Glenn Beck and Zoo Radio

September 25, 2009

Salon's three part series "The Making of Glenn Beck" should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. What I found most interesting is the information about Beck's past daytime top-40 radio work. This video clip gives a sense of what that looked like:

The Salon piece helps put this in perspective: Beck was a practitioner of "Zoo Radio," which thrived on manic, thought-association talk and wacky stunts. Once I saw the description I could remember this kind of programming from the 80s. It's the kind of thing I would catch snippets of, but I was never in an environment where this style was playing regularly.

I have a soft spot for this kind of creative work. But it becomes kind of dangerous when your zoo radio DJ is informing a large section of the population on the constitution.. which is the current situation. This is not a guy without any real knowledge about American history or traditions, and yet he has a media megaphone that allows him to shape the opinions of millions. Would we otherwise let the zoo radio DJ inform us on a topic? Wouldn't we find that absurd?

But beyond that, Glenn Beck has pulled a neat media crossover. Having been schooled in the style of zoo radio, he has essentially brought that style into television political commentary. Here is Salon:

"You can see the influence in everything Beck does," says zoo pioneer Scott Shannon, now boss jock at New York's WPLJ and the official voice of "The Sean Hannity Show." "The timing, the voices, the inflections, the whole approach -- so much of it is from the old Top 40 morning style."

Brian Wilson, one of Shannon's original inspirations for the zoo idea, likewise notes Beck's successful adaptation and carry-over from 1980s morning radio. "His performance in talk radio and television is full of hangover of basic Top 40 elements, formats and principles," says Wilson, now a libertarian talk show host. "The sound drops, the effects, the 'wackiness' -- he's doing the same thing, only minus the music."

So a style that has its roots in 80s radio has now been successfully transferred to television in the 00s. This style allows for the presentation of a populist political message that goes down surprisingly easy.. despite the anger that lies behind it.

The tracing out of these media mutations should be a priority in a serious history of the imagination. These mutations are everywhere, from the ancient Greek copying of wood designs into stone for their temples, to the importation of novelistic narrative devices into film, our creative formats are advanced and transformed largely by adopting standards and styles from one format to a completely different one. That new format does not allow for a perfect mirroring, and so defects in the copying become the basis for a new canon of style. I continue to wish there were a theoretical language for talking about these media crossovers and mixtures.

I will end with the irresistibly funny video clip of Glenn Beck "throwing a frog" into boiling water. It didn't happen, of course. But think of it as a brilliant attention-grabber.. a zoo DJ move..