There’s thrill in a fight

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/10/2023 (819 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“How do you like them apples?” It’s the title of a video that’s gone viral on social media.

It has Pierre Poilievre in an apple orchard in B.C. He is being interviewed by a small town reporter. The opposition leader is challenging the questions with biting confrontation, turning the reporter into the guy who didn’t get the memo that he was bringing a notebook to a knife fight.

While politics has become more confrontational over the years, the same cannot be said for talk radio.

When I first walked on that stage in 1990, many hosts were highly opinionated.

They enjoyed confronting people they shared the air with. My preference for a good throwdown would be a person with influence, a cabinet minister or even someone running for prime minister. I enjoyed a good go with people in high places.

But at times I did a Poilievre and disarmed the chumps in low places. I was taught by one of my mentors that the public is OK with taking down someone with power, but punching below my weight was poor form.

Nearly two decades ago, some Canadian talk radio executives decided the era of talk radio confrontation was over. They envied the growth of CBC Radio, where rhetorical pugilism wasn’t on the menu. Executives in the private sector believed they could get a piece of the CBC radio audience with hosts who made nice with everyone who came on board.

The idea was for professionals like me to be doing more facilitating — less instigating. My enthusiasm for the shifting wind was nonexistent. I’d rather have a goulash of hemlock than roll over like a dog to pols who loved to lie their faces off, all the while with a no-challenge guarantee.

With no great fondness, I recall one executive directing me to stop sharing my opinions on the air.

The market research, I was told, indicated that my opinionated style had great appeal to my audience, but not for listeners who favoured the CBC. I told the manager that I learned how to communicate in my dad’s tailor shop. He altered and dry-cleaned clothes and taught me to how to make our customers happy.

My father never asked me to waste time on customers who didn’t want their clothes altered or cleaned. The radio suit told me that if I stopped offering opinions, we would have a clean shot at getting the CBC audience.

What about the people I had been dancing with for 20 years? He told me they would stay loyal because for them, I was a habit and they would not tune out a much less confrontational, much more deferential version of Charles Adler.

The conversation was a career turning point.

I tried to be the good soldier. But in doing so, my excitement for the craft was cratering. For so many years, work was anything but laborious. My passion for the job made me forget it was a job. Impersonating Johnny Nice Guy and parking my genuine opinions far from a live microphone became the most boring experiment this talker had ever experienced.

Unfortunately, it didn’t even matter if the person in the executive suite was replaced. The new one preached the exact same sermon.

I recall one of them saying “The days of you being the loudest voice on the radio are in the rear-view mirror. I want Charles Adler to be interested — not interesting.” So the mandate from on high was to use whatever creative juices I still had to make the guest appear to be something they generally weren’t — stimulating.

This column has given me the best offer a communicator could ever have, the licence to be brutally honest with the reader. My talk radio career turned into an exercise where I felt my job was to fake excitement about dullards.

I was asked to have lively conversations with people who frequently had no sense of humour, or freshness or any familiarity with the art of conversation. As far as I was concerned, the talk radio industry wanted me to become an intellectually lazy phoney, the kind of synthetic sloth I used to mock without mercy.

So when I watched the video of Pierre Poilievre in the orchard, chewing on the reputation of a reporter, I knew at my core, that this was going to excite conservatives imagining a new prime minister with big shiny boots, squashing people they think of as rotten apples.

» Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. This column previously appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.