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Why I Stopped Listening to Coast to Coast AM in 2020
And why that’s not changing after the events of January 6, 2021
Nothing factual, nothing fictional, interchangeable… all sensational. This is the age of confusion.
— Puscifier (2020), “Grey Zone”
To my wife’s surprise, I canceled my 20-year subscription to Coast to Coast AM in 2020. For years, I’ve been annoying her by listening to such “wackadoodles.” It may actually surprise you that I even had a subscription.
“Isn’t it that late night radio show about aliens?” Well, yeah. It has been quite a bit more than that. Big Foot hunters and what not are definitely a big part of Coast to Coast. But I’ve also heard interesting interviews with Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
That’s not why I listened to Coast to Coast for so long. As a rhetorician — a sophist even — I love hearing and analyzing different arguments, even ones I disagree with. A creative argument holds great interest for me. In the past, Coast to Coast AM has been a delicious smorgasbord of just that. To some degree that’s probably still somewhat true, but some food has definitely spoiled.
Why I Listened to Coast to Coast.
Let me first explain why I listened to Coast to Coast. As a professor of rhetoric, I feel like that’s important, since much of what Coast to Coast discusses now would be considered “fake news.”
My listening experience began in the 1990s when I worked swing shifts in security. My colleagues and I had the best fun laughing and shaking our heads at all the weird theories and personalities that showed up on Coast to Coast, especially during “open lines” — when anyone could call in for any reason. Kind of like the Twitter of the time. There literally was no other program like it … and it kept us awake.
I learned to really enjoy the many voices on Coast to Coast AM, ranging from liberal to conservative to absolutely bizarre. Looking back, it was the perfect postmodern show — what scholars would call polyvocal (see Mikhail Bakhtin for more on this). The incoherence highlighted the fractured contradictions of American society and discourse. A true carnival.
