George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 July 2018.]

In our hyper-polarized country it’s time to revisit the notion of censoring free speech.  And specifically as this relates to talk radio.  Our Left has had a perennial problem with how talk radio works in America, or how it works for the Right, and disastrously fails for the Left.  This leads to cries of censorship, claiming that the resulting programming is not ‘fair and balanced’ in the minds of progressives.  All such talk began back in 1949 with the Fairness Doctrine introduced by the Federal Communications Commission.

Back in those days public communication channels were limited to print media, movies, and radio.  Television was then in its infancy.  Since frequency bandwidth was a limited resource, the FCC parceled it out to radio stations as a limited public good.  And among the many rules imposed on broadcasters, the one on the discussion of controversial issues of public importance required programming from every station to be “honest, equitable, and balanced”.  Well, you can imagine the kind of problems that requirement launched – honest, equitable, and balanced in whose opinion?  Soon all kinds of obvious violations came to pass, and in 1987 the FCC rescinded the rule in favor of letting the markets decide who gets to listen to what.

By the early 1990s radio channels had expanded considerably, television was mature, cable was burgeoning, and the internet was already on the horizon.  In the intervening decades broadcast TV had become the home of leftwing political commentary, most visibly when packaged as entertainment, as in late night comedy shows that became thinly veiled propaganda outlets for leftwing ideology and Democrat causes.  And most of the other media, including government subsidized public radio, had taken a distinct and comfortable leftward tilt that actually started under FDR during the depression of the thirties.

The last bastion of rightwing thought became talk radio on private sector commercial stations where commentators were able to interpret the country’s goings on from the conservative and libertarian viewpoints to audiences that seemed to grow without bound.  The reach and effectiveness of conservative talk radio was not lost on the Left, which immediately launched its own talk shows to dispense socialist and progressive views of the world.  But for some puzzling reason, none of these shows got enough traction or caught on with the public.

The liberal diagnosis was that somehow the capitalist free markets were censoring leftwing talk radio, with stations shutting down one show after another as sponsors abandoned them because the audiences simply weren’t there.  As always, the Left’s proposal has been to bring in government, this time to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine that would put talk shows under newly minted quota regulations.  The thought is that no matter if people listened or not, forcing radio stations to devote equal time to Left and Right talk shows would reduce time available for disseminating conservative viewpoints.  This also satisfies a basic tenet of liberal belief, that whatever the government does not subsidize, prescribe, or enforce with its gun, is automatically prohibited, proscribed, or censored in our society.

So today’s accepted progressive wisdom is that censorship by capitalist free markets has been the reason for the ongoing failure of leftwing talk radio.  And this censorship needs to be removed by reinstating government regulation of thought on the airwaves.  But instead of reinstating the failures of the Fairness Doctrine, I would like to offer some other considerations why leftwing talk radio cannot attract audiences, reasons that others may consider too politically incorrect to explain the absence of listeners.

The simplest and most plausible reasons that audiences reject progressive commentaries are due to a combination of factors.  First and foremost, the credibility of a message that violates critical thinking, common sense, and universally understood norms of human behavior.  Second, the ability of government succored audiences to comprehend the more complex parts of public debate and policy proposals.  Third, the poor command of English by many of today’s Democrat constituencies.  And finally, education limited backgrounds that put out of reach the more detailed arguments based on history, economics, and science.

So, why do you think that liberal radio has had such a disastrous history?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  The main point I want the reader to take away from this is to answer why it is the Left that is trying to limit the speech of the Right, and the Right has no interest in reciprocating.  Specifically, no one on the Right seeks to apply the Fairness Doctrine to the highly one-sided programs on the mainstream media and the government subsidized outlets such as under the aegis of CPB and PBS.  (A more local example is the record of local lefties who have called for the silencing of my former Union column, and the ongoing calls to get me off the air at KVMR.  Has anyone ever run across someone on the Right trying to silence the rampant local propagandizing by the Left?)

If there were a real demand for leftwing or progressive radio commentary, then there is no one out there to stop them from grabbing time slots, even on established rightwing outlets, since such programming would significantly increase the stations’ outreach to audiences that advertisers would find attractive, and therefore increase such stations’ revenues.  Instead, the ideological fare that sells on TV is leftwing oriented comedy one-liners that appeal primarily to people for whom thinking is optional.  But, of course, for such audiences this lightweight and almost always fallacious fare is extremely effective, especially since it’s the only political commentary they consume.

Here is the currently operative view from the Left as to why they don’t fare well in the talk radio market, and why the government must step in – landmark 2007 study by the Center of American Progress (here), and some analyses of it (here and here).

[26jul18 update]  ‘The Trashing of George Mason U.’ provides a relevant tangent to this post.  Turns out that there’s a sleazebag outfit called UnKoch My Campus that is attacking George Mason for accepting donations from Koch brothers and others of a conservative libertarian bent for seeking “to advance the understanding, acceptance and practice of those free market processes and principles which promote individual freedom, opportunity and prosperity, including the rule of law, constitutional government, private property and the laws, regulations, organizations, institutions, and social norms upon which they rely.”  This attack on supposedly “dark money” funding colleges is against one of the last islands of free speech and conservative thought of America's academia, and is  carried out by an outfit that itself refuses to reveal who is funding its activities.