What's Fair on the Air?
Subtitle: Cold War right-wing broadcasting and the public interest
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Chicago, Ill.
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780226326788
Description: The rise of right-wing broadcasting during the Cold War has been mostly forgotten today. But in the 1950s and '60s you could turn on your radio any time of the day and listen to diatribes against communism, civil rights, the United Nations, fluoridation, federal income tax, Social Security, or JFK, as well as hosannas praising Barry Goldwater and Jesus Christ. Half a century before the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, these broadcasters bucked the FCC's public interest mandate and created an alternate universe of right-wing political coverage, anticommunist sermons, and pro-business bluster. A lively look back at this formative era, What's Fair on the Air? charts the rise and fall of four of the most prominent right-wing broadcasters: H.L. Hunt, Dan Smoot, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis. By the 1970s, all four had been hamstrung by the Internal Revenue Service, the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, and the rise of a more effective conservative movement. But before losing their battle for the airwaves, Heather Hendershot reveals, they purveyed ideological notions that would eventually triumph, creating a potent brew of religion, politics, and dedication to free-market economics that paved the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan, the Moral Majority, Fox News, and the Tea Party. - Publisher.
Table of contents: title: Right-wing media vs. cold war America: "lace, luncheons, and frying pans" collapse into a "nightmare of raw violence and brutality"; title: "A strong reek of the not-quite-crackpot": H. L. Hunt, right-wing radio's "constructive" conservative; title: Right-wing broadcasting's supreme individualist: Dan Smoot and the tactics of constitutional conservatism; title: God's angriest man: Carl McIntire, neoevangelicalism, and the long-lingering fundamentalist fires; title: A story of "epic proportions": the battle between the FCC and WXUR; title: Everything old is new again: Billy James Hargis, extremist tactics, and the politics of image; title: Conclusion: from Birchers to birthers?