Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has a lot to say about talk radio that others of us have been thinking for a long time. He offers essentially four reasons why talk radio seems to be losing its luster: It's politically or ideologically monolithic; it wastes far too much time on commercials and other extraneous, mind-numbing noise which are the talk-radio version of Chinese water-torture and which occupy about half of every hour of air time; the callers are too often either sycophants or banal; and, though it may be heresy among conservatives to say it, the big-time hosts are beginning to grow threadbare.
We confess that we often listen to talk radio when we're driving alone, and frequently find it very informative. Nevertheless every one of Carter's complaints is on the mark. Take, for example, the last.
Rush has for years been a national treasure, but more recently he seems to have become too convinced of his own self-importance. In the early years this was his shtick, now it seems to be his truth. On those occasions when he's not off on a trip somewhere he too often gives the impression that his show has been reduced to a mere sideline in his life. He's still good at pointing out the contradictions of contemporary liberalism, but his program is no longer as richly entertaining as it once was. Perhaps this is because he has allowed himself to become too much a caricature of the fat-cat, cigar-chomping, country-club Republican. His fondness for name-dropping and lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous exploits have become tiresome and are of little or no interest or relevance to the majority of his audience.
Rush is in many ways an admirable person, having risen to the top through dint of hard work and having persevered through a number of very difficult crises in his personal life, but despite his disclaimers, he seems to be taking both his show and his audience for granted.
Sean Hannity seems like a good guy, but he's especially hard to take on the radio. Every conversation is an opportunity for him to talk about himself in tones that ooze a faux humility. He likes to say that it's not about him, but, in fact, it seems to be all about him. His debating style is extremely confrontational and unpleasant. His preferred tactic is to refuse to let a guest speak and to step all over whatever words the unfortunate interlocutor does manage to sputter. It's quite unedifying.
A listener might like to hear a reasoned discussion when Sean has a liberal guest on, but that's pretty much hopeless. Hannity isn't interested in discussion, he's interested mostly in just pummeling his adversary into oblivion. He regards conversation as a kind of combat waged with clubs rather than as an attempt to increase the audience's understanding of the issues he's debating and to help them move closer to the truth. When Sean features a conservative guest with whom he agrees he often spends much of the allotted time talking, usually about himself, and leaves the guest relatively little time to say much of anything before the station has to break for commercials.
None of this isn't to suggest that neither Limbaugh or Hannity aren't still tremendous national assets. They are, but one wonders if, like great athletes, they aren't moving past their peak. Conservative talk radio has been a wonderful boon to this country. It has provided millions of Americans with information that was easily accessible nowhere else and has served to galvanize conservative citizens around a set of ideas that many found difficult to articulate themselves and which many also assumed no one else held. Even so, despite all its virtues, talk-radio is in jeopardy of becoming tired and old. It would be a shame if that were to happen.