Did you know the Ku Klux Klan are actively recruiting in Ireland? They're actually targeting 16-year-olds. They're using the Internet, seemingly.
Or so I heard the other night on the Chris Barry Show (98FM, Monday to Thursday), where the host repeatedly made these assertions. Personally I reckon the "story", basis of a hour's phone-in chat, is a load of rubbish - and toxic rubbish to boot.
Here is the tale as Chris told it. A worried mother discovered her son's surfing of the World Wide Web included a KKK site; she passed the word to Chris, the way you do. So Chris and his ample research team visited the website, found a telephone number (a US number presumably), rang it and got a barmy, lengthy answering machine message from the South Alabama White Knights etc. The complete irrelevance of the recorded KKK rant, which concerned the way crack-cocaine is corrupting the white youth of the "Gulf Coast" - principally by getting white girls addicted and involved with "nigger boyfriends" - didn't stop Chris from playing it twice.
From there, he made the claim, without presenting any evidence, that the KKK is recruiting in Britain.
Finally, it only took the passage of a few more minutes for him to conclude "we know they're recruiting here". Perhaps more evidence had intervened, evidence he didn't choose to share with listeners; perhaps not.
This was, essentially, pornography. The alleged topic was: aren't we concerned that children are being targeted like this?; the real attraction was the titilation of forbidden language, first from the KKK tape, then from "Barry", a comic-book racist who telephoned (spontaneously?) and acted as the phone-in's straw man, throwing around the "N" word for most of an hour and talking about the violence he would like to inflict on refugees.
Sure, Chris and all the other callers opposed him, but their contributions mostly boiled down to: "That fella is the most ignorant, disgusting scumbag I've ever heard."
Since these are the same terms with which other callers, earlier in the programme condemned a young man who wasn't paying rent to his mother, racism was hardly shot down by unique force of argument.
No, the programme's special achievements were as follows: (1) broadcasting arguments in favour of racist assaults; (2) planting the idea of organised racism, the Klan in Ireland, in the minds of some vulnerable listeners. I suppose when the KKK graffiti starts appearing in Dublin, Chris will do a hard-hitting expose.
The black-and-white arguments favoured by Chris Barry and his FM104 successor, Adrian Kennedy, give dialectics a bad name. Far from teasing out and testing each other's positions, their phone-in antagonists are most likely to resort to personal invective; "scumbag" and "slapper" are the connoisseur's terms of choice, but it can get nastier - as when a caller who has a black boyfriend was told "that's 'coz you're too ugly to get a white fella". The often-heard comparison to pub arguments is a gross insult to alcohol. Face-to-face confrontations may often degenerate into incoherence, but very rarely do they involve such witless hostility. And that's the attraction - after all, why would people tune in to the same rows they could hear in the local? The naked aggression and excessive rhetoric of the phone-ins can, undeniably, make exciting, what's-gonna-happen-next radio.
In fact, a little of this sort of thing wouldn't go astray on RTE. While it's been suggested that Gerry Ryan has moved downmarket in the direction of the phone-ins with the "put your ass on the line" ad campaign, I reckon Joe Duffy's summer marshalling of Liveline is a more relevant comparison; with Duffy moderating, the programme seemed less about "a sympathetic ear" and more about a good argument, which was all to the good (this comparison, by the way, is no reflection on Duffy's journalistic standards).
Duffy shares something else with Chris Barry, and that's the evident desire to draw inspiration from Gay Byrne.
Having got used to Kennedy's fairly no-nonsense style during Barry's absence from the airwaves, I was shocked, when Barry returned last week, at his audible mugging - all "Ah now, Missus" and stage Dub accent. Barry's approach, as it can be gauged from the first week, also seems slightly more Gaybo-harmless than Kennedy's, as if he is trying to attract listeners who think the FM104 Phone Show has gone a bit far.
Thus on Barry's first night, Kennedy was giving away lots of money and asking callers to talk about the strange places they've had sex; meanwhile Barry wanted to hear about the embarrassing situations your kids have put you in.
As both these topics suggest, the phone-in programmes' approach is not all about abuse and confrontation; the hosts and producers of these shows are sensible, and they realise that a whole night of name-calling would be an exhausting turn-off, that these things need a rhythm, an ebb and flow, if they are to work. The listening figures assure us they do work, having built a late-night audience that scarcely existed a few years ago. And it's hard to argue with that.