Last night driving home I heard a ridiculous card reader - "Danielle" - on a local radio station (RadioTon. Her "readings" were obviously cold reads (she never gave any verifiable new information), but the moderator Joern Bastian and callers took her seriously. Apparently, this show is now going to be on every Sunday. As long as stuff like that gets air time and Bild continues to be the top-selling newspaper, Germans will have little reason to suspect they are more enlightened than
Americans.

It reminded me of another local radio station which routinely gives away enormous sums of money to people. They call a random number and if the person answers with the name of the radio station, "Hit radio anetenna 1" they get 50,000 Euros. They usually don't answer correctly and then the MC chats with them about how disappointed they are and what they would have done with the money.

Here's what I want to have happen:

Telephone rings. Someone answers:

Female voice: Schmidt, hallo?

Host: Guten morgen Frau Schmidt, this is HitRadio Antenna 1!

Female voice: Really? What?

Host: Yes, Frau Schmidt, this is Horst Schniedel, Hit Radio Antenna 1. That was the 50,000 Euro call.

Female voice: I don't understand.

Host: If you had answered the phone, "Hit Radio Antenne 1" you would have won 50,000 Euros!

Female voice: Why that? Why would anyone answer their phone that way?

Host: To win 50,000 Euros! Are you disappointed?

Female voice: I still don't get it. Why would someone win so much money just for answering the phone?

Host: It is our way of thanking our listeners for their...

Female voice: Oh, it's a shallow advertizing gimmick. You give away huge sums of ....

Host: You could have won thousands of Euros...

Female voice: No I couldn't have. I never answer the phone that way.

Host: But if you had, you could have...

Female voice: You don't understand. I don't listen to radio stations that waste my time and vast amounts of financial resources on stupid games.

Host: Well, our listeners are waiting to see who will win the...

Female voice: I simply can't imagine having so much money at my disposal and wasting it on such a stupid gimmick. Don't you have better things to spend your money on?

Host: It's part of the fun, Frau Schmidt. We're offering our listeners a once-in-a-lifetime...

Female voice: How about investing in young music talent if your show is about music? How about donating to a charity that the listeners vote on if your show is about giving away lots of money? How about...

Host: Danke, Frau Schmidt! Remember, listeners, every hour, 50,000 Euros for a random number! Keep your radios tuned to Hit Radio...

Female voice: That's the stupidist waste of money I've ever heard of...

CLICK

I must admit I would probably be too flustered and disappointed to react this way, but it is what they deserve. Considering these kinds of shows and what has been done with my words in my last three radio interviews, I am beginning to think that radio is no longer so much better than television than it once was, not even here in Germany, where we don't have the airwaves full of right-wing "talk."

It is, in a way, some indirect evidence of how conservative the media is, especially the private, for-profit media. Instead of talking about things that matter, they distract people with games. It is like the circus in ancient Rome and the lottery in 1984. It is not just entertainment, but entertainment that is politically innocuous while involving the public more directly - with the chance of life-changing participation - than simply showing some plot unfold.