Revealed: How Conservative Radio Creates an Echo Chamber of Hate

August 16, 2012  |  By itself, Pamela Geller's May 2010 appearance on the "Sean Hannity Show" was par for the right-wing talk-radio course. The conservative blogger was brought on to rail against the conservative raison d'outrage of the moment, what she habitually called the “Mega mosque on Ground Zero [3]” (SPOILERS: the whole building really wasn't a mosque, but that wasn't going to stop her) that was being planned in New York City around that time. But a recent study places the Geller-Hannity encounter in a bigger, more dangerous context that observers have noted for years.

The study, released last month by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, used Hannity's radio show and four programs – the "Rush Limbaugh Show," the "Glenn Beck Program," "Savage Nation" and the "John & Ken Show" -- as the focus of an investigation of the influence and confluence of specific interests in ultra-conservative radio programming. The results, as you might imagine, were not surprising.

“The findings reveal that the hosts promoted an insular discourse that focused on, for example, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and pro-Tea Party positions,” the study concluded. “This discourse found repetition and amplification through social media.”