NONFICTION - March 31, 1996

HOT AIR: All Talk All the Time: An Inside Look at the Performers and the Pundits by Howard Kurtz (Times Books: $25; 407 pp.) There seems to be a clear trajectory for radio talk show hosts. They begin with some sense of mission, of void-filling: Oprah Winfrey gives credence to the concerns of intelligent American homemakers, Larry King wanted to reveal the people behind the events, Ted Koppel forced interviewees to answer tough questions, Phil Donahue first legitimized the concerns of the common man, Howard Stern voiced the pure blithering opinion of the common man, and Rush Limbaugh offered an alternative to the liberal media. Without fail, however, they all end up drowning in their own rhetoric. None will enjoy the lifelong career and credibility of Walter Cronkite, for example. They cease to be rebels against their chosen tyranny the more financially successful they become and the more contacts they have in Washington and in big business. And when hypocrisy marries rhetoric, they, in the inevitable way of things, become just like the machines and institutions that their audiences were running from. Howard Kurtz, media reporter for the Washington Post, captures this truth in each of their careers, and although he starts with the premise that their rise to popularity (if not to power) is “bad for journalism” and “bad for the country,” he ends up, the way most people do after listening to Stern, tired and more than a little bored of his subject. “As for me,” he writes in his very last sentence, “I’m all talked out.”