Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
B (0:07)
This is ralph nader, and you're listening to radio powered by the people, kpfk, 90.7 fm los angeles, 98.7 fm, santa barbara, and across the globe at kpfk.org.
C (0:26)
This is John Nichols of the Nation
A (0:28)
magazine, and you're listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
D (0:32)
Stand up. You've been sitting way too long.
C (0:41)
Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio R. My name is Steve Scrovan, along with my co host, David Feldman. Hello, David.
B (0:48)
Hello.
E (0:49)
You hear that construction noise?
C (0:51)
Yeah.
E (0:52)
That's what I'm living with. It's very hard to read with noise. We live in a very noisy culture. But one of the ways to turn off the noise is to read.
C (1:03)
And that's the theme of our show today. But I also, before we even get into that, want to introduce our producer, Hannah Feldman. Hello, Hannah.
B (1:11)
Hello, Steve.
C (1:13)
And of course, the man of the hour, Ralph. What do we got going today, Ralph?
B (1:18)
Well, it's an experiment for our listeners. We're having six authors of nonfiction books, each one as compelling as the other one, and by comparison, illustrating the decline in actual reading in our society and compared to the way the media used to treat these books. Phil Donahue had a television audience of 10 million people. He would have authors like the ones you're going to hear about on his show. The book would become a best seller. Editorials would be written about it. Citizens would mobilize around it. I remember the Larry King radio Show. It started at midnight in several hundred stations around the country out of suburban Virginia. I went on that show once with our evaluation of the three presidential candidates in 1980. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Congressman Anderson from Illinois. 20,000 copies were ordered. 20,000 copies. That show has no parallel today. There is no parallel to the Phil Donahue show today. They're gone. So when we have indicators of how our democratic society declines, this is one of them, listeners, and we've got to be alert to it. And we've got to reconstitute the process of a deliberate democracy, which means readers think, thinkers read, and then they move to achieve a better society with more justice and more freedom and more opportunity. So here we go.
