As a hearing impaired person, I don't listen to the radio. I can't hear it. Not the music, not the talk shows, certainly not the advertising.
That means I do not know who the advertisers are on any given radio station or program. All I have to go by is hearsay. Second hand information. Second hand outrage.
Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Dave Ramsey, Bill O'Reilly - I only know their names and antics in passing conversations, other people's comments, and occasionally a rant or ten. As far as I can tell, none of the talk radio shows have full written transcripts of the shows - there's no closed captioning for radio! There are some portions of transcripts here and there, but for the most part, if I want to know what the radio talk show people are saying, and the callers, well, I have to rely on rumors and interpretations, filtered through people who have their own opinions and agendas. I don't get the raw source material.
Because of this removal from the immediacy of it all and the filtering of what I do get, I can't seem to get as outraged as quickly as other people. When I can't get the raw material, I can't be sure I should be outraged. It could be a misinterpretation, it could be someone twisting the words for their own purpose.
It can take me days to decide if a topic that appears on talk radio is something I should even bother with because most of the time, it's a tempest in a teacup, all drunk to the dregs and gone before I even know about it.
There's no sense getting outraged when the matter has already been dealt with.
Because I am always coming in to things late, after the worst of the upset has past, after everyone else has already decided what to do and half the time after those steps are already being implemented, often all I can do is say, "Yeah, OK, so sure, I support it. Whatever." And then go on about my business.
Hearing issues are not normally a big deal. It's a unique kind of handicap in that for much of the time, it's not a handicap at all and I often think it's an improvement. After all, I don't have to deal with hearing screaming babies and toddlers, microphone feedback, the high pitched squeals and whistles that have others cringing. I don't have the ringing of doorbells and telephones to distract me. I never get earworms.
On the other hand, I don't hear back-up beeps from SUVs and trucks (I was hit twice before I got Itzl - and both times they blamed me instead of themselves -they relied too heavily on the beeps alerting people to move out of the way and didn't look to see if the way actually was clear), so clearly, being hearing impaired is dangerous far more than it's an inconvenience.
I also don't understand a lot of the YouTube videos because when they are all talk and virtually no action, there are no reference points for me to understand what's happening. The same thing for talk radio - I can't see what's being said.
So, when something truly important happens in talk radio, I depend completely and utterly on the hearing to relay the information as factually as possible - and that doesn't happen near as often as I'd like. I have to painstakingly piece everything together - dissect a rant here, scroll through comments there, read a dozen newspaper articles and blog posts to try to ferret out exactly what was said and how and why. This is made more difficult by the lack of any sort of closed captioning option or full transcripts of the talk radio shows.
By the time I piece everything together, it's mostly all over.
Even as disjointed as it all is, I deeply, truly appreciate all you hearing people posting and commenting about it because without that and as frustrating as it can be to sift through all this data to find the nuggets of facts buried among all the opinions, back in the pre-internet days, I might never have known any of this at all.
So, late as I may be to things, I am here because all y'all cared enough to write about all kinds of issues, important or not. Instead of being totally behind the times, I get to be a part of the current of events - on the outside in the whirling eddies at times, but at least still sort of timely.