Talk Radio UCLA study

In Talk Radio we saw Barry combatting callers who were generally conservative anti-Semites, misogynists etc. Generally when I think of talk radio though, I imagine the conservatives as hosts of the programs. I found a study from UCLA by Chona Noriega and Francisco Javier Iribarren, that looked at several talk radio shows hosted by conservatives in order to quantify the hate speech that derived from these programs. They broke down these programs and searched for four specific things in the rhetoric:

  1. Targeted statements
  2. Unsubstantiated claims
  3. Divisive language
  4. Indexical terms: meaning is dependent on context

What they found in the results was a pattern of targeting specific vulnerable groups, relying on three of the four categories: unsubstantiated claims, divisive language and indexical terms. These radio shows were found to be extremely reliant on unsubstantiated claims even though they claim to be news. So basically its concerning because these hosts spew a lot of nonsense at times that do not have any true basis of fact, and loyal listeners will mistake their diatribe for fact.

It’s interesting to look at this study in comparison to the movie because a lot of the time Barry was not necessarily giving facts, bending the truth in order to elicit the reactions he wanted from listeners.

Click to access WP01_Quantifying-Hate-Speech.pdf

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