Some of you may hear in this diary, an echo of Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. But it's not a human being I want to target, but rather the extreme Right Wing's stranglehold on a medium that reaches a huge percentage of voting America: AM Talk Radio.
We've been dismissing the daily Bund meetings that take place all over talk radio as the realm of crazies, white trash on SSI and closet Nazis, but unfortunately, the Right has so monopolized this medium that there are tens of thousands of communities in the United States for which Right Wing Talk Radio is literally the only available point of view. No other voices are heard, period.
Take the town of Rolla, Missouri for example. Here is a town of 20,000, growing, prosperous, with a state university housing another 4,000 souls. Across the AM dial, you will find no fewer than four ultra-conservative talkers, two stations that carry the more moderate Rush Limbaugh and Tony Snow, and six (6!) Christian stations that talk hard-core politics between prayer requests and gospel songs. To hear a non-Right-Wing opinion, you'd have to drive a hundred miles to the suburbs of St. Louis and tune in the local PBS affiliate. If you drive through fly-over America, you'll find thousands of locales with a similar media profile.
This state of affairs came about through a concerted, organized effort by political and religious extremists to drown out or eliminate all competing ideologies. Letter writing campaigns targeted moderate or Democratic voices, sponsors were boycotted, complaints were filed to the FCC. When those failed, senators like Kansas' Sam Brownback wrote threatening letters to media moguls warning of dire consequences. Clear Channel, Salem Radio Network and Sinclair simply fired any hosts that didn't support George Bush. It didn't happen overnight, but it didn't take long.
And there's one theme you'll hear on all these outlets: The Media Leans to the Left.
Here's my proposal: It's time for us to join this struggle, using some of the tools perfected by the Right. Letters have to be written, to stations and especially to sponsors. National advertisers especially are sensitive to disgruntled listeners, as a conservative minority learned through their campaigns. Sponsors have to be shown, through communication and the power of the marketplace, that Free Markets can be a two-way street.
Another powerful weapon will be the use of complaints to the FCC. The worst of the Radio Fascists go over the line into hate speech on a daily basis. When you hear Michael Savage say that certain public figures deserve "two in the back of the head" or he refers to statistics that show that "Mexicans will soon outnumber humans in this country", you have heard a serious offense against public standards. Complaints are simple to make. You write a letter, including a tape and/or transcript of the segment. As we've seen with the persecution of Howard Stern and other talkers for their political views, a few million-dollar fines add up quickly, and lead to management's discontent with radio hosts, no matter how popular. Once a few complaints pile up, the FCC is practically forced to do an inquiry, and often that's enough.
I know, this kind of supression of free speech is anathema to the beliefs of our side. We've had it done to us so many times that we're leery of bringing the boots of government down on anybody who's just saying what they believe. But we are now engaged in a fight for the very existence of the values Americans hold dear. As much as it makes me uncomfortable to turn the tables, that may be exactly what we have to do.