The Tower of Babble

The power of talk radio united the working class across Fly Over Country and contributed mightily to the success of Donald Trump.

I have been a talk radio fan for decades. I began listening to Rush Limbaugh in 1989 when he was still broadcasting from Sacramento California. As his influence began to spread, so did the genre. Before long there was a plethora of talkers to choose from and I found myself channel surfing to find a new voice and talk format. I literally lost interest in pop music, except when I was driving in areas with no AM signal.

Over the years the concept of audience participation exploded across media segments. The whole nature of civic involvement changed and evolved. Talk shows gave a voice to the everyman. Suddenly we were no longer just a faint voter. We had power as a group and we had a say about many subjects that had eluded us in the past.

Rush had a major impact on Washington. The more participatory the audience became, the more secretive and manipulative the politicians became. As listeners and viewers pushed for more accountability and transparency, the less the beltway was willing to give us.

Sound familiar?

The media itself began to take sides. Some, like conservative AM radio, tried to reflect and amplify the concerns of voters. Others, like most television news operations, became entangled in ratings battles, and because of their growing dependency on corporate financial support, assumed the role of public relations agents for the political elite, huge groups of indentured union members, students and poor urbanites. Because of the extreme costs of operating massive studios, supporting huge payrolls and paying celebrity salaries for talking heads, they had to create train wrecks to draw audience share.

Advertisers could care less about traditions. What they want are eyes and ears, and the more dependent those audiences are, the better.

The media quickly learned that making their audience loyal was the challenge. Talk radio was doing it by focusing on what thinkers were interested in. Mass media on the other hand, found an even larger and more malleable audience with non-thinkers. Folks that wanted mostly distractions, entertainment, superfluous information and gore. They catered to the "middle" politically, and also found that that group wanted validation too. So they began to pander to them, telling them "what they wanted to hear" that the world was safe, that their children were smart, and that the government would take care of them.

"Mainstream Media" morphed into predominantly game shows, situation comedies, infotainment, and advocacy programming. The lines of distinction were smeared and the truth of reporting was distorted to make stories fit a narrative and a sound bite time limit.

If the goal is to stupify and mesmerize your audience, it is much more effective to present only shallow storylines, surreal action sequences and attention grabbing headlines with little or no serious analysis or followup.

Scandals were particularly attractive and they tend to go on for months or years, like television soap operas. Many news reporters made their career out of milking political or cultural scandals among elected officials or celebrities.

I would argue that the emergence of a growing talk radio audience forced many traditional news programmers to lean towards what has become the "Fake News" phenomenon. More recently, the power of talk radio united the working class across Fly Over Country (a term that mocks mid west conservatives) and contributed mightily to the success of Donald Trump.

Since the emergence of talk radio, the blogosphere, and podcasting, plus the ubiquity of social media platforms like FaceBook, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and hundreds if not thousands of others, our information stream has become a tsunami of innuendo, scandal, blasphemy and misinformation.

It is literally impossible to sort it all out…

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is that it scattered languages all across the world, making it impossible for people to unify. Maybe the world wasn't united and speaking the same language when the internet came about, but it has effectively scrambled information, making it impossible for people to determine the truth.

We are living in a new era of tribalization. The internet is just a modern version of The Tower of Babble, but instead of scattering garbled language, it is distributing garbled information.