So how has the TV/radio talk show culture changed families in the United States and the way family conversations are conducted?
A lot, concludes actor-blogger Wil Wheaton in a provocative essay in Salon which you can read here. (You have to watch a brief ad to get to the essay but it’s WELL worth it). In case you were on Venus the past 10 years, Wheaton the talented actor morphed into Wheaton the talented non-political blogger and book writer. In fact, he now has one of the biggest, most successful non-political blogs on the Internet.
And why is that? If you haven’t read his work make sure you read the Salon piece, a rare venture for him into the political realm. He communicates perfectly the shock and dismayed awe of someone who suddenly has a relative leap down his throat due to exposure to the talk radio culture. In more sedate times, there would have been an energetic debate…but today rage is all the…well, rage.:
“Well,” I said, “I don’t believe in the death penalty, so…”
You know those optical illusion drawings, where you’re looking at a smiling man, then suddenly he’s become a werewolf? Faster than you could say “Fox News,” my dad was screaming at me, Bill O’Reilly-style.
“… an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! He killed four…” he stabbed at the air with four fingers on his left hand, “four people in cold blood and deserves! to! die!”
I briefly made eye contact with my stepson, Nolan, who sat just behind my father on my parents’ couch. His face flushed and he quickly looked away. My sister had stopped her channel surfing on a shopping network, and he looked awfully interested in putting a sapphire ring on easy-pay. While my dad continued to scream about biblical vengeance, I went into shock. Just minutes earlier, we’d stood together outside on the deck and laughed with each other as he congratulated me for a great finish I’d had the previous day at a poker tournament in Las Vegas. In fact, I’d cut my trip short, specifically so I wouldn’t miss the family Christmas.
What a difference five minutes makes. While he screamed at me, I wanted to ask, “Who are you, and what have you done with the man who raised me to be tolerant, patient, peaceful and charitable?” Instead, I said, as calmly as I could, “Dad, I just don’t believe in the death penalty. It is unevenly applied to poor people, and clearly doesn’t work as a deterrent…”
Others were stunned:
“I … I don’t know.” I said. “What just happened?”
“I’ve never heard your dad freak out so much,” she said.
The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he’s slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O’Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything.
Read the whole thing yourself. The point here is NOT the death penalty or specific issues. The point here is people gathering their own information, processing it through themselves, then reaching their own conclusions versus what we see all too often these days: people deciding that they will believe what a talk show host (or blogger) says just because he says it and they’re on his “team” and therefore it must be so and they must believe it too. And if someone disagrees, you don’t just differ with them you get personally angry at them.
The talk radio culture makes rage cool and questioning people’s “REAL” motives par for the course. On one hand, it has made people more aware of issues; on the other, some (not all) listeners abdicate being open to any new ideas (because they’re constantly told the people who suggest them are evil, insidious, or really don’t believe what they say they believe).
Read Wheaton’s piece in full. It touches on the “war on Christmas” issue. But its underlying theme is the divide between independent thinkers (in the blog world you have them on all sides) and lock-step defenders (of either party position). It’s a question of quality versus volume of and quantity in debate and how this shift has changed the way info is now processed and discussed in America — and over family dinner tables. Y no es bonita.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.