The Rest of the Damn Story

The most popular right-wing pundit on the air is more than halfway through a contract that would make pro footballer players jealous, a $100 million dollar over ten years deal that trumps even perky Katie's take and makes Rush and the falafel king look like shoestring operations.  If you live in a city, you may encounter this mega-broadcaster only on some tiny AM stations.  But if you live in a rural area, you can bet he has a prominent place on the dial -- and by now he's been there so long that he is the sound of rural radio.  He's the guy who invented the mingling of conservative commentary, selectively clipped news, and personally delivered advertisements that has become the model for the right.  He's Paul Harvey.

NPR is running a story celebrating Paul Harvey's eighty-ninth birthday and his seventy-four years in broadcasting.  For many people, Harvey has been at his microphone so long that he's acquired a kind of defacto status somewhere between radio saint and national grandpa.   His fat salary shows that, no matter how little attention we may pay to the man, his reach is still extensive and his ability to pitch ideas -- as shown in the sales he racks up with his oh-so-sincere product placements -- undiminished by time.

It's hard to be angry at a man older than my father, much less a man who my grandfather used to listen to daily, but I have a special disdain for Harvey.  Despite the praises sung to his salesmanship, and the plaudits given his years behind the desk, Paul Harvey is a mean-spirited old cuss who has done more to push selfishness, division, and vilification into the political process than any ten other commentators combined.

I'll admit it, when I was young I listened to the man every day.  After all, he was on the only radio station in my home town, and the station was owned by the same man who paid my salary as a photographer for the local weekly (see, we were doing media consolidation long before Rupert).  I even bought a couple of Harvey's books, taken in by the clever historical teasers that often bumpered his broadcasts.  It took me years to realize that far from giving "the rest of the story," what Harvey was delivering was "his half of the story," an edited, often distorted view of both American history and current politics, shaped to ignore any truth that didn't fit his own extremely conservative viewpoint.  He made no effort to sort fiction from fact, and never missed an opportunity to blame the left for the nation's problems.

And often it wasn't all that subtle.  I still remember well the day that John Lennon was shot, not only for the sadness that swept over so many on that day, but for the outrage of how Harvey reacted.  Rather than finding sympathy for Lennon's widow or child, Harvey sneered at the "whining" of Lennon's long-haired fans.  He then went on to speculate just how much crying there would be "when someone kills Paul McCartney."  That's America's grandfatherly broadcaster at his purest -- a man full of disdain and hate for anyone that didn't toe his own political line.  There's nothing that Rush Limbaugh ever said during the Clinton years that Harvey didn't say first -- and meaner -- about Jimmy Carter.

How far to the right is Paul Harvey?  Far enough that his once (and quite probably future) stand in is Fred Thompson a man who was described as having the same "homespun appeal" as Harvey.

Unlike Harvey's hate for those not on the right, I don't wish the man any ill.  I hope he lives to be two hundred.  I hope we all do.  But celebrating seventy-four years of Paul Harvey at the mike is only elevating three quarters of a century of vitriol and distortions that have warped the rural view of America, of history, and of politics.