Hallelujah: Parshall Departing Local Radio

by bert

There is some good news about our local radio air-quality that Tim Cuprisin, who covers such changes in his Journal Sentinel column, seems to have missed.

I was waking up today to Janet Parshall’s nationally syndicated show that is carried locally by the Christian station WRRD-540 AM. Parshall is from Wisconsin, a graduate of Carroll College in Waukesha and appointed by Tommy Thompson to advisory councils. Like “Christian” rock music, her show on “Christian” politics is not well known outside the listeners of such stations. And, like "Christian" "music", her show is not compelling enough to be able to survive a wide-open market.

This morning, for as long as I chose to take it, Parshall performed her typical trick. She anoints rhetorical tricks that promote far-right political stances as somehow an obviously Christian way of thinking.

We’ve all heard by now about the twin bombings in Baghdad last weekend. A lot in Iraq these days is ignored, but this tragedy cut through the willful ignorance that news editors and most other Americans have strapped to our eyes regarding Iraq, and not because the death toll was way up there around 100. That’s not enough to do it anymore. What did it was the reports that the humans carrying the bombs past the duped guards were mentally retarded women.

Parshall’s take on this –- deliberately using sneaky and exploitative logical fallacies that insults one’s intelligence -- was that these tragedies tell us something about Democratic politicians.

"I don’t know your definiton of evil, but if that isn’t it then evil doesn’t exist. And yet there are some out on the campaign trail right now even as we speak who have a postmodernist idea that we don’t have good and evil in the world. Everything is just various degress of gray."

She leaves to listeners the job of populating that category. But she a little later shepherds any who may have gone astray to the intended destination. Barack Obama, she falsely tells us, wants to negotiate with terrorists. So she implies that the senator would love to sit down and negotiate with the people who used these disabled women to kill 100 other innocent people.

This line of "thinking" is typical. She has said in the past that victims of child molesters should look to Bill Clinton and his sex acts for the real cause of their suffering.

Parshall reminds me of Dana Carvey’s church lady character on Saturday Night Live. Up tight, humorless, narrow-minded, phony, and wrapped in righteousness.

The good news that I mentioned at the beginning is that Parshall’s show is leaving 540 AM after this week. As Cuprisin has covered (that’s where I learned it), another company is buying this Salem Communications station (that's the company that fired employees who criticized the build up to the Iraq war) and replacing the Christian format with sports talk.

Good riddance, because even more so than Dana Carvey, Parshall gives Christians a bad name.