FEST Writing Group

Four hundred years before the Holocaust, Martin Luther decried Jews in the most inflammatory terms. He said they drank the blood of Christian children, and called for their killing, the taking of their property and the burning of their homes. Scholars draw a line from those words to the systematic extermination of European Jews under the Nazis.

Words matter. They echo over the generations and find new roots in new times – distant from the moment when they were first uttered.

I believe that we are seeing today, in our politics, the echo of irresponsible utterances made by self-styled, political commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others, who for years (decades in the case of Limbaugh) have shaped how millions of viewers and listeners understand conservative politics.

They offered and continue to offer on Fox News today a brew of contempt and conspiracy- mongering has created a contagion of anger, resentment and fear that we are seeing in the support of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and others this political season.

Here is an example, taken from a show by Jay Severen in about 2007. He is a talk show host who was once suspended from his Boston radio station for something he said about Mexican immigrant – “crimminalians,” he called them – and eventually was fired. I believe he continues his rants on a Sirius channel.

Severen was warning listeners about the over-reach of the federal government and how it endangered all that listeners held dear. For example, he said, the FCC could come in to the station tomorrow and if they didn’t like what he was saying, take him off the air. “Then when you tune in the next day, what will you hear? Country music, my friends, instead of my voice….”

He used that invented (and illegal in the way he described it) scenario to then inveigh against the government, speaking as angrily as if the situation had really happened. By the time his rant was in full swing, you could not tell that he was denouncing an invented and highly unlikely scenario. It sounded as though it actually had happened. And a percentage of his listeners (whom he called “the best and the brightest”) most likely thought it did.

It makes me think of the description of how anxiety spreads through a herd of cattle and results in a stampede.

There has always been irresponsible communication on the part of the news media. Newspapers have a history of raucous and partisan owners, such as McCormack in 19th century Chicago, who freely used their column inches to support causes and punish enemies.  The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 found entry in the United States, in part, because a Philadelphia newspaper refused to warn people to stay away from a major event and instead encouraged them to attend. (I was reminded of that today by a piece in the New York Times. Nicholas Kristoff wrote that right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Beck denounced the call for flu shots during the 2009-10 flu pandemic. They apparently saw it “as a nefarious Obama plot,” he said. A peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law later found that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots.)

In 1929, The Wall Street Journal contributed to fortunes lost by urging investors to buy stocks on the eve of the stock market crash. And during the Dust Bowl, an influential newspaper owner in Texas defied what nature was telling the farmers of the southern plains, and urged them to keep busting sod and planting wheat through the drought – the very thing that created the dust storms that buried homes and cars and sickened humans and livestock alike.

Despite the potency of newspaper communications of the past and the occasional disastrous results, they cannot compare to the influence of contemporary radio and television hosts — particularly when they are amplified by social media and other digital communications.

Since the 1980s, when Rush Limbaugh first discovered that outrageous political talk could make him a millionaire, a brand of angry, combative political communication has developed that I believe contributes to, accelerates and is a product of societal regression.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media feeds have only intensified the process. Aside from his rallies, Donald Trump’s campaign communications consist almost entirely of 140-character tweets. He has paid for just one or two campaign commercials on television, which in the past has been the communications lifeblood of presidential campaigns.

I recently live-Tweeted from an event – a legislative hearing in Boston – on behalf of a client. And I felt in a new way the power of social media. As I was Tweeting the testimony in 140-character snippets, I was getting immediate feedback from followers. It was real-time communications with individuals I never had met, from across the country, who were following what I was writing about the hearing. I have to say that as a former journalist, I found it intoxicating. No wonder Trump is up at 3 a.m. Tweeting to his millions and millions of followers. You have to wonder who is creating who – is Trump creating this new political environment or are his Twitter followers creating him?

With the decline of newspapers, the barriers between types of communication – news, opinion, fact, fantasy, serious and entertainment – has continued to erode. I was taught as a child that “sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” Words, in other words, are not important. But they are important, especially when they are wedded to images and sent careening around the world, as they so easily are today.

Emotionally based communications is a potent conveyor of anxiety and intensity. And I believe it is deserves greater examination as a product of and an accelerator of societal regression.

Four hundred years before the Holocaust, Martin Luther decried Jews in the most inflammatory terms. He said they drank the blood of Christian children, and called for their killing, the taking of their property and the burning of their homes. Scholars draw a line from those words to the systematic extermination of European Jews under the Nazis.

Words matter. They echo over the generations and find new roots in new times – distant from the moment when they were first uttered.

I believe that we are seeing today, in our politics, the echo of irresponsible utterances made by self-styled, political commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others, who for years (decades in the case of Limbaugh) have shaped how millions of viewers and listeners understand conservative politics.

They offered and continue to offer on Fox News today a brew of contempt and conspiracy- mongering has created a contagion of anger, resentment and fear that we are seeing in the support of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and others this political season.

Here is an example, taken from a show by Jay Severen in about 2007. He is a talk show host who was once suspended from his Boston radio station for something he said about Mexican immigrant – “crimminalians,” he called them – and eventually was fired. I believe he continues his rants on a Sirius channel.

Severen was warning listeners about the over-reach of the federal government and how it endangered all that listeners held dear. For example, he said, the FCC could come in to the station tomorrow and if they didn’t like what he was saying, take him off the air. “Then when you tune in the next day, what will you hear? Country music, my friends, instead of my voice….”

He used that invented (and illegal in the way he described it) scenario to then inveigh against the government, speaking as angrily as if the situation had really happened. By the time his rant was in full swing, you could not tell that he was denouncing an invented and highly unlikely scenario. It sounded as though it actually had happened. And a percentage of his listeners (whom he called “the best and the brightest”) most likely thought it did.

It makes me think of the description of how anxiety spreads through a herd of cattle and results in a stampede.

There has always been irresponsible communication on the part of the news media. Newspapers have a history of raucous and partisan owners, such as McCormack in 19th century Chicago, who freely used their column inches to support causes and punish enemies.  The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 found entry in the United States, in part, because a Philadelphia newspaper refused to warn people to stay away from a major event and instead encouraged them to attend. (I was reminded of that today by a piece in the New York Times. Nicholas Kristoff wrote that right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Beck denounced the call for flu shots during the 2009-10 flu pandemic. They apparently saw it “as a nefarious Obama plot,” he said. A peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law later found that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots.)

In 1929, The Wall Street Journal contributed to fortunes lost by urging investors to buy stocks on the eve of the stock market crash. And during the Dust Bowl, an influential newspaper owner in Texas defied what nature was telling the farmers of the southern plains, and urged them to keep busting sod and planting wheat through the drought – the very thing that created the dust storms that buried homes and cars and sickened humans and livestock alike.

Despite the potency of newspaper communications of the past and the occasional disastrous results, they cannot compare to the influence of contemporary radio and television hosts — particularly when they are amplified by social media and other digital communications.

Since the 1980s, when Rush Limbaugh first discovered that outrageous political talk could make him a millionaire, a brand of angry, combative political communication has developed that I believe contributes to, accelerates and is a product of societal regression.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media feeds have only intensified the process. Aside from his rallies, Donald Trump’s campaign communications consist almost entirely of 140-character tweets. He has paid for just one or two campaign commercials on television, which in the past has been the communications lifeblood of presidential campaigns.

I recently live-Tweeted from an event – a legislative hearing in Boston – on behalf of a client. And I felt in a new way the power of social media. As I was Tweeting the testimony in 140-character snippets, I was getting immediate feedback from followers. It was real-time communications with individuals I never had met, from across the country, who were following what I was writing about the hearing. I have to say that as a former journalist, I found it intoxicating. No wonder Trump is up at 3 a.m. Tweeting to his millions and millions of followers. You have to wonder who is creating who – is Trump creating this new political environment or are his Twitter followers creating him?

With the decline of newspapers, the barriers between types of communication – news, opinion, fact, fantasy, serious and entertainment – has continued to erode. I was taught as a child that “sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” Words, in other words, are not important. But they are important, especially when they are wedded to images and sent careening around the world, as they so easily are today.

Emotionally based communications is a potent conveyor of anxiety and intensity. And I believe it is deserves greater examination as a product of and an accelerator of societal regression.