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BS ‘n’ About…
Hate Radio Days
“And that’s the way it was…” There was a time when we respected our newsmen and they respected us. They actually used to try to report the news rather than be it. Whether it was “We have liftoff” or the unsettling truth of Vietnam’s unwinnability, our newsmen served a very important role in defending the Constitution and preserving the underlying principles of Democracy that made America the special place it so recently was.
Freedom of the press is one of the most sought after and cherished freedoms known to man. It is also one of the first freedoms to become distorted when a free nation is threatened. When a people can no longer believe the veracity of what is being presented to them as ‘fact’, they are a people being asked to make uninformed decisions based on insufficient, information. The result is a society built on lies. The result is the America we live in today.
As recently as Richard Nixon we threw a President out of office because he had the audacity to tell us one little white lie to protect his friends. The My Lai massacre was front-page news for years until the guilty were brought to justice. We marched in the streets for things we believed in enough to fight for. The media stayed behind the microphone and let us, the American people make up our minds about the issues of the day.
After all of Tricky Dick’s shifty subterfuge, we elected the most honest, decent man we could find: Jimmy Carter. After four years of his floundering about, we elected Ronald Reagan because he promised us strength. Once elected, we united behind our leaders. We didn’t root for them to fail. We didn’t demonize them. We didn’t hate our neighbor because he voted differently than we did.
All that has changed. We have never been so consumed by hate. It irresponsibly assaults us across the airwaves, fomented by demagogues of divisiveness who are only interested in their own self-importance and bank account. We have traded William Paley for some Australian internationalist with no real vested interest in America’s success. We have traded icons like Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, and Brinkley for buffoons of bloviation like Limbaugh, Beck, Olberman, and O’Reilly.
When everything is presented in black and white with no deviation, our democracy is in danger. Democracy is a gray area of compromise, not a black and white battlefield of dogma. When our politicians always vote in a party block, they can’t be voting in the best interests of their constituents, their conscience, or America. When our newsman are always banging the drum from the far right or the far left, it ought to be obvious that they are not thinking for themselves, that they are not being objective. A media that is not objective is not a free media and cannot serve the needs of a free, democratic people. A media that is not objective is called propaganda.
The price we pay for this circus is a dear one, indeed. We quit asking questions. We quit being part of the process. We become spectators, bought off by bread and circuses. And then the bread runs out and that’s when the real fun begins.
Of one thing you can be certain: When a billionaire pays a millionaire to get you to hate your neighbor, it won’t be in your best interests, nor those of your neighbor. America has been torn apart in recent years over abortion, gay marriage, gun control, healthcare, the war on drug users, and many of the other personal choices we and our neighbors make.
Meanwhile the Fox News’ of this world admonish us for being too hard on poor old BP, call us socialists for wanting to spend the wealth of our nation on moms and kids instead of giving billions in bailouts to the bankers, and unpatriotic for daring to even question the war on terror and the police state America is turning into. We don’t really understand ‘the war’ and don’t want to be in it. Our healthcare system is little better than legalized rape and all Obamacare does is tell us to lie back and enjoy it. Our bridges, roads, schools, power plants and factories are state-of-the-art for a century ago. The rich are amassing Gilded Age fortunes and America is falling apart.
Radio back in the days of Cronkite was governed by what was called a “Fairness Doctrine”. In essence, it said that if a station gave airtime to one side of an issue, or one party, it had to allocate equal airtime to the other side, or the other party. It sounded good in theory: the very essence of democracy. But, in practice, it pretty much saw to it that except for the news-oriented stuff, politics stayed off the airwaves. Rich guys weren’t allowed to amass media empires to fund one-sided propaganda campaigns. The President could give a speech, or a ‘fireside chat’, and the other side could comment on it afterward. But the single-minded destructiveness of paid political hate mongers with an agenda was kept at bay.
When the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, moneyed interests rushed in to fill the airwaves with shills for, Surprise! Surprise!, the moneyed interests. America used to be a left of center country, a country where a decent wage resulted in home ownership, benefits, college for the kids, and a decent retirement. Being left of center made sense. There were a lot more truck drivers than trucking company owners. There were a lot more steel workers than steel mill owners. There were a lot more wage earners than there were ‘capitalists’. Left of center was the natural order of things when America was a prosperous country with its prosperity shared by those whose hard work made it that way.
Hate radio has so distorted the issues that we now see ourselves as a right-of-center country: A country where a right-to-work, fast food job and a credit card will saddle you with more mortgage than you can afford, pay for your undereducated twentysomething kids who are still at home, and blame the downfall on welfare mothers and teachers unions.
For a long, long time the majority of Americans have been deceived into voting against their own best interests. A big part of the reason for this is that the issues that are truly important to us and our kids never get rationally discussed. While we’re being incited to hate our gay neighbors, the bankers are stealing us blind. While we’re busy hating teenagers and rape victims for not wanting to bring another unwanted life into this world, the oil interests are marching those lives off to the Middle East to die for Wall Street. The politicians have made it virtually impossible for us to feed, educate, and get medical care for our kids, much less keep them out of the biggest per capita prison system in the world.
The problem is that hate sells. It worked for Hitler to distract the people from his excesses by throwing their Jewish neighbors into concentration camps. It worked for the Roman Emperors to distract the people from their excesses by throwing their Christian neighbors to the lions. It is working for the American ‘Greed-Elite’ to distract us from their excesses by throwing away any hope We, the People might have for a decent future.
They have savaged our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren’s grandchildren in their pursuit of greedy excess. And they’ve managed to so because we were so busy hating our neighbors that we don’t have enough energy left over to keep an eye on them. We, the People have no voice.
Hate radio is not our friend. They actually have the audacity to try and make us feel bad for poor old BP. They’ve managed to convince us in the midst of 20% unemployment that Goldman Sachs needs its billion dollar bonuses to attract ‘the best and brightest’, a best and brightest that we had to bail out after damn near flushing the world economy down the toilet. Hate radio is not our friend.
It is time we the American people wake up. We need to tune out the hate and start talking to our neighbors again. Regardless of our differences, we have a lot more in common with them than with anyone bombasting away at us from some penthouse in New York or walled compound in Florida. We need to start questioning what we are being told and separate the truth from the lies. We need to start forming our own opinions rather than allowing them to be formed for us by people who, when it gets right down to it, aren’t our friends and aren’t looking out for our best interests.
Ronald Reagan swept into the White House by asking, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Well are you? Are you better off than your parents were? Will your kids’ lives be better than yours?
Unless you work on Wall Street, for a defense contractor, or a Senator, you probably answered “No!” And if you did, then who is to blame? …the teachers unions? …the welfare mothers? …the terrorists? Hate Radio would have you believe that the blame lies with your gay neighbors, or your welfare neighbors, or your Muslim neighbors, or your illegal immigrant neighbors, or your leftist, socialist neighbors, or maybe even your plain old garden variety unpatriotic, un-American neighbors!
…anybody but poor little old you. You are the victim here so it follows that it has to be somebody else’s fault, right? But, chances are it isn’t our unemployed, over-mortgaged, under-educated neighbor’s fault at all. As with most problems, follow the money. If our lives are not better than those of our parents, it’s because we have less money, lots less money. Good paying lifelong union careers have been replaced by a succession of no-benefits service industry jobs. Tax dollars that built roads, schools, and futures for our parents’ generation have been given to the bankers and Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.
If we are truly honest with ourselves, we’ll realize that the fault lies with someone who doesn’t even live in our neighborhood. They probably live in some gated community with lots of security to keep both us, and our neighbor, out.
Hate Radio screams at us that it is our defender, the champion of the little guy, the champion of our America. But these guys are cashing six-figure paychecks, riding around in limousines, and retiring on stock portfolios that profit every time our job gets outsourced or we get downsized. The truth is that it is their America they are championing, not ours.
We, the American people need to wake up and take responsibility for the mess we’ve allowed America to become. We need to start practicing family values rather than preaching them. We need to quit hating our neighbor and start working with them to rebuild the ideal we all pledged allegiance to in school: “…with Liberty and Justice for All.
If the government won’t do anything about the hate that fills our airwaves, then it is up to us. The Patriot Act’s only definition of a terrorist is ‘someone who incites others to violence against the government’. How these folks manage to hold our airwaves hostage is both a mystery and a travesty. Teach us to hate and we’ll learn to hate. That ought to be pretty damned obvious by now.
We need to tune these folks out. The ‘greatest generation’ wasn’t spawned in a red versus blue nation. They were spawned in the most visionary democracy ever to grace the face of this Earth. If we are truly honest with ourselves we’ll realize that we are not a red versus blue nation. We are an us versus them nation. The trick will be figuring out who the us is, and who the them are. Hate Radio is not our friend.
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