What's Fair on the Air?

“A meticulously researched and astutely analyzed history of the right-wing broadcasting movement of the 1950s and 1960s” (Thomas Streeter, author of Selling the Air).

“What’s Fair on the Air? challenges us to rethink widely accepted notions of free speech, fundamentalism, and modernity. That’s a big task; fortunately we have Hendershot’s brilliant—and often funny—book to help us begin.” —Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family and Sweet Heaven When I Die

The rise of right-wing broadcasting during the cold war has been mostly forgotten today. But in the 1950s and '60s you could easily tune your radio dial to diatribes against communism, civil rights, the United Nations, fluoridation, the federal income tax, Social Security, or JFK, as well as hosannas to Barry Goldwater and Jesus Christ. Half a century before the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, these broadcasters bucked the FCC’s public interest mandate and created an alternate universe of right-wing political coverage, anticommunist sermons, and pro-business bluster.

A lively look back at this formative era, What's Fair on the Air? charts the rise and fall of four of the most prominent right-wing broadcasters: H. L. Hunt, Dan Smoot, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis. By the 1970s, all four had been hamstrung by the Internal Revenue Service, the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, and the arrival of a more effective conservative movement. But before losing their battle for the airwaves, Heather Hendershot reveals, they purveyed ideological notions that would eventually triumph, creating a potent brew of religion, politics, and dedication to free-market economics that paved the way for Ronald Reagan, the Moral Majority, Fox News, and the Tea Party.

“Hendershot achieves . . . capturing the baroque strangeness of the mid-century American right, without sacrificing empathy for them as reasonable political actors—recovering the severe discontinuities between far-right broadcasters and today’s Fox/Limbaugh world, while also honoring what has been constant in the history of American right-wing depredation of liberalism. And as broadcast history, it’s exceptionally subtle and useful.” —Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America