by Akim Reinhardt
I drive in silence these days. That in itself is nothing new. For years, my solo road trips across America have featured long stretches of near silence. Nothing coming from the speakers. No talk, no music, no pleading commercials. Just the whir of the road helping to clear my mind.
But not at home.
Tooling around Baltimore, whether commuting about twenty minutes each way or running some errands, I almost always have the radio on. Or at least I did. That started to change in January and February, though the issue dates back to last November.
Donald Trump’s victory was not much of a surprise, but deeply depressing nonetheless. And it was the first time an election depressed me. There’s been no shortage of shitty politicians I’ve hated to see win elections in the past. But this felt different. Maybe because I’m a little older now and my perspective is changing. Maybe because it was so obvious there would be very few guard rails the second time around. Maybe because Trump really is a psychopathic rapist and aspiring dictator who has successfully chipped away at democratic norms while transforming the U.S. presidency into shameless kleptocracy while about a third of the electorate ardently roots him on. Whatever the reason, it was very clear to me that a new, very fucked up version of “normal” was about to unfold, and the one thing I could not stomach was reputable news agencies, dizzy with fear, doing everything they could to sound “objective,” which meant actively sticking their heads the sand and pretending that everything was still the old, familiar normal.
At the opening of Trump’s second term, that was NPR to the max, for all the good it did them; it took Trumpists all of half a year to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As if you couldn’t see it all coming. I certainly did, and I absolutely could not bear to listen to them normalize the pending Trumpist assault on the U.S. republic. But I didn’t switch the station. Instead, I did something that, as a former radio DJ myself at two different public stations, surprised me. I turned the radio off. Which is a shame, because it meant I was forsaking Baltimore’s fairly robust radio scene.
There’s jazz from Morgan State University on WEAA-FM. Robert Shaheed’s Master Class show is a real go-to, and I adore the Latin jazz and salsa show Fiesta Musical with Guillermo Brown and Gary Elter whenever I come across it. There’s also the more formatted programming of WTMD-FM, which used to be housed in my university but went public a few years back. They serve up music aimed at my generation of (socially) white people. It’s sometimes a bit soft and predictable for my tastes, but occasionally it really hits the spot. However, the real gem in the Baltimore market floats over from the other side of the Chesapeake Bay: WKHS-FM out of Wharton, Maryland. The HS stands for High School. Catch it at the right time and you’ll hear actual high school kids whip up a truly head-spinning mix of music, and then charmingly fumble their way over the microphone. It’s priceless and always makes my day. Other times, adults in the Kent County community take over and really let it rip. And about half the day, WKHS it serves as a relay station for WXPN-FM out of Philadelphia, which pioneered the modern, middle road, middle aged, middle class format that WTMD follows. Then of course there’s the local NPR station for news, WYPR (Your Public Radio), which spun off from Johns Hopkins the way WTMD spun off of Towson University. In fact, those two stations are now partnered up under the same non-profit umbrella.
All of that is public radio on the left end of the dial, below 92.1 FM. On the rarer occasions when I venture north of 92, I listen to Spanish language music or, as a last resort, some classic rock. But always something when I drive around Baltimore. Until this year.
In some ways, nothing sets the tone for cultural norms like mass media: TV, radio, news outlets, movies, etc. This is particularly true for Americans over 45 who grew up and came of age in a fairly homogenous mass media environment. Boomers and Xers remember just three television networks, PBS, and one or two local stations on the tube, along with radio music programming determined by the various Billboard charts. Millennials had cable TV straight out of the crib, but most of them still lived a 20th century childhood unbesmirched by the web. For the real fracturing of mainstream American culture did not crackle and pop until the internet created a patchwork of subcultural hives for people to retreat into. The year 2000 marks the moment when a slight majority of Americans had home internet service, and the crumbling of a coherent, mainstream national culture really took off.
That fragmentation of American popular culture is just one factor enabling Trump. Maybe it’s also because the Greatest Generation, who on the whole after WWII weren’t nearly as great as their moniker intimates, were mostly gone by 2016. Lord knows they would have proverbially stomped the living shit out of an absolute fucking ass clown like Donald Trump if he had dared approach the sacred halls of power during their watch. Then again, maybe if they really were so great, they wouldn’t have raised a generation of spoiled, angry permachildren, a majority of whom (the white ones, anyway) voted for Trump the first time and got this whole mess going. Truth be told, there are at least 99 ways to explain the current mess.
However, the fracturing of the mainstream culture is the one that resonates most with me these days. And to be fair, there is actually has a lot of upside to it. For example, the flourishing of talented and interesting DIY culture producers who would never have found their audiences on YouTube, TikTok, and elsewhere in the ether if mass media corporations still finely filtered the production and distribution of cultural products to the masses. But there’s also been a very dark side to that fracturing. The world’s most corrupt, insane, and nastiest shit has found ways to become normalized as the mainstream no longer sets boundaries for what is normal and what is abnormal.
Q-Anon is the most obvious example, perhaps. It’s no longer disqualifying in any number of venues, including Congress and the White House, to echo loony toon nonsense promoted by the American internet’s most successful amalgamation of mentally ill and conspiratorial delusions.
I don’t blame the so-called legacy media for this, of course. That would be unfair. They were blind sided by the rise of the internet and struggled to adjust. Newspapers, for example, lost about half their revenue when Craigslist rendered obsolete their classified ads, which you had to pay a small fee to place. That’s just one example of what they were up against.
However, this just made it all the more infuriating when those same media outlets normalized Trump in 2016. At the time, I was irate that they were not calling a spade a spade. Instead, they waited, reading the temperature of the room, petrified that GOP propaganda organs, which had been villainizing them since at least the 1990s, would yet again paint them as biased for speaking truth to Republican power. But to normalize Tump through all the insanity, corruption, gross stupidity, and anti-democatic action of his first term, and not learn a fucking thing? And then, four years later, to think that continuing to normalize Trump’s victory and the oncoming onslaught of Trumpism would somehow insulate them from his wrath? Seriously?
Poor and working class Baby Boomers who voted for Trump still lost their Medicaid right out of the gate. What fucking chance did All Things Considered have?
I’ve been shaking my head for about nine years now. I will never say the legacy media deserve the Trumpist beat down they’ve been facing, but when some dumb motherfucker falls in a well because they obstinately refuse to wear their glasses outside the house, it’s tough to have a lot of sympathy them, even if you kind of need that dumb motherfucker to keep the lights on in your own home.
The truth is, since 2016 most if not all reputable news outlets in the United States have played a role, a major role actually, in normalizing Trump the politician. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but they played along, and continue to do so, making things worse, and I’m not sure I can ever forgive them for that. Because it sure looks to me that they helped normalize Trump and Trumpism in the name of objectivity, while actually being more concerned with self-preservation. It has been a stunning betrayal not only of the republic, but of the values for which real news organizations stand. So much so, that listening to NPR pretend everything was normal this past January and February despoiled, at least temporarily, the entire medium of radio for me, a person who loves that medium deeply and spent a decade giving free labor to and raising money for the public version of it.
But I suppose I’ll be back, eventually. Even if a healthy functioning American democracy might not.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com