Is News/Talk the “Tyranny of the Majority?”

There’s an interesting post on BuffaloNews.com today by Jeff Simon.  I think his hyperbole is tongue-in-cheek, but he has some intriguing thoughts.  Simon bemoans the whittling away of jazz and blues on Buffalo’s stations:

…no one ever understood the inherent flaw in American democracy better than Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 “Democracy in America” tells you most of what you need to know about why excellence always has been a media battleground and always will be.

What de Tocqueville summarized in one phrase characterizes the current perils of WBFO-FM in an age of WNED ownership: “The Tyranny of the Majority.”

Simon goes on to  cite Greg Sandow’s piece which we discussed last week.

With brute realism, Sandow points out the reason: “The Sacramento station offers these numbers based on hour-by-hour surveys of what people listen to. 400,000 people listen to its news broadcasts each week and 130,000 listen to classical music.”

Hence news in place of classical music. And there you have it—de Tocqueville’s ineradicable American flaw writ large.

We’ve been appalled for the past two years over the “Tyranny of the Minority” in Congress, but maybe the tyranny of the majority is equally bad.  I’ve always maintained that there’s room for classical music on the airwaves.  We don’t need to homogenize all of our listening.  Jeff Simon agrees with me.  A rich cultural melting pot is uniquely American, and a rich cultural mix on the airwaves broadens and deepens us and makes us better.  Jeff writes:

Please understand: I love NPR. I couldn’t respect it more…

But, incredibly in the 21st century, news programming at NPR stations is becoming a national majority tyranny of choice. I can’t tell you how painful it is to me that my own profession can now be seen all over public radio as a clear and present danger to all minority music programming, whether jazz or classical or blues…

A bully is a bully is a bully, even armed with a reporter’s notebook, a ballpoint and the noblest possible intentions.

It seems to me that the only antidote for America’s Tyranny of the Majority is a majority that understands it has no business existing at all without the passionate devotion to minorities that made the Bill of Rights the miracle of civilization that it is.

Emphasis mine.  Thanks, Jeff Simon.