FOR ART BELL, WHEREVER HE MAY BE
Art Bell is gone, which means finally he may finally find the answers he was looking for.
If you don’t know, Bell was the late-night talk radio host of Coast To Coast AM, in which he and his guests and callers explored UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, various supernatural and paranormal phenomena, and government cover-ups of all the above. Bell was X Files before X Files was cool.
When I worked at a news-talk radio station in the mid-90s, we ran the first couple of hours of his show before sign-off. And having grown up at a time when some of the big best sellers were written by Erich von Daniken, Charles Berlitz and Hal Lindsey - and where TV was running programs like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Project UFO - I had a soft spot for Bell’s subject matter. Granted I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I admit I'm fascinated with the theories themselves. And frankly, compared to the political shows we ran in the afternoon, Bell was by far the sanest person in our line-up.
The secret, I think, was that he was very open minded and willing to let callers talk about all kinds of weird things, but he also knew when to reign them in or push back when even their own internal logic started to unravel. He could generally tell when people really believed what they were saying and when they were making it up as they went along, and he wasn’t afraid to call them out on it - yet he did it in a calm and reasonable way. He didn’t yell at or insult anyone - at least not while I was listening. Maybe he did in later years, but from what I understand he had the same style from beginning to end.
Which isn’t to say that everything he said was true. But he could at least make it sound plausible, more often than not.
Of course, some people blame Bell for not only convincing people that conspiracy theories and UFOs are real, but laying the groundwork for people like Alex Jones and the alt-right. Personally I don’t think that’s accurate or fair. People believed in UFOs and govt conspiracy theories long before Bell picked up a microphone. He gave them a voice and a platform, but the internet would have done that eventually anyway.
And in any case, conspiracy-theory radio really has its roots in the rise of rabid conservative talk shows in the early 90s. If you want to pin Alex Jones and alt-right batshit fact-free outrage radio on anyone, pin it on Rush Limbaugh. He pretty much invented both the format and the business model.
By comparison, I think Bell was relatively harmless, both in terms of the subject matter and the way he handled it. Again, I only listened to him from the early 90s to 1996, so I don’t know what his latter-year broadcasts were like, but at least during that time, Bell wasn’t a loud angry demagogue out to exploit populist anger exclusively in favor of a specific political party. He was more like a radio version of Charles Fort, keen to explore the unknown and unexplained, and convinced that the world is weirder than we think and - to a coin a phrase - the truth is out there.
I want to believe,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1614986.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
If you don’t know, Bell was the late-night talk radio host of Coast To Coast AM, in which he and his guests and callers explored UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, various supernatural and paranormal phenomena, and government cover-ups of all the above. Bell was X Files before X Files was cool.
When I worked at a news-talk radio station in the mid-90s, we ran the first couple of hours of his show before sign-off. And having grown up at a time when some of the big best sellers were written by Erich von Daniken, Charles Berlitz and Hal Lindsey - and where TV was running programs like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Project UFO - I had a soft spot for Bell’s subject matter. Granted I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I admit I'm fascinated with the theories themselves. And frankly, compared to the political shows we ran in the afternoon, Bell was by far the sanest person in our line-up.
The secret, I think, was that he was very open minded and willing to let callers talk about all kinds of weird things, but he also knew when to reign them in or push back when even their own internal logic started to unravel. He could generally tell when people really believed what they were saying and when they were making it up as they went along, and he wasn’t afraid to call them out on it - yet he did it in a calm and reasonable way. He didn’t yell at or insult anyone - at least not while I was listening. Maybe he did in later years, but from what I understand he had the same style from beginning to end.
Which isn’t to say that everything he said was true. But he could at least make it sound plausible, more often than not.
Of course, some people blame Bell for not only convincing people that conspiracy theories and UFOs are real, but laying the groundwork for people like Alex Jones and the alt-right. Personally I don’t think that’s accurate or fair. People believed in UFOs and govt conspiracy theories long before Bell picked up a microphone. He gave them a voice and a platform, but the internet would have done that eventually anyway.
And in any case, conspiracy-theory radio really has its roots in the rise of rabid conservative talk shows in the early 90s. If you want to pin Alex Jones and alt-right batshit fact-free outrage radio on anyone, pin it on Rush Limbaugh. He pretty much invented both the format and the business model.
By comparison, I think Bell was relatively harmless, both in terms of the subject matter and the way he handled it. Again, I only listened to him from the early 90s to 1996, so I don’t know what his latter-year broadcasts were like, but at least during that time, Bell wasn’t a loud angry demagogue out to exploit populist anger exclusively in favor of a specific political party. He was more like a radio version of Charles Fort, keen to explore the unknown and unexplained, and convinced that the world is weirder than we think and - to a coin a phrase - the truth is out there.
I want to believe,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1614986.html. Please comment there using OpenID.