When I was a kid our family would frequently gather around the radio in the living room and listen to Fiber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleave, Johnny Dollar, The Red Rider, The Lone Ranger and one of my favorite The Shadow (alias Lamont Cranston, now also the name of one of our cats.) Radio was a major portion of our news information along with the Des Moines Register newspaper. We also had at various times magazines such as Look, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and others that the school kids were hawking on any given year. All in all we were pretty well informed I thought.
Then my brother in the late 50’s brought home a 13” portable he bought with one of his jobs between times in college. Whoa! We got 3 channels: NBC our regular news outlet largely because it had the strongest signal for our rabbit eared antenna, and on good days we would also get CBS, ABC and sometime PBS. Our aunt and uncle then bought a console TV and would invite us over from time to time for big TV events. I believe there were 2 or 3 commercials of a half or a full minute allowed to sponsor these shows. However, new show were not allowed to be money makers, according he the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) they were the stations obligation to the public for the privilege of selling the other programs on TV. As a result the nation it seems to me was better and more timely informed that ever before. The great newscasters were icons of virtue and truth telling such as Huntley and Brinkley (our NBC station giving a friendly “Goodnight Chet”, “Goodnight David” even if they didn’t know each other all that well and lived in different cities, Howard K. Smith, and the great Walter Cronkite the most respected voice on reliable news that everyone accepted and a truth speaker. Ah, those were the days.
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Then in 1977 Roone Arledge, well known for his running of ABC’s Wide World of Sports took over ABC’s news department. He decided enough of the loss leader news stuff and say that new should pay it way and thus began profit-making news. Meaning a long more bad news as that sells best. All other networks soon fell into place with this new source of revenue except of course PBS. Good old solid reliable PBS. Of course a good number of Trump voters don’t believe things on PBS.
Anyway, the race for profit TV News was on its way. Sob. (You ever notice the similarity between sob and SOB; that just occurred to me; sorry my disturbed gray cells get in the way of my writing from time to time. Who knows what happened to commercial limits; likely big money bought the FCC as well.
And then came Cable. I believe Cable was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse but I could be wrong. Now everyone who has cable has 4 quintillion channels to select from each worse than the original 3 + 1. And, each one is out to make a buck. Of course, for profit news programs began to proliferate as well. I am using the term new programs loosely here; very loosely. At any rate there are a lot of channels about almost anything except things of interest.
Oh, back to radio; now this is important. Radio, despite creative guys like Stan Freeberg who would march 100,000 roman soldiers during a program and say, match that TV. Again I digress. The fight between radio and TV wasn’t really a fair fight despite Stan Freeberg. You could see things, kinda fuzy and first and then clear, and then came color (the clerk of session in our church was bought the first color TV in my hometown; a nine inch screen with a magnifying glass over it), and then came replays, and then came…well you get the idea. By the 70’s the number of am radio station had declined sharply despite Dick Clark and brain numbing music. FM became the way to go. Well, maybe this all is that important except, for the folk who started buying all these nearly defunct radio stations. Who, bible belt, fundamentalist bible thumpers, that’s who. They cost little and low and behold got a lot of listeners. There is a ton of information on the transitions on radio and then TV and the folk who bought these stations, far too much into than I want to get into here but it leads to where I want to go and this point anyway.
This was the beginning of a large consortium of folk from the right, often the far right who began buying all these radio stations and later Cable TV stations.
Now if you remember back with the 3 +1 dominated the news, there was a growth in the social consciousness in America. Wars viewed up close and personal and family kitchen tables began to upset folk who wondered why are we fighting them. In my hometown there was not a single black man, woman, or child, or any other minorities I noticed. Now there was talk about civil rights, and demonstrations, along with music gatherings where folk wore little clothing, sang protest songs and like to stick flowers in GI’s rifles during parades. Some folk saw this and doing what Jesus said to do in the bible, others thought they were immoral, decadent complainers just upsetting the apple cart. They organized as well, but quietly at first anyway.
Folk like the Southern Baptist Convention used their new purchased radio and some TV station to combat what they had organized to begin with during the civil war, to fight integration of the races. The Bible was filled with slaves and God fearing Christians had a right to those slaves.
It occurs to me that the essay is going to grow to gargantuan proportions unless I cut to the chase and get to the major points here. The major player in right wing politics and media is the CNP (Council on National Policy.) It is not a big outfit but its members are absolutely financially loaded. It came into existence in 1981 and combined a number of organizations such as the Southern Baptist Convention, Focus on the Family (Dobson), Tim LaHaye the head of the Moral Majority, Christian TV guys like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, a bunch of senators, Trump spokeslady Kellyanne Conway, good old Oliver North, then secretary of Education Betsy Devos, the Kock brothers and a bunch of others and the NRA. It is a secretive group that does not want it meetings know however in 2016 the Southern Poverty Law Center got ahold of its membership and listed it. The point is this small group is very smart, and huge financial recourses, incredible political knowhow and a definite extreme right wing agenda. Wikipedia descries is as a pluto-theocracy. It is probably best described as against anything liberal.
I would suggest you do your own googling about the CNP and it membership and the extremism of it constituents.
What is important to me is there control and power they have through modern media resources. They have influenced a great number of people who have bought into the misinformation. For example the group Qnon in the news today where folk with extreme positions gathered from these misinformation resources have alienated family members.
This has been the most difficult piece to write because of it scope and complexity. I’ll try to summarize as best I can. Groups on the right of the political spectrum began buying and controlling minor media markets since the Reagan days. The represent lots of groups including the Southern Baptist Convention, The Bible/Rust Belt contingents like Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robinson and the like, and a great number of extremely wealthy folk who just want more wealth and believe in noblesse oblige, that they should be in charge of government, people who could fund all these groups. Folk like David and Charles Kock, Dick and Betsy DeVos, Timothy Mellon, and a bunch of other folk whose names you probably do not know the NRA who has more money to spend on politics than their $35/year dues could possible generate (must be a miracle). The organization that brings most of these groups together is the CNP (Central National Policy), who are effective at staying out of the public eye. These are the groups that have benefited the most economically from right wing control of the economy, the .1%ers.
Most mystifying to me are the right wing religious groups who claim to be bible based fundamentalist interpreters of scripture who have accepted right wing social norms and biblical values. They support school prayer, intelligent design, Christian nationalism, and ardently oppose stem cell research, homosexuality, euthanasia, birth control, sex education, abortion, and pornography. They are experts in finding obscure texts taken our of context and use them to justify their ideology. They claim to take the biblical literally, but are quite selective about which verses they select ignoring ting like a man has the right to cut off his wife’s hand if she grabs his genitals (Deut 25. 11-12), you can wear clothe combine linen and wool (Lev. 19.19), If you woman is suspected of adultery she should drink dirty water (Num. 5. 11-31, you shouldn’t sit where a menstruating woman has sat (Lev. 15. 19-21.), you are not allowed to kill a burgler during the day (Ex. 22. 2-3), and of course you should not boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk (Ex. 23.19.) I could go on but you get the point.
For me simply following the teachings of Jesus, which boils down to loving and accepting each other as found in the Sermon on the Mount and his parables should provide clear guidance for moral behavior. So many of the things they stand against preach just the opposite; condemning folk who are gay, of a different color, a different belief system or like bagels. This is not to say that Jesus does not get mad at folk in the scriptures, condemn them and judge them badly. But those folk are inevitable people of his own faith who have left love out of the law and made up a bunch of rules that became a burden for folk rather than a means to care for others and build up community. This describes the very people who do the same thing today and are found on the extreme right. Jesus taught tolerance and supported those marginal folk of his society, he didn’t condemn and make their life more difficult than it already was. I do believe in taking all scripture seriously but for me that means understanding the historical context, research and critical thinking.
A good deal of the materials I used in this essay came from a book, Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Anne Nelson (enough information in it to make your head spin for weeks) and other similar books: The Power Worshippers, Democracy in Chains, Dark Money, American Oligarchy, etc.
I don’t feel I have given this subject due justice, take from it what you will and we all struggle to be faithful followers of Jesus. And social media would take another whole article if I can bear to get into it.
Oh, you can still get episodes of those great old radio programs at http://www.radioclassics.com/ and elsewhere. And a lot more fun that shock radio.
“Good night Mrs Calabash wherever you are.”
Thank you for writing again. I enjoy your thoughts.
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