EVEN IF WE don’t spend our time listening to talk radio, most of us are aware that much of what passes for “discourse” on the airwaves these days is filled with vitriol and venom. But it wasn’t always that way. When I was growing up, radio commentator Paul Harvey was a regular background companion to our family’s dashed before-school breakfasts. Harvey, one of the precursors—but oh so different—to today’s shock jocks, offered a gentle heartland wisdom as he spun his daily stories, usually punctuated by a surprise ending and his signature line, “Now you know ... the rest of the story.”
How did we move from that kind of rural Americana to the dishonest, hate-laced spewing of talk jocks such as Trump honoree Rush Limbaugh? As Anne Nelson explains to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove in this issue, it wasn’t an accident. Rather, her research shows, it was part of an intentional effort to use everything from old media, such as radio, to the sophisticated exploitation of Big Data for hardcore, extremist political purposes. We see the result every day in our abased, uncivil public discourse and in the reality-TV nature of contemporary politics.
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