Free Radio New Orleans

In all of the chatter about Don Imus, no one is talking about how an idiot like that gets paid millions of dollars to offend people across the country. It doesn’t matter that Imus lost his job. The problem is that we won’t have much say in who the next annointed idiot is to replace Imus.

Why have our media outlets across the spectrum become vast toxic dumps for intolerant cranks like Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, and more? Who makes the decisions to subject audiences across the country to bias, ignorance, and hatred? Local communities? When was the last time a local cable provider, TV or radio station, invited the public to a forum to talk about what kind of content they’d like to have? Of course, it’s never happened. That’s because media corporations don’t give a damn about what you think. They only care about how big their sponsor contracts are on nationally syndicated programs which are locked in a race to the sewer.

When all of the media outlets in your hometown are owned by out-of-state corporations which own dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other stations, there’s absolutely no interest in obtaining local comments. And the hate-mongering shock jock hosts who we’re told are professionals — well, they may be controversial, but they certainly don’t represent the America of tolerance which was the vision of the founding fathers. If they who sacrificed their lives for freedom of expression and tolerance compared the civility of British media with the crass hatred spewed forth by American media, they might wish the Revolution never happened.

Where does all of this self-righteous hatred come from?

We simply think America—and all the developed countries—are growing old, reaching the stage where one complains about things instead of doing something about them. It gets easy to be cantankerous and churlish. The flock of chiders, complainers, carpers, cavilers, and castigators makes it harder and harder to get an optimistic note in edgewise.

What we don’t know is how much better we could be served if more moderate voices, or more locals were allowed entry into the business of talk programming. The whole rationale for syndication is cutting costs while dominating markets across the country. If we’re going to be subjected to that kind of economic model for media, then we deserve more say in the standards used in programming what we have to be subjected to.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Media Democracy, Media Ownership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.