"90.7 on the FM Dial"

"'This library is deeper than anyone can possibly master—there's more music back there than you can realistically ever check out,' Musicant said, in between thumbing through the stack of albums at his feet looking for the next album to cue up. 'It's an infinite challenge. I'm never feeling like, "Oh, I've got it." I'm always on edge and it feels like a whole new thing, every single show.'"

Katie Lauer at the East Bay Times marks the sixtieth anniversary of UC Berkeley's KALX.

"A Key Element in the Development of the Highly Partisan Journalism and Other Media That Envelop Us Today"

"Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape."

Al Tompkins at Poynter explains how the end of the Fairness Doctrine led to the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

"It Has Its Roots in the Late Days of the Reagan Administration"

"It's been noted before that Trump learned his political attack style from shock, but he's also the only one to successfully translate shock into social media, especially on Twitter, which in turn drives cable news and columns in national newspapers. On radio, it's trash talk. Online, it's shit posting, and say what you will, Trump's troll game is solid gold. He has attacked any number of people for their race, gender, and disabilities, delighting his base and triggering the libs, with stunning success. Trump did not invent shock comedy, but there's no one who has done it better or gained more from it."

Ben Schwartz at The New Republic explains "[h]ow the merger of right-wing politics and dick-joke comedy came to pass."

"How We Got Here"

NPR runs a "special series" on 1968.

One-O-Three-1

"I was driving around and I stumbled across the station and all they were doing was playing punk music and there was no commercials and I'm thinking, what the hell is going on here? This is something, I've never heard anything like this and I didn't know what it was. I was excited about turning the radio on and not hearing the same old crap that you was hearing at that time, like every other station."

In 2015, Liz Ohaneslan at Noisey presents "An Oral History of Indie 103.1, Commercial Radio's Greatest Failed Experiment." 

What Ever Happened to...

"She began her career at 3, starring in her own show on NBC radio by the age of 5, cutting records and appearing in vaudeville, in shorts including 1929's 'Baby Rose Marie the Child Wonder' and in Paramount's 1933 feature 'International House' with W.C. Fields.

"Variety founder Sime Silverman himself mentioned Rose Marie in its pages for 'The Child Wonder,' writing, 'Though but a kidlet, she seemed to have an idea of her own.'"

Carmel Dagan at Variety writes an obit for Rose Marie.

The Porpoise Is Laughing Goodbye Goodbye

"At the end of a four-hour final edition of a show he has curated for nearly 40 years--which included archival interviews with Van Halen and Elvis Costello and on-air well wishes from Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and others--the DJ born Rodney Bingenheimer played one last piece of music: 'Porpoise Song.'"

Randall Roberts at the Los Angeles Times marks Rodney Bingenheimer's final "Rodney on the Roq" radio show.

Swamp Things

"In much the same way mainstream society now recognizes that the oceans will rise (well, people who don't read Alex Jones do, at least) and that this has all sorts of ramifications for where we build, for future displacement and migration crises, and so on, it's time to start considering what a political and media climate looks like in which some sizable chunk of the population permanently inhabits a different, impregnable information universe in which—unlike in the slower-paced recent past— hey are constantly fed new false things to believe and share. As in, every hour, if not every minute."

Jesse Singal at New York argues that "it's time to shift out of the mind-set that there is anything that can be done about the fever swamps" of right-wing media.

And Lee Drutman in The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that "[p]erhaps it is finally time to stop pretending there is such a thing as a rational voter."

"Easy Prey for Demagogues and Hucksters"

"The research suggests that there is only one way to mitigate or reverse this process: restore some level of trust in the US political system. But conservative elites—who have the ear of their base—have no incentive to do so, and it's not clear that anyone else has ability to do so. Declining trust in institutions is broad and deep in America; it may very well be unstoppable. As long as it continues, conspiracy theories will play a larger and larger role in public life."

David Roberts at Vox looks to see who is prone to embracing conspiracy theories.

"The Voice of Los Angeles"

"The players don’t hear him on the field, the big shots rarely hear him from their box seats, and the rest the country only hears him through their wireless. Since the Dodgers arrived here 58 years ago, Scully has spoken almost strictly to us, Angelenos in our cars and in our homes, millions who grew up with his voice in their kitchens and have grown old with it at their bedsides. He is the teacher of our children, the bleacher buddy of our teens, the wise neighbor on our cul-de-sac, and the dear companion of our aging and infirm.
"For the people of Los Angeles, he is not merely the announcer of baseball games, he is the soundtrack of our lives, the dignified and graceful accompaniment of endless sandy summers, a daily harmonic reminder of the Southern California dream."

Bill Plaschke in the Los Angeles Times says farewell to Vin Scully upon Scully's retirement after broadcasting Dodgers baseball games for sixty-seven years.

"One of Those Fantastic, Only-in-Washington Characters"

"When Williams is described as Carson's 'business manager,' it sounds like a euphemism, but it's literally true. The two became friendly about 22 years ago, after Carson appeared on Williams's television show. Soon Williams says that he realized his friend's business could be managed better. As Williams tells it, Carson 'was looking to sell some property and minimize his tas, so I turned him onto the 1031 exchanges'—a financial strategy that's used to shield investors from capital gains tas. Before long, Williams wasn't handling just Carson’s business affairs, he was employing Carson's sons through his production company and helping Carson's wife, Candy, import 300 pounds of Egyptian marble for the renovation of the Carson family home. When Carson turned his attentions toward politics, it was only natural that he’d turn to Williams for assistance."

Jason Zengerle in GQ profiles Ben Carson's Svengali, Armstrong Williams.

"Exceedingly Riveting Radio"

"'The whole thing for me is you're doing it live there in the studio, as opposed to podcasts or whatever. I love the fact that I'm on the radio live locally. I guess it's just an old-school thing. The way those '70s DJ would pick their own songs instead of just filling space between a set that's already been laid out and they have no control over. That's what I love, and I'll do it as long as they'll let me.'"

Scott T. Sterling in the LA Weekly reports the return of Jonesy's Jukebox.

Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen "Conservative Jon Stewart"?

"In contrast, conservative talk radio humor tends to rely less on irony than straightforward indignation and hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh took down Georgetown student and birth-control activist Sandra Fluke in 2012, he called her a 'slut' in order to drive home his point about state-mandated birth control [coverage]. After the liberal blogosphere erupted with derision, Limbaugh responded with more jokes, asking that Fluke post videos of her sex online so taxpayers could see what they were paying for. (After a few days, he offered a public apology, insisting that he 'did not mean a personal attack' on Fluke.)
"These examples formed the kernel of Young's theory that liberals and conservatives look for and see different kinds of humor. Connover, the producer of The Flipside, has already voiced skepticism about Young's hypothesis. 'That's another way of saying that liberals are smarter,' Connover said. 'And clearly that's not the case. Liberals are some of the dumbest people to walk the earth.' Young insists that hypothesis is not about intelligence; it's about a preferred structure of jokes. She maintains that there's nothing inherently better about liking ironic jokes over exaggerated ones."


Oliver Morrison in The Atlantic asks the question.

Cafe Pretty Primary Enola Drum

The New York Times reports the deaths of journalist Margot Adler, actor James Shigeta, flight navigator Theodore Van Kirk, film director Noel Black, documentarian Robert L. Drew, and nightclub owner Manny Roth.

"Keener Than Most Persons"

"By making fun of their own medium, said Pollock, 'they make their listeners their co-conspirators on both radio and TV. They distinguished themselves by appearing normal. They never really perceived themselves as actors but two guys entertaining themselves and each other. It was always assumed audiences were in on [the joke], and that was part of the fun.'"


Susan King in the Los Angeles Times remembers the comedy duo Bob and Ray.

"We're No Longer a Radio Network, We're a Sad Political Glee Club"

"'National Public Radio was kind of a body blow to Pacifica,' Lasar says. 'It was a more professional and less strident alternative.'
"In Los Angeles, ousted KPFK program director Ruth Hirschman (now Ruth Seymour) built KCRW into a powerhouse. Many of Pacifica's volunteer programmers were happy to let 'corporate' NPR surpass them in listenership; Pacifica was 'community radio.'
"'The central underlying problem at Pacifica,' Marc Cooper says, 'is that in the end, what dictates everything is the individual programmer's desire to hold onto his or her airtime. Management has always been weak.'"


Hillel Aron in the LA Weekly depicts the decline of Pacifica Radio.

"Almost Nobody Was Fooled by Welles’ Broadcast"

"How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled 'Terror by Radio,' the New York Times reproached 'radio officials' for approving the interweaving of 'blood-curdling fiction' with news flashes 'offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.' Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, 'The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove ... that it is competent to perform the news job.'"

Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow in Slate counter the long-told story of panic following the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938.

For Truth, Justice, and the American Way (or for Stalin, Socialism, and the International Expansion of the Warsaw Pact, depending)

"If familiarity breeds contempt, this character’s seven decades of cultural ubiquity have bred something more insidious. In writing my cultural history of the iconic superhero, I repeatedly encountered a view of the character as a stolid, unremarkable chunk of conceptual furniture. It was one place where the received wisdom of comic book obsessives (who tend to focus on edgier stuff) overlapped with that of the general public (who tend to ignore comics of any provenance). The Big Blue Boy Scout was a safe, unchanging, anodyne fixture of our popular culture. A bore.
"They’re all wrong."

Glen Weldon in The New Republic looks back at seventy-five years of Superman.

As does Larry Tye in the Los Angeles Times.

"Neither a Man nor a Crowd nor a Nation Can Be Trusted to Act Humanely or to Think Sanely under the Influence of a Great Fear"

"Like Father Coughlin, Billie James Hargis, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and so many other right wing media crusaders before them, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham understand that for many religious Americans, 'evil' is not just an adjective but also a noun. When the Puritans first arrived in New England, they believed they were reclaiming a wilderness from Satan. Many traditionalists on the right, whether Christian Millennialists or not, feel much the same way.
"To them, Godless Communism or Secular Humanism isn't the absence of a religious orientation so much as they are Satanic religions in and of themselves, whose acolytes glorify evil, promote the slaughter of innocent, unborn babies, and persecute believing Christians. Blue State America is Rome in the time of Christ. Whether its depravity is manifested in the form of sexual libertinage, income redistribution, spiritual or economic incontinence, blasphemy, women's and gay rights, or the threat of 'race mixing,' anathema and even violence are completely appropriate responses to it."

The Atlantic runs an excerpt of Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right.

All Things Must Pass

The Los Angeles Times publishes obituaries for activist Fred Kameny, radio writer Norman Corwin, photographer Barry Feinstein, football-team owner Al Davis, and dictator Moammar Kadafi.