Radio Vox Populi: Talk Radio from the Romantic to the Anglo-Saxon

By Peter Laufer and Christian Ruggiero

Talk radio is broadcast discourse expressing – under ideal circumstances – the medium’s full potential as a vox Populi megaphone. Talk radio creates a virtual arena (a Coliseum!) in which topics of public relevance, and most specifically of current affairs, are treated with both expert voices and the continuous contributions of the “man on the street” – the vox Populi. This vox Populi is expressed within the mainstream media context. Radio broadcasters anticipate the active participation of listeners and make them engines of the on-air discussions. Talk radio programs become instruments for intervening in public opinion and, via opinions of the public, intervene in the public agenda. Talk radio and its vox populi amplify the importance of political issues and social issues. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839987557

Peter Laufer

Journalist Peter Laufer is the James Wallace Chair Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. He is the author of Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey Through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures and Organic: A Journalist's Quest to Discover the Truth Behind Food Labeling.

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Praise

Peter Laufer is like a literary flashlight—whatever subject he tackles, he illuminates it with a piercing, but always warm, glare. With his Sapienza partner Christian Ruggiero, the two media scholars gathered a distinguished coterie of experts to help readers better understand the international role of talk radio. Radio Vox Populi enjoys a distinct value-add with Laufer as an editor: Here is someone who has forgotten more about this subject than most will ever know.

—Nick Ferrari, longtime LBC London talk radio breakfast presenter

Radio Vox Populi traces the history of radio as an agora, as an arena for discussion and opinions. It does so with a sharp and contemporary analysis that highlights how radio is—and has always been—an extraordinary engine of innovation, capable of anticipating change and shaping the future.

—Federica Gentile, radio and television host (RAI, RTL 102.6), artistic director of Radio Zeta

Radio is the voice of the people par excellence. The movie or TV star is distant from the people; he is a star. The radio talk host, on the other hand, by nature perfectly embodies the thinking of the man on the street. That is why if you are one of the 35 million Italians who turn on the radio for at least 5 minutes every day, you absolutely must read this book: it is the opera omnia of world talk radio.

—Nicola Savino, radio and TV host, director and author, one of the leading figures of commercial radio in Italy

There are opinions expressed in this industrious book with which I personally and professionally disagree. But that’s okay. Talk radio of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is all about disagreement—including the irksome reality that scholars, listeners, broadcasters, politicians and journalists alike are not able to arrive anywhere close to a consensus as to what the term talk radio even means. I support democracy and the First Amendment but recognize they are extremely untidy affairs. The international flavor of this collection adds even more sizzle to its combustible content. I’ve always taken Peter Laufer seriously although I could argue with him for hours. If you are interested in the transitional influence of spoken word radio for better or worse, check this book out!

—Michael Harrison, publisher, Talkers magazine, an industry journal dedicated to talk radio

Despite disruptive forces ranging from technological advances to a pandemic, the medium of radio has maintained a healthy, but declining, share of audio consumers. Research indicates that personalities appeal to listeners more than music. Thus, this edited volume of international scholars, on talk radio, is well timed! It provides readers with a keen understanding of the evolution and current status of the industry.

—John Allen Hendricks, Stephen F. Austin State University (Texas) communications professor and editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Global Radio

Radio has undergone metamorphoses and even radical changes in its history, but it has never lost the centrality of speech. Radio Vox Populi focuses on its ability to create listening communities, analyzes its changes and how the power of new media and the crisis of traditional ways of forming public opinion represent a new challenge for radio. For practitioners, insiders and citizens interested in the health of democracies, this book is a useful and brilliant reference point.

—Marino Sinibaldi, former RaiRadio3 director

Radio Vox Populi

Radio Vox Populi

Talk Radio from the Romantic to the Anglo-Saxon

Edited and with forewords by

Peter Laufer and Christian Ruggiero

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2022 Peter Laufer and Christian Ruggiero editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Cover design: Giada Fioravanti

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948588

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-754-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-754-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Preface

David Hendy

Foreword: Talk Radio Is Pornographic

Peter Laufer

Foreword: The Social Role of Talk Radio

Christian Ruggiero

SECTION 1

Making Euros & Dollars with Talk Radio

1 America’s Extreme and Partisan Talk Radio Led to the January 6 Uprising

Peter B. Collins

2 Radio in Italy beyond the Crisis: Toward New Content and Economic Revival

Mihaela Gavrila and Giorgio Zanchini

SECTION 2

Grabbing Listener Ears

3 Local Shows, National Shows, and the Concept of Community

Mark Davis

4 Talk Radio: Verba Manent

Giorgio Simonelli

SECTION 3

Securing Listener Loyalty

5 Talk Radio and the Commodification of Public Discourse

Christopher Chávez

6 A One-Way Conversation: Voiceless Audience, Radio Personalities, and Football Talk Shows in Rome

Marta Perrotta

SECTION 4

Selfishly Broadcasting Divisiveness

7 You Need Know Nothing

Markos Kounalakis

8 Ideological and Political Polarization in the Italian Radio System—between Revolution and Conspiracy

Mauro Bomba and Aida Picone

SECTION 5

Commercial Propagandizing vs. Public Discourse

9 A Word from Our Sponsor

Terry Phillips

10 The Precarious Growth of Community Radio in Italy: Economic Problems, Legislative Uncertainties, and Identity Issues

Mihaela Gavrila and Marta Perrotta

Epilogue

Peter Laufer and Christian Ruggiero

Index

Preface

David Hendy

Talk on the radio has always been a subject of fascination for scholars. Which is just as it should be, since it’s always been a subject of passionate contention for broadcasters themselves. The countless men and women who’ve either appeared before the microphone or wielded the power behind-the-scenes to determine who gets to appear have been grappling with the issue for a century now. But there seems little prospect, yet, of a global agreement on what the precise merits are of opening the airwaves to a kaleidoscope of voices and opinions—or how this high-wire feat of radio programming should be managed. Clearly, talk radio is thriving. It can be captivating—and sometimes appalling. But what exactly is it for?

Though this book is contemporary in focus, I’m a media historian and therefore want to offer, even if only briefly or superficially, an historical perspective. My own area of expertise is focused on Britain and, specifically, the history of the British Broadcasting Corporation (or British Broadcasting Company, as it was until 1927). Obviously, radio is not synonymous with the BBC, and Italy and the United States, in particular, have their own fascinating and often sharply divergent radio histories. But the BBC has often been emulated and admired—and almost as often viewed with suspicion—around the world. So I believe its 100-year history of thinking about talk—and its place in the broadcasting firmament—can offer a salutary clearing of the throat before the main event.

The very earliest BBC programs had something of an ad hoc feel: practices were fluid, rules not yet fixed. But in March 1924, when the Company was just 17 months old, its general manager, John Reith, sent instructions to every one of his station directors—those who controlled output not just in London but in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and several other smaller relay stations across the country. His memo, which survives in the BBC’s written archives, is startling even today in its confident ability to lay down the law about who gets to speak on air. He has, he said, heard of people offered the microphone whose status, either professionally or socially, and whose qualifications to speak, seem doubtful. It should be an honour, he explained, for a man to speak from any broadcasting station and only those who have a claim to be heard above their fellows on any particular subject in the locality should be put on the programmes.

How on earth did one judge who exactly had a legitimate claim to be heard? Reith didn’t make the criteria explicit. He already regarded these things as a matter of instinct, something made on a case-by-case basis and on a foundation of common sense and experience. Staff were expected just to get these things right—that’s what made them worthy of their role. But his memo contained a smattering of hints. He wrote of men—for now, women remained unmentioned. He wrote of people who were an authority. He wrote of people with professional qualifications. And on Sundays—Reith, the son of a church minister, was a stickler about religion having a prominent place in the BBC’s Sunday schedules—he wrote of expecting to hear men who can really get their message over, with a good voice and correct diction.

If wireless as technology was already a quarter of a century old when Reith issued his famous instruction, the organized and regular broadcasting of speech to a large public audience was still a relatively new phenomenon, uncharted in its social effects. It’s worth remembering the terror this induced as well as the excitement. Inside Reith’s fledgling BBC otherwise confident young men and women were in awe of the microphone. There was a strange new tool that promised anyone who stood before it instant access to hundreds of thousands (and soon, millions) of listeners. What if the speakers who had been invited to come into the studio were to take advantage and sow discord on a national scale? It was true, the schedules needed filling. Staff recall fondly their constant search for new and more people to take part in programs. Every moment of experience, one producer explained, could be grist to the microphone. But, this wasn’t literally the case. In these early days, matters of political, industrial, and religious controversy were to be avoided and access to the airwaves remained something almost entirely restricted to a privileged few. Even then, words could not be uttered spontaneously. Since broadcasting was still live, the only way to ensure someone didn’t abuse the opportunity, or perhaps dry up with nerves, was to script everything in advance. Influential producers such as Hilda Matheson would do their heartfelt best to enhance the art of the radio talk by creating scripts with presenters that were conversational in style and full of the rhythms and asides and hesitations that constituted normal speech. But they couldn’t help sounding rather stiff and unspontaneous—simply because that’s exactly what they were. Guidance on accent and pronunciation also began with a proscriptive flavor. The ruling from London headquarters that announcers should speak with one voice—and that that voice was to be a form of what was called a southern, educated English accent—ensured the BBC of the 1920s and 1930s sounded thoroughly middle-class and privately educated. As the writer Compton MacKenzie puts it rather colorfully, Britain’s airwaves exuded a finicking, suburban, plus-fours gentility.

Yet the BBC was already too big and too complex for uniformity to be fully enforced. In its lively and adventurous North Region based in Manchester, socialist-inclined producers such as Geoffrey Bridson and Olive Shapley busied themselves throughout the 1930s going to factories, shops, pubs, and working-class homes to capture the authentic voices of so-called ordinary people in a series of pioneering observational documentaries. Later, during World War II, it became even more imperative that the BBC started to sound more like its audience. After all, it could only succeed in fulfilling its wartime role of maintaining public morale if the public kept tuning in. And the public would only keep tuning in if people felt that this was a BBC that reflected the traumatic and messy experience of everyday life they were going through themselves. The appearance of working-class voices in popular wartime radio series such as Workers’ Playtime, Billy Welcome, and ITMA seemed to prove that since the BBC really did now sound a bit more like its audience, it also understood them, perhaps even sympathized with them.

This drive to widen the range of voices on air could often be contrived—part of a conscious strategy to help conjure up the notion of a People’s War, utterances always tightly managed through the continued use of careful scripting. Things loosened up a little, and then a lot, in the two decades after the war, when tape-recording made it possible to record a spontaneous conversation in the knowledge that it could be tidied up before transmission. The egalitarian spirit of the 1960s—what social observers referred to as the decline of deference—also saw the arrival of a new generation of broadcasters wanting to open up the airwaves to a broader and more eclectic range of speakers. The view of the man in the street—and, somewhat belatedly, the woman in the street, too—became a much sought-after ingredient of any topical program. The era of the vox pop was joined almost immediately by the era of the radio phone-in and the airwaves soon seemed awash with voices that were not just varied in accent but unpredictable in content, passionate in tone, sometimes even inarticulate with rage. It made for good radio. But in an age when one person’s opinion was starting to be regarded as being as good as any others’, and when politicians, especially those of the free-market right such as Margaret Thatcher, were speaking of vested producer interests having to make way for consumer sovereignty, it somehow felt right, too. In many respects, the more recent embrace by program-makers of real-time conversations with their listeners by featuring a steady stream of text messages or tweets on air is but a digital version of this now near-ubiquitous production style.

For nearly half a century, it’s seemed as if we’ve been steadily fulfilling one of radio’s long-cherished ideals, namely to act as a kind of electronic backyard or town hall forum, to embody the free speech principles of democracy itself. And if the unavoidable restrictions of time and space mean that respected national institutions such as the BBC still have to ration access to the airwaves—for even now, it’s impossible for everyone to be offered the national pulpit the Corporation provides—then a bevy of other organizations—local radio, community radio, micro radio, community radio, Internet radio, and even prison radio—step-in to let the people speak.

It’s easy to see the 100-year journey undertaken by the BBC as falling neatly into what’s been called media history’s liberal narrative. In this, radio’s trajectory becomes the story of the political community—the public sphere, if you like—being steadily and relentlessly extended, in large part because it’s been radio (and later television) that has established the right of ordinary people to have a say in the affairs of the world. And although this analysis is one that emerged specifically from the British experience, it clearly has universal resonance. It’s entirely possible to see similar stories around the globe—stories of radio gradually opening-up and embracing the demotic.

There is, then, some important history underpinning our present-day broadcasting practices. Yet the real value in the kind of rigorous media and communications scholarship found in the pages that follow is that it reminds us to be wary of adopting too readily a radio version of Francis Fukuyama’s famous end of history thesis. It is the scholarship that demands of us that we question our own easy assumptions about Western democracy and, in particular, that we interrogate the far-from-straightforward relationship between talk radio and free speech. We know that today, still, not everyone gets to speak. So, who gets excluded, who gets to choose? We know, too, that whenever anyone speaks on air, what he or she has to say will already be framed by the presentational tropes of the program and its host or by the actions of a team of broadcasting professionals behind the scene who—inevitably, because it is their job to do this—establish the parameters of what can be spoken about, the context in which it is spoken, and how others are allowed to respond. So, what kind of things can we say even if we are ever given access to the microphone? And, perhaps even more pertinently, to what effect?

I worry—as do others—that while in a functioning democracy everyone’s opinion should count, the loudest voices are sometimes wont to overpower all others. Perhaps expertise itself always needs to be given more weight than ignorance. But while outright falsehoods need to be called out, the view of the ordinary citizen still matters. The inarticulate, inexperienced, hesitant, or uncertain speaker might not make good radio—especially, perhaps, in the old-fashioned Reithian sense—but they, too, deserve a hearing. They bring messiness—nuance—to the discussion. And although from a station’s point of view, any talk will do as ready-made content that fills an otherwise empty schedule, broadcasters surely also need to listen, actively listen, to what’s being said on air—otherwise they’re treating the public’s ideas and opinions as mere noise, just one more aesthetic ingredient in the multilayered texture of output.

Our present-day culture wars often turn public discourse into something horribly shrill and bad-tempered. Yet this only goes to show that some of radio’s age-old challenges have not gone away and in some respects have become more intensive than ever. That’s why this collection of essays is so urgent and timely. For me, as I hope I’ve shown, they trigger a remarkable set of historical resonances. But the issues these authors chew over so brilliantly are also stunningly topical. In their different ways, they touch on perhaps the key challenge for everyone interested in the health of talk radio: How do we capture some of the excitement and vigor of spontaneous human expression in all its variety while nudging opinion-formation away from the purely confrontational toward something that is socially useful. It’s why this book