Flashbacks of WNAK-AM

Growing up in a backward rural township in North-East Pennsylvania, among more backward parents, with few sources of news and information besides the TV and radio, my parents had on the radio station WNAK-AM, in Nanticoke, in Luzerne County, one of the old-coal-mining communities.

WNAK’s general manager, Bob Neilson, pretty much ran the station by himself, being the DJ and announcer. The station played the format of “easy listening,” the softest, blandest music on the market. The station has slots for polka music, barber-shop-quartet music, gospel, and “patriotic” music of the Yankee-Doodle kind.

But Neilson had his series of editorials, titled “Another Point Of View,” which was supposed to be a “balance” of “news you hear and read from other sources.” Neilson passed this off as an “alternative” to the “left-liberal slanted” commercial news media, a favorite theme and whine of the far-right of that time. Neilson harped on the danger of “socialism” in this country, and of the “Welfare State” (he assumed his audience knew that those terms meant, like a secret code) and hailed the genius of the “free enterprise system” and the “free market,” and he complained about regulatory agencies, such as OSHA and the EPA, interfering with (sarcasm alert) “corporations’ ability to bring forth prosperity for all” (and rewriting history to serve his propaganda purpose). He identified himself as an “individualist” as he always used the first-person-plural, like “We don’t need or want this,” presuming to speak for many millions of Americans.

Neilson showed great ignorance about the world and the country, sounding like a parody of a far-right radio talker. In talking about the movement for statehood for the District of Columbia, he said that Philadelphia, New York, and other cities didn’t have their own senators-comparing DC to cities that are a part of states.

Neilson, while railing against the Soviet Union, praised other despotic regimes that were our “allies” simply because they said their opponents-peasant organizers, trade unionists, intellectuals-as “communists,” and practice “free enterprise.” His favorite was Chile under the Pinochet regime; Neilson denied the terrible human-rights record of the regime-the beating, torture, and murder of the regime’s opponents-and said Chile was a “free nation” because of its privatization of state-owned industries, joining the ranks of other conservative “geniuses” like William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman.

On South Africa, Neilson would be sarcastic about it being “ruled by a white minority,” adding “so is the Soviet Union,” like he couldn’t see the big deal about the Apartheid system, and hinting at “discrimination” against white people, another favorite conservative whine.

Neilson is a true precursor to later radio maniacs like Bob Grant and Rush Limbaugh, but on a smaller scale, broadcasting in a primarily rural market, with few alternative media outlats. But the same message of willful ignorance, misinformation, and hate goes on.