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.
That suspect weaving of advertisement into content increases with the conservativism of the commentators/content producers, consistent with the overall capitalist anti-ethic. It immediately devalues the program, yeah. Skeezy. I feel sorry for people that feel alright with skeeziness. Our hustle culture is deeply rotten.
Adam McKay, screenwriter etc. movie guy, the other day suggested a union of independent journalists producing a reliable noncommercial newstream. Seems like it has to happen.
How unfortunate that public broadcasting is crummy now. I began to wonder if it was always asking the wrong questions & distracting from the horrors it would touch upon. Its agenda should have been relaying events truthfully, presenting current events in depth but the choices of topic and the direction of inquiry was increasingly conservative which has basically overtaken centrist-liberal-moderate ideology which simply bends around it to attempt to reconcile with the threat it actually is!
Ha, well, yep, there is no progressive, no left voice, no actual balance of progressive vs. cautious in our news sources. We need political rhetoric which re-fashions left vs. right. We need a class war. But anyway.
That BS “fair and balanced” reporting thing has infected most public information –if there is a commercial reason to dispute an important issue’s relevance, then mass media will have to present discrediting propaganda, assert that the truth is false. I have a friend who is brain-fried now–there is no solid ground of fact in any of our lifetime’s history–she disbelieves in climate change, mass shootings, vaccines….and so i’ve been a little bit, studying the structures of misinformation, so we can talk about how her negative arguments work and how positive arguments work and how to hold a critical stance but keep carefully evaluating research by looking at the researchers themselves, looking at the quality of the sources….haha…this is sorta like how the Arab world was doing medicine and math while the West was having a “dark age”…a dark age has been intentionally seeded in the world by the USA, by its greedy creepy creeps of hardly representative government.
I remember maybe ten years ago, pulling into the house as the public station in Austin wrapped up an MLK Day segment…no mention of how he died or why he was killed…no reflection on racism, hate crime, poverty, inept, corrupt justice and policing, just a pretence that civil rights efforts from the era had been utterly successful and society was doing just great now.
I think public radio was less addled, less thick, less superficial in the 80’s, but maybe I became more and more sensitive? I think others became gradually less and less sensitive.
I think you were anti-commercial because you were bright and aware while being exposed to ideological rhetoric. Even if you weren’t understanding it at the time, it was there and attempting to sway somebody.
I remember my parents always discussing politics. I remember the news back then.
I remember being on my way out, passing through the family room with the news on and hearing about another massacre of Palestinians and I thought that I wanted to know why this conflict was still going on, why it was constantly in the news, why the US was so concerned with and so involved, and I began paying attention but I already had the sense, osmotically? acquired, that Israel never kept its word in ceasefires, never abided agreements on territory and became aware of an expression, “Israel fights with tanks, Palestine with rocks and sticks.”
We were becoming conscious of the wider world as kids with Ralph Nader visibly fighting against greed, the country vocally sick of the war. Oh-local news too in those days began having segments of consumer defense–Houston had Marvin Zindler…with EYEWITNESS NEWS! -our heroic, very emphatic consumer advocate in immaculate 70’s polyester suits and perfectly smoothed silver hair. We came from a time that was rumbling about revolution.
I honestly get all news from individuals I follow on Twitter. I search for things on YouTube. I look stuff up. I tried last year to figure out which of the major 3 old broadcasters ABC CBS NBC had the least freaky news but a greater integrity was barely discernable between them, so I only look for weather stuff from those local affiliates. I stopped last year watching “Democracy Now” also. I’m gradually more aware of Al Jazeera’s slant. We are all learning the invasion of the body snatchers happens stealthily and we have to constantly judge the suppositions we’re offered from the evidence we get. Do these statements make sense based on what’s been presented? If not necessarily, then it’s worth taking time to give that source a personal ranking of 1-10 reliability: Most programs= “3–reports something happening, gets the importance of it completely wrong.”
More and more we’re going to have to simply choose our action, our own statements and supports and rejections from what is most compassionate and respectful to those in need because we haven’t learned how to establish provenance? of evidence in the face of artificially constructed imagery and likely, more frequently, destruction of evidence.
The 70’s, though. I have so much nostalgia for that analog world! I remember leaning on my 4th grade teacher’s desk, sharing my disappointment with Richard Nixon. I’d voted for him in the 3rd grade mock election. (Embarassing.) She said sadly, she’d voted for him too.
We’re still living in a world, a mental state of paranoia and exploitations evilly layered into a gestalt? a tricky version of reality by creepy Cheney and Rumsfeld, active in US policy since then. What to do but keep on being real. The crust is falling off.
The radio and riding in cars and being a kid in the spaceage was pretty good stuff, though. Sorry to ramble. Obviously, I really enjoyed your post, thanks!
Thanks, June. There’s a lot of analog I miss as well.
In retrospect, I’m grateful my folks never talked about politics or forced it on me. There’s plenty of trauma I can stew in, but they never forced their politics on me, only made a half-hearted attempt at religion (but only after I’d turned eleven), and encouraged me to read (and allowed me to read anything I wanted). So, for that I’m grateful.
The first Iraq war (Bush I era) turned me off television news but around that time I was working for small press magazine distrubution and started reading tons of news (mostly left) mags.
Here’s hoping 2025 isn’t the shitshow I fear it will be. What a toast to the new year!