Hot Air
Kurtz, Howard
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Hot Air" he was inconsiderate to his subordinates—was also exploded by Gilbert. He quotes from a 1938 letter sent by Churchill to his long-time secretary, Mrs. Pearman, and given to him by Mrs. Pearman's...
...One of the amusing features of broadcast journalism is the rise of TV-star talking heads...
...Churchill's kindness also comes out in a letter sent to him in 1937 by Ethel Snowden, widow of the Labor politician, Philip Snowden, one of Churchill's severest critHot Air: All Talk, All the Time Howard Kurtz Times Books / 384 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian nA merica is awash in talk," writes Howard Kurtz, who covers journalism for the Washington Post...
...John Stossel ABC "20/20" oa s Green Activism in America "If Environmentalism Name Address City State Zip Mail to Capital Research Center, 727 15th Street N.W...
...Pearman's daughter, Rosemary...
...Yet at the same time, through anecdotal evidence, he argues that TV and radio talk shows have supplanted the "old media"—by which he means newspapers, I suppose — in driving events or setting the agenda in national affairs...
...but standards prevailed, and principles went unchanged...
...Their litany is familiar...
...The trouble, of course, is that the wrong sort of people arethe beneficiaries...
...the quality of judgment is fatally flawed...
...In the old days journalists strived for prominence...
...Shortly after Snowden's death, Lady Snowden wrote: "Your generosity to a political opponent marks you forever in my eyes the 'great gentleman' I have always thought you...
...he has spawned a host of hinterland parasites and duplicates, some of whom push his spirited advocacy into the realm of violence and scorn...
...Indeed he regards the Limbaugh phenomenon as not just the crowning symptom of the talk-show disease, but a virus infecting the media in general...
...the prognostications are invariably wrong...
...Howard Kurtz, perhaps unconsciously, provides a case in point...
...If Limbaugh's popularity derives from his appeal to the public's baser instincts, then so must the success of the Washington Post...
...Fair enough...
...Conspiratorial talk...
...ics...
...Suite 800, Washington D.C...
...If all of this makes sense to you, then Howard Kurtz's chronicle of the yacking universe will make comfortable reading...
...There is even a semblance of moral perplexity...
...Rush Limbaugh has not just triumphed in the competition against the old media...
...Environmental groups that once made consistent strides towards ambitious policy objectives today are often stymied...
...Translation: There used to be a media culture of distinction...
...Kurtz is at some pains to describe, and lament, the superficial qualities of talk show journalism: Entertainment values are paramount...
...Nobody who has ever listened to his radio program —and, I confess, I hear it veryseldom—would recognize in Limbaugh anything like Kurtz's characterizations...
...Now, a little further down the evolutionary chain, journalists have taken up the chorus...
...He is considerably more interested in amusing, sometimes enlightening, his audience than exhorting them to action, and his much-advertised bile is essentially good-natured...
...There is nothing new in this, of course: People have been shaking their heads about American vulgarity and greed since before the founding of the Republic...
...who would have thought Rush Limbaugh would turn things upside down...
...Loud talk...
...As journalism, if that is the word for it, the decline is not just palpable, but malevolent as well: from those conscientious, sleep-inducing Sunday-morning shows—"Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," etc...
...Adler's story compares the ideals on which the movement was founded against the reality of its current leadership and its organized activities in Washington...
...he is an entertainer whose stock in trade is ideology...
...quantity prices available...
...Since then, we are told, journalistic ideals have slowly given way to commercial demands: Money, not integrity, oils the machinery, and ratings are the measure of status and achievement...
...hich brings us to Rush Limbaugh, whose capacious figure shadows this volume much the way his show tends to dominate the airwaves...
...Well, just as they have been since colonial times, the barbarians are at the gate, and American civilization continues to decline...
...AS-296 The American Spectator • February 199 6 69...
...Then there is the question of power and influence...
...20005...
...From his perspective, talk shows are not just shallow and corrosive—specimens of our "boob-tube civilization and run-of-the-mouth culture" —but mysterious as well...
...now they are fat and happy as celebrities...
...In the 1950's, television writers of the so-called Golden Age—Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, for instance—regarded their Eden as having been invaded by the serpent of Madison Avenue...
...Reading this charming memoir of his search for Churchill, one can't help concluding that Gilbert is something of a "great gentleman" himself...
...Public affairs used to be covered by newspapers whose mission was to report the news fairly and accurately, and present it to readers in authoritative form so that citizens could draw sensible, well-informed conclusions...
...to such terrors of the airwaves as John McLaughlin and G. Gordon Liddy...
...Well, which is it...
...issues arrive and depart with the wind...
...14,* microphones and cameras with which to terrorize the countryside...
...now it is a world of cacophony and avarice, an asylum where the inmates have tied up the psychiatrists, and found PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...This is a message that some will not like, but it is -1 important for at the Crossroads: Green Activism in America ORDER FORM hear and all to weigh...
...Delete the word "talk" from these arresting opening sentences, and you scarcely need to read the subsequent pages to arrive at Kurtz's unstartling conclusion: "From Imus in the morning to Koppel late at night, America has become a talk-show nation, a boob-tube civilization, a run-at-the-mouth culture in which anyone can say anything at any time as long as they pull some ratings...
...Ill-health had forced Mrs...
...Here, I am afraid, the voice of Howard Kurtz's employer may be heard...
...For guidance he seeks counsel from amenable observers—Margaret Carlson, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Kinsley, Richard Cohen —who point to a handful of honorable exceptions: Jim Hightower, Diane Rehm, Charlie Rose, and, of course, Mario Cuomo...
...Had I been in trouble which I could not control myself, there is none to whom I could come with more confidence that I should be gently treated...
...You may choose from a list of saintly pioneers: William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and so on...
...In the 1750's, surviving Puritans, on the eve of extinction, surrounded by the evidence of mercantile society, bemoaned their vanishing holy experiment...
...Americans realize environmental regulations cost them $150 billion a year and don't always deliver the promised risk reduction...
...Rush Limbaugh is not an ideologue with an entertaining manner...
...The author is at a loss to explain not only their conservative tone, but the paucity of left-wing equivalents on the air...
...Gilbert calls his discovery of this vein of goodness in Churchill's character "the most rewarding" result of his years of archival toil...
...As entertainment, of course, the trajectory is steep: from Arthur Godfrey's innocent radio banality to the TV carnival world of Sally Jessy Raphael...
...Raunchy talk, smug talk, self-serving talk, funny talk, rumor-mongering talk...
...With the invention of broadcasting, the techniques of presenting the news were modified, to be sure...
...In the 188o's, novelists as varied as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain saw the collapse of democratic civilization in the triumph of capital during the Gilded Age...
...And when Mrs...
...Here the author's analytical skills break down...
...This used to be a standard conservative dirge...
...Performers such as Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Ted Koppel, and Mark Shields have grown not just ubiquitous but rich as well, traveling on a kind of vaudeville circuit, performing for gatherings of gullible executives...
...Or put another way: The Post Style section, where Howard Kurtz appears, is an odd place to complain about the ways in which the news has been devalued and debased...
...For years such denizens of the old media as David S. Broder and Anthony Lewis have deplored their fellow citizens' supposed lack of interest in the news and public issues: Readers are forever tuning out political coverage, and turning away from newspapers in droves...
...Pearman died in 1941, Churchill provided for her daughter's education...
...Talk shows, in their various forms and incarnations, serve as a gauge of relentless decline...
...There is no mistaking Howard Kurtz's attitude: He dislikes Rush Limbaugh, and deplores his success...
...they cannot be both...
...Moreover, there is an instructive irony here...
...Pear-man to take a year off, but Churchill promised to pay her salary while she was recuperating...
...Angry talk...
...Talk shows are either sadly trivial or dangerously important...
...Yet now that talk shows exploit public interest, revealing a deep vein of conviction and concern, they find that their prayers have been answered all too readily...
...A diliThe Sound ofAmerica: YaketyYak, All Talk Back 68 February 1996 • The American Spectator gent reporter, he offers a series of arresting descriptions of shows, personalities, incidents, and trends...
...Environmentalism at the Crossroads: Green Activism in America explores whether the nation's environmental establishment will overcome its recent failures or be forced onto a new course...
...What Price Environmentalism...
...The lock-step bias of the press remains intact: The public has shifted its allegiance to talk radio, and away from the old media, because the public is desperate for alternative points of view...
...30 each...
Vol. 29 • February 1996 • No. 2
