For higher than half a lifetime, I’ve studied media and its effects on the general public psyche. Teaching broadcast history and directing a student radio station, the larger picture seemed pretty clear.
But one query at all times frustrated and perplexed me: How did AM talk radio, specifically, come to program such venomous, outrageous programming? Why do station managers, salespeople, even some listeners insist that Rush rants are what the general public wants? And the way did “Christian” radio come to hold such un-Christian messages?
One in all my students, fresh from his each day Glenn-Beck-listening commute, touted Glenn’s latest — on Salina, Kansas, radio. Actually, it provoked earnest discussions, at school and out. Our respectful relationship culminated together with his presenting me a Cuban cigar at retirement. Our mutual respect didn’t, nevertheless, end my frustration at Beck’s seeds planted each day on local AM.
What forces shape, often without general awareness, a combative story about who we’re? Why have we tolerated, even encouraged, these voices, when the threat they pose culminated within the election of a philandering, draft-dodging, election-denying, serial-lying, consummate con man, tax cheat — and tv show host — as president of the Divided States of America?
On the Media’s recent public radio series, “The Divided Dial,” provides a solution, and a fresh perspective on U.S. radio history.
Constructing an empire
Consider young Stuart Epperson, who went from listening to local casting. His small enterprise grew into probably the most influential public-mind propagandizers you never heard of: Salem Broadcasting.
In his small Nineteen Thirties Southern Blue Ridge Mountain town of Ararat, named for Noah’s Ark destination, his brother Ralph mail-ordered a Montgomery Ward hi fi. They eventually opened windows wide for neighbors who flocked there to listen.
The Eppersons soon expanded from receiving to sending. A maze of wires and tubes enabled them to create their very own broadcasts. Based on the series: “Aspiring singers and musicians flocked to the house with banjos and fiddles, filling Epperson’s lounge and the local airwaves with what they called ‘hillbillery.’ ” Soon, local preachers were invited to sermonize to a vaster congregation than they may have imagined.
They became a part of an electronic war of apparatus and bandspace. That free speech eventually demanded federal regulation. The Communications Act of 1934 imposed station licensing for specific frequencies and power. It provided enforcement to stop stations from overwhelming or interrupting one another’s signal. The query was methods to get a license.
Fast forward to 1973. Epperson got one. An enormous one. And plenty of more.
He graduated from South Carolina’s white supremacist evangelical Bob Jones University. With classmate and wife Nancy Atsinger, he joined her brother, fellow Bob Jones alum Edward Atsinger, to determine Christian stations in Bakersfield and Oxnard, California. They defied standards immediately, making the stations businesses, not nonprofits. As business stations, they sold airtime to preachers.
Again, in keeping with the series: “It was a win-win. (As) a platform for preachers, … with money coming in, they (bought) more radio stations, and turned them into pulpits. They weren’t a lone wolf Christian station, (but) a network.” By 1990, Salem Broadcasting had two stations in Portland, San Diego, and Latest York City. Distinguished of their programming, which included James Dobson’s Concentrate on the Family, were voices for segregation academy “independent schools” (like Bob Jones University), and against LGBTQ people and abortion rights.
Quick to see the ability in such conglomeration, Paul Weyrich, a Nineteen Seventies conservative leader, got on the air through Salem. He knew that elite-leader strategizing wouldn’t be enough. They needed megaphones. They needed radio. As an on-air host and program director at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, radio station, and a news director in Denver, Weyrich knew radio to be a vital communication channel for the brand new Religious Right. He also understood it could influence elections by getting the “right” people to the polls.
As Weyrich explained to evangelical leaders in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote! …. Our leverage … goes up because the voting populace goes down.”
He founded the Council for National Policy in 1981. Today, the CNP and its lobbying arm has included the likes of Ginni Thomas, Mike Pence and Cleta Mitchell, a Donald Trump lawyer working to overturn the 2020 election results. Based on the series, it also includes Salem co-founders Epperson and Atsinger.
Famous voices
Salem is significant, but just one player within the historical dominance of Christian nationalist, xenophobic, antisemitic, racist themes on radio.
A master of, and gear for, that dominance was legendary Kansan John R. Brinkley. Brinkley operated KFKB (Kansas’ First, Kansas’ Best) radio out of Milford. Widely known for his quack “goat gland” operations to revive male virility (and sure killing dozens on the operating table), Brinkley also preached sermons and inveighed against federal and state authorities.
Brinkley “garnered the support of fascists, including Gerald B. Winrod, a Wichita preacher and Nazi sympathizer who blamed all of society’s troubles on a world Jewish conspiracy,” wrote the Kansas Reflector’s Max McCoy.
In 1930, Radio Digest named KFKB the most well-liked station in the US; shortly after in the identical yr, Brinkley’s license was revoked as “not in the general public interest.”
Without shame or remorse, Brinkley ran a write-in campaign for Kansas governor, and lost — by only 251 votes. Some report he also garnered enough votes to be governor of Oklahoma.
If Brinkley touted his bogus medical credentials, with sermons as a sideline, Father Charles Coughlin led primarily with religious credentials. Known for his smooth and entrancing voice, Coughlin sucked the faithful into his frequency with amazing alacrity. But in time, his voice grew more shrill, moving from faith to factionalism. Like Brinkley, he attacked authority (including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and promoted fascism.
Based on America magazine’s James T. Keane, his broadcast content featured “tropes which have develop into all too familiar lately: Anti-Semitism; a nativism ‘combined with alarm in response to foreign invaders’; open praise for dictators; ‘both-sides’ arguments designed to excuse … genocidal strongmen; the rhetoric of victimization (for) whites; dog-whistles encouraging sedition and vigilantism; (and) identification of Christianity because the true American religion.”
Like Brinkley, Coughlin’s reach was vast. His estimated listenership was 30 million, in a nation of fewer than 130 million. Coughlin saw all his villains as a part of a campaign to persecute Christians. His enemies, he evangelized, were communists, Roosevelt, and Christ-killing Jews. His hero was Hitler, who, Coughlin said, was doing the best thing.
In 1938, in keeping with the podcast Ultra, “just a couple of days after Kristallnacht, Coughlin got on the radio to guarantee his American listeners that they shouldn’t be too fearful about what they may be hearing out of Germany about Jews being persecuted and murdered. … (He) told his followers democracy was ‘doomed.’ He said ‘We’re on the crossroads. I take the road to fascism.’ ”
Coughlin’s on-air attacks were manifested in his militarized Christian Front, whose violence is now our heritage. Attempts at on-air reason and dialogue could be defeated by regulatory failure of the Nineteen Eighties Fairness Doctrine, and the 1996 takeover by satellite-driven, mega-company broadcasters. That’s for next time.
Thanks for listening.
This commentary was originally published by the Kansas Reflector, a States Newsroom affiliate.