lawmakers and suggesting state officials “‘obey the Constitution or die,’” has been arrested again, this time by FBI agents on a federal complaint filed in Chicago. It is now alleged that Turner posted threats to assault and murder three federal appeals court judges there in retaliation for their recent ruling upholding handgun bans in Chicago and a suburb, according to the Justice Department.

For a summary of Turner’s dangerous tirade against the judges, go here.

But this quote from Turner — once a favored guest of Sean Hannity –probably says it all: “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed.” His hate-filled postings included photographs, phone numbers, work address and room numbers of these judges, along with a photo of the building in which they work and a map of its location. In the Justice Department statement, U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who announced the charges, said, “We take threats to federal judges very seriously. Period.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Turner as “A belligerent, foul-mouthed talk show host…the maestro of radio hate “a man who rants about a “Portable Nigger Lyncher” machine, “faggots,” ‘savage Negro beasts,” “bull-dyke lesbians” and “lazy-ass Latinos ” slithering across the border.’”

For more background the Turner/Hannity connection, see this 2005 Nation article.

Seriously — Rush is claiming that Obama made Sanford cheat on his wife!

Listen for yourself: