The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg is worried about right-wing talk radio or “viscous, untreated political sewage” as he gently describes it. There is, he says, no real counterpoint to “ the far right’s near-monopoly on political broadcasting nationwide,” except, er, NPR (which has an audience about the same size as Rush Limbaugh’s) but that, apparently, doesn’t count.

“NPR programs are news-feature broadcasts; they adhere to the practices of journalistic professionalism, including the aspirational ideal of objectivity. Their sensibility may fairly be said to be “liberal” in the sense that liberal education is liberal—that is, open-minded and urbane, with a preference for empirical inquiry over dogmatic conclusion-mongering—but what little overt political commentary they offer hovers around the moderate middle. NPR’s local talk-show hosts tend to be more overtly liberal, but they are always polite about it.”

This, of course, is a familiar refrain, but it doesn’t stand up to closer examination. Yes, conservative radio talk show hosts follow a strongly partisan line, but they don’t hold themselves out as doing anything else, The “open-minded and urbane” NPR, on the other hand, clothes its bias in a spurious objectivity, or, to borrow Hertzberg’s treacly phraseology, a pretense of “empirical enquiry over dogmatic conclusion-mongering.”

But if anyone is looking for some dogmatic conclusion-mongering, try this choice piece of Hertzberg:

“[R]ight-wing radio is niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive. It succeeds because a substantial segment of the right-wing rank and file enjoys listening, hour after hour, as smug, angry, disdainful middle-aged men spew raw contempt at reified enemies, named and unnamed. The radiocons seldom offer analysis or argument. To the chronically resentful, they offer the sadistic consolation of an endless sneer—at weaklings, victim-group whiners, cultural snobs…”

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…