I had commented quite a bit over the past two years on conservative talk radio...posting this in August of 2019....I've been a talk radio listener since the mid-1960s! Talk radio has always been very big in Pittsburgh....and I was listening to talk while Rush....or 'Jeff Christie' as he was known on Pittsburgh radio back then....was playing records on nearby KQV. Callers were always a big part of the fun as you never really knew what the next caller was going to be like. Controversy....I'm sure that you remember this....was a big ratings boost....so the hosts wanted the callers that could generate a rip-roaring argument.
I gave a little history of not only radio but Pittsburgh's and my family's tie to it in....The first commercial radio broadcast by KDKA....(the same radio station that I listened to talk radio early on)....occurred about 6 pm on election day November 2, 1920 from a shack on top of one of the buildings of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's possible that both of my grandfathers were in that building during that broadcast for both were young men employed by Westinghouse at the time.
According to much ballyhooed reports...Cumulus Media....a major player in talk radio station ownership....informed the radio hosts on their stations to tone down the rhetoric that can incite violence. If this report proves accurate it has 1st Amendment implications....but also common sense issues. I have no way of knowing what's going on with Breitbart's morning radio show but the host is off all week which points to some kind of corporate meetings as he is also the editor-in-chief.
There were once regular visits to these posts from Australia....totaling 3,775....but they all stopped on one day a few years ago. That was disappointing because I had twice been to Sydney in the early 1970s....and posted some anecdotes that had local to Sydney Christian implications. I took this in stride....whatever happened....because if God wants anyone on earth to read anything that I might post....then it will happen....and if He doesn't.....then neither do I.
Going further back in these posts.....December of 2016....as Donald Trump was then president-elect.....of which I celebrated....I posted this concerning conservative talk radio in a post titled....Your Mission....Should You Accept It....Conservative talk radio....[our] Publius, our Thomas Paine, our Benjamin Franklin, and our John Locke transmogrified into waves of electromagnetic radiation travelling at the speed of light into every kitchen and workroom and automobile in America.....these stellar stars that we navigated by through a perfect storm wrapped in a cosmic disturbance that threatened every foundation laid in the latter half of the eighteenth century....their mission now....a much more difficult mission this time....should they accept it....is to bring God into the equation....but first they have to realize that God alone rules in the affairs of men.
I couldn't have been more wrong in my assessment on what might then happen on conservative talk radio. We always occupied the high ground....and it was our strength....surely we would stay there....but the first thing that we did was to come off that high ground. Slowly but surely the intellectual debate ended....replaced by indoctrination. It was no longer conservative talk radio but Trump talk radio. The controversy was no longer generated by differing opinions.....but by what the only accepted opinion would generate in America.
I lauded Limbaugh and Hannity and Levin in those posts....for no radio personage ever had the ability of Rush.....or the work ethic of Hannity....or the academic debate of Mark Levin.....but I concluded one post with this.....It would benefit us to remind ourselves that as important as conservative talk radio once was to us....they are not gods to us....and we do not have to automatically believe every word that they say....and that the very powers of scrutiny and examination that they helped us develop....now has to be used towards them. Christians especially should recognize Bunyan's 'enchanted ground' we now find ourselves living on that has made us drowsy....and then recall our own mission with the orders of...."Therefore let us not sleep, as do others, but let us watch and be sober."
