Radio Talk Show Hosts and Their Callers
New media aside, print is the most intelligent medium, followed no doubt by radio. In the oft-quoted words of then FCC chairman Newton N. Minow, TV is a “vast wasteland”.
Print offers the usual benefit of hard copy, the ease of storage and retrieval around the house or office, all that has changed with the digital age. I would still want to suggest though that for content radio rules, not only because it’s cheap, spontaneous, interactive, portable, and transportable, but also because unlike TV, radio is not duty bound to push with entertainment glitz the least common denominator in its content niche.
And radio has that perennial appeal to modern society forever on the move, it’s the friendly constant companion to the motorist.
Radio audiences the world over have come to expect a certain erudition, a certain class, polish even, from broadcasters; and we admire the talk show hosts who tactfully school the callers who at worse are downright moronic, and at best border on the illiterate.
And as the educational system in my island home churns out school leavers with less than passing acquaintance with school libraries, a new generation of callers have descended upon radio land. Take the caller to a popular talk show who commenced an attack on Christianity by saying that the word suffer is a negative word so it would have been evil for Jesus to say “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”
The host, a PhD who admittedly had limited knowledge of the New Testament, gave him support. I could have screamed. Having a problem with the words of Jesus is one thing, but not even a basic idea of the King James English. And every decent media house should have some kind of library with online or hard copy dictionary and thesaurus. So in addition to the usual meaning of suffer such as endue pain the eager talk show host could have seen that the word suffer also has a verb meaning to allow or permit .
