I have a strong sense memory of sitting alongside my father in his beat-up Chevy pick-up truck sometime in the early- to mid-1970s.
Perhaps 1973, and I was eight. There’s a smell I can almost recreate. A smell of dust and warmth. A comforting aroma that feels like a masculine space, a paternal space. My mother never drove this truck (as far as I remember), only my father. And it felt special to be sitting on that bench front seat heading out wherever.
On multiple occasions we would listen to the radio as we drove. Dad’s program of choice was Paul Harvey. As a kid I was charmed by Harvey’s “rest of the story” schtick. It felt like peering behind the scenes. Only as an adult do I realize that Harvey was a deeply conservative commentator.
Paul Harvey was a success. In the year 2000, at the age of 82, he signed a $100 million dollar contract with ABC radio. Imagine that. Someone 82 years old signing such an enormous contract in the age of the internet boom. He was a singular voice and held one of the highest profile radio slots for a half century.
He was also, something I didn’t realize as a child, ultra-right-wing. He palled around with J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Billy Graham.
But the reason I’m thinking of him now is because of his signature way of reading advertisements. In his show he’d move seamlessly from telling a story about someone in the news to telling a story about a commercial product, using the same cadence and tone. When he started telling a story it was difficult to determine if it was going to be a news story or a commercial.
As a child I didn’t understand the conservative subtext (supratext?) of his commentary but I did recognize that his method of delivering commercials was…off. I consumed enough television and radio as a child that I understood there to be a fundamental division between commercials and content. Harvey’s method of commercial delivery always bugged me a little. Even as a child it felt wrong somehow.
I write about this today because of my New Year’s resolution to listen more. As I listen to more podcasts I notice that multiple podcasters read the commercials. Some separate the content from the commercial more clearly than others, but some kind of blend the two together. Every time I hear this I flash back to those moments in the truck when I’m thinking – you can’t do that. People might get confused between the story and the commercial and believe (so my childish mind thought) that the hyperbole about the quality of the goods or services for sale are “true” “news”.
Looking back at my childhood and adolescence I’m not sure how I became so adamantly anti-commercial. I know it was solidified in my late adolescent punk-rock years and lingers with me today. One reason I’m so attracted to scholarly journals is because of their resistance to commercials and advertisements. Ditto with Wikipedia. In fact, one of the reasons I haven’t watched news on television for the last 35 years is because I believe commercially supported news is suspect. Unfortunately, there’s no way to escape it. All the major news platforms are dependent on news. Even my local, and ostensibly non-profit Tampa Bay Times*, is overly dependent on advertising.
So, while I’ve learned to accept that advertising is inextricably intertwined with the news ecosystem, and most of the recorded entertainment ecosystem, I still find it jarring when I hear a podcaster (to clarify, these are mostly comedy podcasters) start telling a story that turns out to be a commercial. And every time this happens I flash back to Paul Harvey and sitting in that Chevy pick-up truck and running some errand with my dad.
*The Tampa Bay Times is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute.
