The Powerful Effects of Human Interest

Courtesy of Starcom

Another year, another Spring Break where I literally did nothing but sleep and watch TV…

This time around, I ended up watching two pretty amazing movies, both an ode to a couple of once very popular, yet semi-fleeting mediums—the radio and the newspaper. 

The radio movie, ironically titled, Talk Radio, is a late 80s film about Barry Champlaign, a rule-breaking, liberal, shock-jock from the East Coast, who has one of the highest rated radio shows in the (mostly) conservative town of Dallas, TX. Barry talks about things that make some of the more conservative residents of Dallas pretty uncomfortable, things like sex, racial remarks, drugs, and a bunch of other “unspeakable taboos” that make Southern, traditional, conservative, White people in the 80s squirm. 

As you would have it, due to Barry’s confrontational and incredibly condescending demeanor, as well as the chosen topics of interest on his show, he ends up receiving quite a lot of hate and dissent. Beyond that, Barry and his team at “Talk Radio” end up scoring a great opportunity when their show is selected to broadcast nationally, now having the ability to reach a bigger audience than ever before. Barry wastes no time announcing the great news on his show and it seems (at least to me) that this moment is the true catalyst for the increasing threats and overall hate he faces shortly afterward. 

Unfortunately for Barry, this hate comes in the form of a neo-Nazi brigade, known as ‘The Order’. Don’t get me wrong, Barry does receive his fair share of adulation and fans. However, it appears that as his show grows in success, the hate seems to outweigh and overpower the love. It doesn’t help that Barry is Jewish, a common target for neo-Nazi groups.

Barry, who receives various threats and hate throughout the movie, likes to call people’s bluff and is convinced most of the threats are really just hoaxes. Sometimes he’s even right, for example, when he was mailed a rat, a Nazi flag, and a threatening note, instead of a bomb, as he was told by the person who threatened him and sent the package.

Or when he was right about Kent, a young, crazed, moral-less listener, who lied to Barry about his girlfriend having an O.D., keeping up the lie for a couple of days up until Barry got him to break and tell the truth. 

In this way, it’s quite understandable why Barry was very skeptical regarding the degree of hate and amount potential violence he was actually receiving. Barry himself didn’t see the link between his growing hate and the growing viewership of ‘Talk Radio’. He spoke the unspeakable and people were all ears, to the point where it became virtually indecipherable to tell the difference between a fan and a hater in the movie. This happens to the very end of the movie, when Barry is assassinated by a neo-Nazi posing as a fan who wanted an autograph. 

It’s important to note that the movie, Talk Radio, is actually based upon a real-life occurence. The movie itself, a fictionalized version of the assassination of Alan Berg, a Jewish, shock-jock, radio personality who was murdered back in 1984 by a neo-Nazi from “The Order” over in Denver, Colorado. 

The movie itself takes place during a time where radio was declining as a medium, so it’s no surprise that shock-jocks (with their taboo, obscene, cutting-edge talk shows) were among the last that could still hold a considerable audience on the radio platform. Unfortunately for Barry, the price he paid for his “practicing of the 1st amendment” was basically his life.

The second movie I watched over spring break, was made much more recently. This movie, as mentioned prior, utilizes the newspaper as the medium of interest. More intriguingly, it is actually based on true events. 

The movie is called, Spotlight, and it focuses on an investigative unit, known as the “Spotlight” team, who served as reporters for the irrefutable and very credible newspaper, the Boston Globe. It takes place in the early 2000s, when newly hired Globe editor, Marty Baron, comes along and convinces the “Spotlight” team to dig into the history of Catholic priests and their child abuse allegations, as well as the subsequent cover-ups occurring in the Boston area. 

The “Spotlight” team goes to enormous heights to uncover the truth and successfully expose the wrong-doings of these priests, something that was continually undermined in the past as the priests were protected by multiple institutions. These institutions include: the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston under the rule of Cardinal Law; the Attorneys employed by the Church to handle victim settlements and get incriminating evidences sealed; the reporters who devalued and dismissed the allegations for years (dating back to the 70s) despite being supplied with the story from multiple sources; and on a more subconscious level, the institution of Catholics who didn’t want to face the truth and hold the priests (and the entire Catholic Church) accountable for what they’ve done, despite the multiple allegations made public over the years, occurring and reported way before the “Spotlight” team even started on the case. 

According to Vox, Spotlight, does a great job at showing the exhaustive, excruciating, banal work of an investigative journalist team, along with the many hurdles they face in just getting the actual story. 

Throughout the film, the “Spotlight” team face so many hurdles. These hurdles range from menacing clergy-men, to pushy, pseudo-aggressive lawyers, to Catholic allies in the form of co-workers at the Globe, to even 9/11 (which, according to the movie, caused the investigative team to abandon their Catholic Church story for more than 6 weeks, as they were forced to reallocate their efforts to 9/11 related coverage only). 

Spotlight does appear to have a happy ending in the end, the team ends up making it through all the obstacles they come across except time, still successfully exposing the institution of the Catholic Church, and inadvertently causing the first, unofficial #MeToo-like movement to occur in the US. The relevance of this movie in today’s social climate is not lost upon me. It’s pretty funny, because despite the fact that both of the movies are depicting a past time in history, they both are pretty relevant in our current time frame. 

Talk Radio perfectly showcases theshift to secularization that the United States has undergone throughout the last 5 decades, particularly at the demand of the American public. From the entertainment to the fashion, America’s secularization has impacted nearly everyone, particularly the youth, and many people at the time felt it was mostly being caused by media. Moreover, since the 80s, shock-value as an entertainment ploy has only increased. It’s pretty much our social norm. 

According to George Rodman, in his book, Mass Media in a Changing World, shock-jocks are “radio personalities who derive humor and ratings from lewd and tasteless comments, using tactics such as vulgarity, racism, sexism, and cynicism”.  Moreover, shock-jocks are particularly denoted for their high ratings, which basically means a lot of listeners are tuned in. Rodman suggests that one reason why people would tune in to listen to such obscene material is simply due to desensitization, which he describes as a developed “callousness or emotional neutrality” in the face of obscenities and violence. Furthermore, Rodman discusses how the conversationalist and auditory nature of radio exhibits powerful effects on people, particularly youth. This explains why Barry’s show was met with such immediate and strong reactions, ranging from mimicry to hate crimes.

Spotlight itself features a type of powerful effects that occurs when a human-interest story is backed by a large news company, covered by a credible news team with a value in journalistic ethics. This powerful effect is shown predominantly during the final scenes of the film, after the report is published, the call lines at “Spotlight” are going off from victims who felt empowered enough to share their story after reading the exposé.

There are other similar things about these two movies, both the “Spotlight” team and Barry Champlaign face threats from groups who want to silence them. For the “Spotlight” team, the Catholic Church and the associated lawyers are the main culprits who are trying to kill their story. For Barry at ‘Talk Radio’, the neo-Nazi’s in Dallas are the ones doing the silencing, in the end they get what they want. As for the “Spotlight” team, they are the ones who emerge victorious. 

Interestingly enough, there are more similarities drawn between both of the movies, specifically within the characters of Barry Champlaign from Talk Radio and Marty Baron of Spotlight.  Both Marty and Barry are Jews from the East Coast, who come to a new town and essentially stir things up and force the conversations and discussions that nobody really wanted to talk about. Furthermore, both Barry and Marty refuse to be silenced, as both felt that what they had to offer within their medium was important, moreover, they both wanted their work to be important. 

Barry wasn’t really concerned with the ‘Standards and Practices’ that kept radio material more ethically inclined, he felt the importance of his work was more in the discussion of his liberal-based views across an amalgam of topics to a very conservative audience. In the end, Barry realizes his show was probably doing more harm than good, to both himself and his listeners (especially the younger, more impressionable listeners). As for Marty, he was all about journalistic standards and ethics, and the report he led actually did more good than he could ever imagine.

Overall, both of these movies do a great job at showing the potent effects that any given medium can inflict, especially when the topic of choice is of high human interest. Talk Radio depicts it in a more sensationalist format, whereas Spotlight depicts it in a more legitimizing, ethical format, nonetheless, the same goal is achieved. Despite the fact that both the radio and the newspaper continuously appear to be on their last life with every passing decade, both mediums continue to remain resilient against newer, more-designated mediums like TV and Internet.

In these times, it seems that if topic is taboo enough to generate high human interest, any medium can stand the test of times…