Talk radio: Democratic renewal or demagoguery?

Peace and conflict specialist Mark Sommer examines in this exclusive Inter Press Service column whether the resurgence of talk radio in the United States is a sign of democratic renewal or just pure demagoguery.

BERKELEY, California: After languishing for four decades in the flickering shadows of TV, radio broadcasting has once more moved to the center of U.S cultural and political life.

The fastest-growing sector in this audio renaissance in so called talk radio -- nonstop chatter by a perpetual procession of hosts, guests, and callers on topics ranging from health care to sex therapy, welfare to Whitewater and everything in between.

More than a thousand stations nationwide now feature talk-only formats, and most operate around the clock, and nearly half of all adults in the United States, of every background and persuasion, tune in to talk radio at some point during their week.

Americans are drawn to talk radio, as they are to computer networks like the internet, both by their conviviality and their anonymity. In a culture whose ever-tenuous sense of community is rapidly eroding, the virtual community of the air waves has become a kind of electronic town meeting, a place to sound of and be heard without fear of embarrassment or retribution.

The results of this freedom are decidedly mixed.

At its best, talk radio is a cumulative conversation in which the insights of each enrich the understanding of all. But in all too many cases nowadays, the talk turns ugly.

Spurred on by the inflammatory rhetoric of a few high-profile "hate radio" hosts, misanthropes and malcontents call in to talk radio in disproportionate numbers, railing against the groups they love to hate -- minorities, liberals, welfare "queens", and immigrants.

In an atmosphere of increasing stridency, more thoughtful voices are loather to speak for fear and ridicule and by their silence give listening audiences the feeling that public opinion is more mean-spirited that it actually is.

Troubling as these trends may be, they have taken on truly menacing dimensions only in the past year as politicians with retrograde agendas have teamed up with charismatic talk show hosts to transform the public's inchoate anxieties about economic uncertainty and social tensions into victory at the polls.

Since their pivotal role in producing last November's stunning triumph by the Republican far right, talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his demagogic imitators have become both king-makers and king-breakers--vilifying the President, promoting his Republican rivals, and setting the tone and terms of the national debate with a surly contempt for anyone with whom they don't agree.

Indeed, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, President Bill Clinton had fleetingly dared to suggest that there might be a link between the incendiary rhetoric of certain hate-radio hosts and the violent actions of right-wing terrorists.

But he was soon silenced by an angry chorus of hisses from the hosts themselves and their powerful allies in the new Republican Congress, who complained that their free-speech rights were being threatened.

Yet for all of its current excesses, talk radio is not inherently an anti-democratic medium. Alone among the broadcast and print media, it allows for instantaneous interaction between speakers and listeners. This spontaneity and responsiveness gives talk radio its potential as the most promising means of reviving a desperately needed debate about the future of the country and the world.

As talk radio's influence has come to be recognized, new and more thoughtful voices are beginning to be heard on the airwaves -- like Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York, and other liberal stalwarts.

But in seeking to shift the balance of the debate, liberals face daunting obstacles. A blizzard of unprocessed information and a frenetic pace of life leave most Americans so distracted they often mistake the trivial for the vital and ignore the issues that affect them most.

A deteriorating public educational system, further crippled by devastating budget cutbacks, leaves the new generation largely ignorant of the world around them and bereft of the skills to participate in the democratic process.

Furthermore, politics has fallen into such ill-repute that overwise thoughtful and conscientious citizens tune out the large debate, hoping they will be insulated from its destructive effects. Yet their silence assures that the outcome will not be to their benefit.

Corporate control of the U.S broadcast media, long a fact of life in television and the print media, is now threatening to engulf the last remaining independent outlets in both commercial and public radio.

The Republican-led Congress is seeking to drive the diverse voices still hard on public radio into a narrow mould of corporate groupthink by cutting off a federal funding over the next three years.

Meanwhile, the new Telecommunications. Act, crafted by lobbyists and heavily influenced by a mutually profitable partnership between House Speaker Newt Gingrich and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, smoothes the way for the formation of ever-larger communications conglomerates, including unlimited foreign ownership of domestic media outlets.

Despite theses obstacles, progressive voices are determined to be heard. And many are persuaded that for all its deficiencies, talk-radio is one of the new places left where it might still be possible to break into a mainstream debate from which most independent voices have been locked out in recent years.

For while editorial censors guard the gates of nearly every editorial page and TV studio these days, for the moment talk radio remains a freewheeling phenomenon.

Whether progressives succeed in penetrating the medium and reopening the debate to new points of view will be one of the truest tests of the durability of U.S. democracy in an age of increasing intolerance.

Mark Sommer is a research associate in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley.