Talk radio proves right makes might.

• Author: Cline, Ned
• Position: CAPITAL

Michael Curtis, a Wake Forest University law professor, has spent untold hours researching the balance between free speech and fairness in the media. What he has found are forces that foster demagoguery more than democracy. There's plenty of free speech, but fairness seems a passing fancy.

"The media can report anything without verifying the facts," he says. "Clearly the number of corporations--and individuals--with influence over what is reported has shrunk through mergers. Concentrated media control can be used for deleterious purposes and is prone to manipulation."

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Dan Rather's blunder notwithstanding, most media distortions go unreported and unexposed. "The absence of coverage on this issue means that the public is missing much of what is going on in the country," says Duke law professor Walter Dellinger III, who was acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. A Washington lawyer whose client list includes Martha Stewart, he has urged major newspapers, with limited success, to cover this trend.

To get an earful of what Curtis and Dellinger are talking about, tune in to talk radio. A decade ago, there were fewer than a half-dozen stations in North Carolina hewing to that format. Now there are nearly 50. Most of the programming skews to the right politically, with some stations broadcasting up to 12 hours a day of right-wing chatter. "Facts" are tossed out like seeds sown in the wind, with almost no weight given to whether they're true.

"It is a disturbing trend," says Ardie Gregory, president of the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters and general manager of WRAL-FM in Raleigh. "While consumers have a responsibility to figure out the truth of what they are hearing, I don't know how healthy it is to the public."

This, however, is not the "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary Clinton talked about. It might not be good journalism, but it's good business--having much more to do with maximizing profit than pushing a particular political point of view.

"I don't think that most station owners had any grand scheme to become right-wing voices," says Jon Coleman, president of Coleman, a national media-marketing research company based in Research Triangle Park. "They just responded to the market. It is fairly cheap to provide, which makes it more profitable. Conservatives who listen think they are getting objective points of view, but most agree with and believe what they are hearing. We have proved [through...