The Chris Moeller Archives

How the Catholic church is like the radio business

One morning about a decade ago I sat in a staff meeting at WHO Radio where the discussion topic was ratings. The program director explained his department's strategy to this end: The trends were alarming. Millions of listeners had abandoned radio and they were never coming back regardless of what what any of us did. The cause was technological, he said, and the goal now was to get the remaining listeners to listen for as long as possible each day.

This was a shocking concession to me. We were no longer "broadcasting," according to my definition of the word. We were instead, I guess, "narrow-casting."

It had been pretty obvious that this had been the thinking in the front office for some time. Listening to WHO for an entire day meant having to tolerate the voices of essentially one reactionary, right-wing gasbag after another. At the time of the meeting, the station, which promoted itself as "the state's" radio station, had not one left-of-center political voice on the air during any daypart. The jukebox played as an almost 24-hour-a-day free commercial for the Republican National Committee, even though Iowa had not given a single electoral vote to the Republican presidential candidate in almost twenty years. This was-- and is still-- curious to me. Anecdotally, I knew several hundred Iowans, at the time, living in several different counties, all within the tower signal of the radio station, and discounting my co-workers, I think about six of these people listened to the station.

There wasn't even an attempt at the appearance of political impartiality. The PD argued that even one liberal voice on the station would only cause the remaining listeners to tune out during that time of the day-- and as was always the thinking in Radioland: if they tuned out, they might never come back. It was hard to argue with that logic, considering the dye that had been cast already so long before.

It would have been funny if it hadn't been so sad. Our industry wasn't dying of natural (read: technological) causes. It had been murdered by program directors like this one who didn't know what people wanted to hear. Those of us still working at the station were being semi-officially charged now with simply providing emotional comfort for the most aged and infirm of political ideas. Rush Limbaugh's job, as Bill Maher once described it, was "to scare white men as they get in their trucks at lunchtime," and our job at his affiliate station was to administer the intravenous Limbaugh drip. A 50,000 watt radio titanic was taking on increasing amounts of water, and we were re-arranging the furniture on the lido deck.

Salon's film and social critic, Andrew O'Hehir, argues that the Roman Catholic Church is engaged in the same sort of narrow-casting, as it were. The church has abandoned the reforms of the early and mid-'60s Vatican II council, and in doing, have also abandoned the hope of expanding the church of the faithful. To paraphrase Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, who was referring to the then-famous purge by the Soviets in Russia, the Catholics "are going to be fewer but better." A Dominican priest named Edward Schillebeeckx called the finished product "the monolith church... a ghetto church, a church of the little flock, the holy remnant."

O'Hehir, the son of parents that left the church rather than stay married to their first spouses, presents the more radical position that the papacies since Vatican II, those of Karol Wojtyla, Josef Ratzinger, and now Jorge Mario Bergoglio, are not even legitimate within the church. Under the Council of Constance, 600 years old next year, "a council trumps a pope," and the rulings made by Vatican II have never been formally overturned. Nevertheless, since the '60s, the hierarchy of the church has taken more authority from the people, and what is a church if it is not the people? That's my heritage in Martin Luther theology bubbling up though. He argued that there was no infallibility in the priesthood, which shouldn't seem like a radical hypothesis today. Yet even today, the Protestant churches inspired originally by his study seem to favor an authoritarian church. In the void, women of empowerment, gays and lesbians, and conscientious objectors, among others, seek spiritual strength elsewhere.

---

My fiance is on spring break this week and not a single day out of nine is forecast to rise above 40 degrees in temperature in Des Moines. Has anyone else noticed that we didn't have a winter until Groundhog Day? I'm starting to doubt rodent-based scientific methodology.

---

I will not refer to her hereafter as my fiance. I'm still mad at the French for their refusal to join the war coalition in 2003. She's my "freedom partner."

posted by CM @ 2:58 PM