THAT “the pictures are better on radio” is a well-known paradox. The problem for J. F. Kennedy’s administration in the United States in the early 1960s, however, was that radio was stimulating more than imaginations. By 1962, voices of radical-Right fundamentalist preachers carried over airwaves were causing havoc: encouraging civil disobedience to government trade policy and fanning the resistance to repealing Jim Crow laws in the South.
Major broadcasters’ post-war switch to TV opened a radio market gap that fundamentalists filled eagerly, offering hard-pressed station-owners ready money for slots vacated by CBS, NBC, and their competitors.
This “paid-for” access meant that fundamentalists could offset longstanding exclusion from (free) mainstream Sunday “public-service” programming enjoyed by mainline Protestant affiliates of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Newly vacated primetime spots had a larger audience share. At its peak, Carl McIntyre’s Twentieth Century Reformation Hour had a national listenership of 20 Million: one in nine American households.
Liberal, NCC-linked pastors were distressed to hear members of their congregations repeating radio-radical talking points. People in the pews seemingly preferred the new “radio religion” to their own minister’s Sunday sermons. Political paranoia and racial prejudice had greater appeal than injunctions to “Love thy neighbour” — especially if the neighbour was black. Worse, “mainline” lay people increasingly financed hard-line radio ministries: a migration of money, presaging a transfusion of membership later in the 1960s.
If the NCC was perturbed, the Kennedys were spooked. Starting in January 1962, the “Polish Ham Boycott”, promoted by radio preachers, blind-sided the government. US trade preferences for goods, especially preserved food, such as ham, produced in Soviet states, were calculated to buy influence with subordinate countries, loosening their economic ties to Moscow. To McIntyre and the likes of H. L. Hunt and Billy James Hargis, this looked like giving comfort to the enemy, “Godless Communism”. If this was not quite supping with the devil, it was certainly buying supper from him.
In less than a year, the boycott had caused 60 national retail chains to drop Eastern European imports, Congress to censure the President, and the US to reverse its trade policy. By late 1962, White House insiders worried about the 1964 election and the pro-Republican influence that radical pundits might exert on sparsely populated swing states.
A counter-plan, the Reuther Memorandum, devised by administration allies in the United Auto Workers Union, proposed forestalling nativist agit-prop by using IRS (tax authority) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pressure on pundits and stations respectively.
As Matzko shows, it was a plan the administration acted upon enthusiastically.
Development of the FCC’s fairness doctrine made broadcasting hate speech — legally sheltered by the First Amendment — uneconomic.
Stations became required to afford persons and groups impugned by religious shock jocks matching (free) response time — which shrank saleable air minutes. Compliance protocols ate employee man-hours, while NCC affiliates inundated the FCC with complaints — sometimes informally colluding with churchgoing FCC board members.
The strategy worked, pushing Radio Right broadcasting into free fall from 1967; but it meant utilising uncomfortably illiberal means to protect liberal ideals, setting bad precedents for Nixon to exploit.
The Radio Right would have benefited from exploration of the verbal texture of contentious programming and also unpacking the specific American connotations of terms such as “conservatism” — which differ significantly across the Atlantic. Overall, though, Matzko tells this story with style, rigour, and humour. Although this is a book about radio, the illustrations are a delight.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.
The Radio Right: How a band of broadcasters took on the federal government and built the modern conservative movement
Paul Matzko
OUP £22.99
(978-0-19-007322-0)
Church Times Bookshop £20.69