Ethnography Part 1: My three year experiment with left-right talk radio

My three year experiment with left-right talk radio

From 2010-2012 I co-hosted a weekday radio talk show with liberal San Francisco activist and author Patrick O’Heffernan. I had forged a reputation as a conservative radio host and author who often interviewed liberals and who strove to engage in constructive dialogue. My past guests included such left luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinum and Congressman Barney Frank who I ended up running against in the 2004 election.

Patrick and I rotated as hosts, by phone, and we scheduled an equal number of guests, authors, and personalities from both the left and the right. I noticed certain predictable patterns emerge from my co-host early on and these became more intense as time went by. My analysis of his behavior and that of many of our liberal guests, along with my own experience as a former liberal who grew up in and who continues to operate in a liberal enviornment, instructs my opinions and offers me a  prespective based upon careful study and inside experience.

Patrick rarely engaged in what could be described as a normal exchange of ideas and opinions. He was all about winning at any cost and he world resort to dirty tactics which he deliverd with an inpenetratable air of authority and erudition. I did not view the show as a contest and while I enjoy persuasion and political combat I’m not afraid to be wrong. Talking with Patrick on the air often felt like I was talking to a taped message.

I soon realized that Patrick lied to win his arguments and, worse, that he occasionally initiated a lie to catch me off guard. While on the air, it was obviously impossible for me to do the research required to refute his often outlandish contentions in real time. I would conduct the research later and, the next day, I would politely raise the contradiction. While he would respond by acknowledging that he was wrong, when confronted by evidence, he would wait about a week and go back to pushing the same lie as if nothing had happened. In the early part of our work together, I naievly didn’t catch the lie but as time went on I began to call him out. The result was that our professional and personal relationship eventually desintigrated. I started to notice this same pattern with other liberals, as well as a tendency on their part to severely constrict their exposure to opposing opinion. This has led me to wonder whether liberals operate in a fantasy world of their own ideological construction.

Patrick often behaved brutally with our conservative guests especially when they were women. If Patrick felt he couldn’t defend his liberal position with a guest, particularly an author, or if he felt that the author presented a case devastating to his liberal belief, he would approach the interview by literally changing the subject and sticking to irrelevant to the interview. When interviewing Dr. Judith Reisman, author of Sexual Sabatoge, he insisted on discussing some current controversy about advertising at high school football games, which had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Reisman’s research. Other times, in classic leftist agit-prop style, in order to discredit an author or a columnist he didn’t want to answer to he would uncover some miniscule mistake, an outdated footnote, a wrong date, and he would procede to pound away at it in an attempt to hurt their credibility and avoid the relevant subject.

Patrick consistently conformed to a liberal party line. I would prep for the afternoon show by listening to progressive Boston radio host Jeff Santos. With rare exceptions, Patrick, during our opening dialogue before we invited our guest to join us, would regurgitate the exact same talking points that were mouthed by Jeff Santos earlier in the day. Not only would Patrick parrot the same ideas and items, but he would deliver his comments often using the exact same words that Jeff used and even the same mannerisms and intonations. I have observed, over time, that liberals tend to engage in group-think and they rarely deviate.

Certainly conservatives lie and conform from time to time but I have noticed a trend amongst liberals in this regard which has led me to speculate over the possibility that lying and conformity is more than a casual event for them but, rather, this is something that they internalize as a basic and necessary part of their ideology. They seem to feel justified in these practices as they think that such actions preserve and advance their idea of progress and are thus justified. Perhaps this reflects the old communist maxim: “You’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”