Increasing the volume on talk radio isn’t the answer

  • William Raspberry / Washington Post columnist
  • Sunday, April 11, 2004 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — I find certain broadcasters — you can probably guess who they are — almost literally painful to watch. It isn’t merely that their political views are contrary to mine; it is also their indifference to civil discourse. Sometimes they seem calculatedly rude.

Worse, I get the feeling that they are playing games that they know many of their faithful take as serious truth. They pretend to be conservative journalists, but often make themselves into unpaid flacks for particular parties and politicians. Every good thing in America today is a direct result of the policies of President Bush. The bad is the unfortunate legacy of his predecessor.

They don’t believe this, of course, but they are utterly untroubled that many of their avid followers do. I find these broadcasters dangerous and divisive.

So now some geniuses from the other side — my side — are giving us: Al Franken.

Now Franken is a funny enough guy, I suppose, as an entertainer. But to the extent he sees his role as countering right-wing misrepresentations with left-wing misrepresentations, my response is: Who needs him?

The answer to lies and partisan innuendo is not more lies, but truth — truth at least to the best ability of journalists to uncover it.

No, I’m not humorless. I enjoy both Bill Maher and Dennis Miller. They are funny, though often in a biting and somewhat ideological way. But they understand that they are entertainers, and they don’t carry water for particular politicians.

Nor do they expect to be your primary source of the news. Indeed, one of the reasons I like them is that they proceed from the assumption that you already know something about what’s going on in the world.

The Franken show as I understand the concept (I haven’t been able to find it on my radio yet) is to stick it to the right the way the right has been sticking it to the left.

If that’s true, then it’s more than just bad journalism masquerading as entertainment. It is a further rending of the fabric of our society, a further poisoning of the public dialogue. Reporters tell us that the current presidential campaign has "gone negative" earlier than usual. But how can we rebuke the politicians when the rest of us embrace the deliberately negative?

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. I don’t know whether she would say it this way again, now that she is married to presidential candidate John Kerry. But 10 years ago, Teresa Heinz made a speech that I still remember. She spoke of our tendency, when things become uncertain and frightening, to turn for solace and reassurance to the finger-pointers, the politicians she described as:

… critical of everything, impossible to please, indifferent to nuance, incapable of compromise. They laud perfection but oddly never see it in anybody but themselves. They are right all the time, eager to say I told you so, and relentlessly unforgiving. They occasionally may mean well, but the effect of even their good intentions is to destroy. They corrode self-confidence and good will; they cultivate guilt; they rule by fear and ridicule.

They are creatures of opportunity as much as of principles, extremists of the left and the right who feed on our fear and promote it, who dress up their opponents in ugly costumes, who drive a bitter wedge between us and the Other, the one not like us, the one who sees the world just a shade differently. … They demonize us by our parts and tear our country into pieces.

Exactly so. Maybe politicians believe they have to behave this way in order to survive — like hunters who kill in order to feed their families. But what of those who, like sports hunters, fire away at their political opponents just for the fun of it? And what of us who, though we refrain from this political pot-shotting, applaud those who do it?

Aren’t we in enough trouble with the economy and the quagmire that Iraq has become? How does driving new wedges help any of us?

William Raspberry is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to

willrasp@washpost.com.

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