The death of talk radio

Part 6

by Dan Kennedy

Even though some hard-headed business decisions underlie talk radio's move toward trivia, it's just plain wrong to suggest that the low road is the only road. After all, David Brudnoy and Christopher Lydon know how to keep it moving and draw an audience while offering intelligent talk about a wide range of issues.

"If there is a local issue, we don't hesitate to do it," says Brudnoy, though he admits that listeners care less about local politics than they used to. When he hosts Boston Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Payzant, for instance, he says he has trouble getting calls. But Brudnoy adds that the solution isn't to stop doing local radio, but to find ways to make it interesting and to relate it to listeners' lives.

Lydon, for his part, says he finds the diminished interest in local politics "kind of a liberation," allowing The Connection to focus on topics that engage him and his listeners: music, spirituality, books. Indeed, things can get pretty out-there, such as on one recent morning when futurist Watts Wacker, co-author of The Five-Hundred-Year Delta (HarperCollins, 1997), cyberbabbled that the Information Age is already over and that we're heading into an era that can only be explained by chaos theory.

"I'm just amazed at the range of things that people want to talk about," says Lydon. "I think the audience has always been out there. It's been ill-served. I think ours is the real audience. People don't talk at home the way they do on Howard Stern. They don't talk politically the way they do on Howie, either. This is a very sane, very interested, very un-dumbed-down populace we have."

If Brudnoy's show represents the best of the past brought up to date, Lydon's may presage the future of serious talk. That's because in the current environment, public broadcasters may actually be more responsive to the community than their supposedly market-driven brethren at the commercial end of the spectrum. WBUR, after all, depends on listener and corporate donations for more than 90 percent of its revenues; commercial stations merely seek to deliver the most desirable slice of the market to advertisers.

Thus it's not surprising that as the quality of commercial news and public-affairs programming has declined, WBUR has emerged as the most important broadcast-news organization in Boston. Two of the three most significant new public-affairs shows of the past few years have been on public stations: in addition to The Connection, there's Greater Boston, on WGBH-TV (Channels 2 and 44), which got off to a rocky start earlier this year, but which is serious-minded and getting better. (The third show, NewsNight, is a production of New England Cable News.)

Then, too, it's easy to look back at the 1970s and '80s as a golden era that in reality never was.

Jerry Williams arguably did as much harm as good, railing against the very taxes needed to help the welfare mothers whose cause the liberal side of him championed. If he was never quite the "tax-cut terrorist" his enemies portrayed him as, he nevertheless helped paint a fantasyland picture of a state in which taxes could be slashed and programs could be bolstered if only Michael Dukakis and his fellow hacks on Beacon Hill would reduce their bloated payrolls.

"Unfortunately, ratings so drive the process that the hate gets more and more strident and more and more extreme," says Dukakis, though he quickly adds: "I never paid any attention to that when I was governor, frankly."

Besides, even at the height of his political activism, Williams always took time out for his annual sex survey.

And yet.

Teaching people to think and act for themselves, and to take charge of a political process that they normally look at as something done to them, is a powerful thing. And in today's decadent talk-radio environment, that's happening less and less.

Take Anthony Schinella, who wants to talk about empowerment but finds himself shut out. Schinella got involved in talk radio through Jerry Brown's 1992 presidential campaign and the 1993 debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. He's a bright, articulate guy, and he espouses a hard-edged political view that's seldom heard these days. He's beside himself, for instance, that not one Boston talk show chose to focus on the recently announced layoff of more than 100 workers at Osram Sylvania, in Danvers, whose jobs are being moved to Mexico thanks to NAFTA.

But Schinella can't break in. He just left a once-a-week gig at Tufts University's tiny WMFO, and is starting a Sunday-morning show at the slightly larger WUNR (AM 1600). Yet he has few illusions about breaking into the big time. "There's no Triple A farm system," he says. "There's no place for me to go. There's a wall there." And he wonders who, in the post-Jerry Williams era, will talk about the Big Dig, a new baseball stadium, or any of a host of local issues. "When you limit the number of voices, you limit the real news that people get," he says. "You don't get news from Dr. Laura."

Michael Harrison, of Talkers, argues that talk radio is bigger than ever, having expanded from 100 stations 10 years ago to 1250 today. And talk is still the second-most-common radio format, after country music.

"The people at WRKO are not deliberately trying to create bad talk radio," he says. "The late '80s and the early '90s were a very special time in talk-radio history. That was a golden era. Right now there's nothing really capturing the spirit of the people the way it did in the early '90s. I hope it changes."

Perhaps it will. But don't count on it.

Two weeks ago, just before Ellen DeGeneres's TV alter ego finally, mercifully, came out, Marjorie Clapprood and Pat Whitley were on a roll. Syndicated columnist Liz Smith had written that another, much more famous TV star was on the verge of coming out. Inquiring minds wanted to know: who did Smith have in mind? The calls rolled in. The most plausible nominee was Oprah Winfrey. The most creative was Andy Griffith.

Trash radio? For hosts who, a week earlier, had asked callers to tell them about the most embarrassing displays of public affection they'd ever witnessed, it was a step up.

Two and a half years ago Time warned that we were in danger of becoming a nation of dittoheads. The magazine was too optimistic. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Williams, Gene Burns, et al., flawed as they were, urged you to turn on, tune in, and get involved.

Today's hosts assume that you've dropped out.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com.