Meet Alex Jones, the Talk Radio Host Behind Charlie Sheen's Crazy Rants

[salvorhardin]

A pretty good profile of Alex Jones in Rolling Stone, although I've got to wonder if Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe, Jason Bermas and Matthew Brown are angry at Jones repeatedly being given sole production credit for Loose Change.

It's just past 9 a.m. when Alex Jones pulls his Dodge Charger into a desolate parking lot in Austin. From the outside, the squat, single-story office complex that Jones calls his "command center" resembles a moon base surrounded by fields of dying grass. But inside, blinking banks of high-tech recording gear fill the studio where he broadcasts The Alex Jones Show, a daily talk show that airs on 63 stations nationwide. Jones draws a bigger audience online than Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck combined — and his conspiracy-laced rants make the two hosts sound like tea-sipping NPR hosts on Zoloft.

Full article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/talk-radios-alex-jones-the-most-paranoid-man-in-america-20110302

[apocalypsehow]

1. "Jones landed his own show on KJFK" - KJFK? Sometimes the punchlines just write themselves...

That aside, this is a pretty good article that highlights just how dangerous - in the literal, physical sense - so many in the Conspiracy Theory "research community" truly are. And they have Alex Jones all but screaming "OPEN FIRE!!!" over his microphone at them so many hours a day.

Notice, for instance, how he refuses to back down from the implicit approval of violence as a tactic against the perceived institutions of the "New World Order":

"Some unstable people are drawn to the bright flame of enlightenment that is so-called 'conspiracy culture,'" Jones says. "Some trees are going to become uprooted in a storm like this. But we can't stop telling the truth for fear of what telling the truth is going to do. If we do, then human life as we know it is over and we're just Prozac-head automatons."

When I press Jones on how he would respond to a violent attack on one of his boogeymen, the Council on Foreign Relations, he once again implies they would have it coming. "I strongly believe in nonviolence and have protested the Council on Foreign Relations with a bullhorn because it's the most effective thing to do," he says. "But if someone attacks the globalists at the CFR, it will be a manifestation of all the evil they've been part of — the corporate neocolonialism, the bombings of villages." Evil, as he sees it, begets evil. "I don't want anybody to attack the CFR," he insists. "But it's up there in the hierarchy. We'll all be judged."

Truly a morally reprehensible and disgusting sentiment to express - a tacit blank check to the Jared Loughner's of the world to act on their paranoid impulses. I can't begin to express the level of contempt I feel for such a toxic personality. Truly disgusting.

[salvorhardin]

2. How do you think Jones compares to Father Coughlin?

More or less dangerous?
http://www.archive.org/details/Father_Coughlin

One thing I was surprised to learn is that Jones has a bigger audience than Limbaugh and Beck combined. That is a powerful media presence! I wonder how accurate it is.

[apocalypsehow]

3. Well, IMO most conspiracy theory thought is a product of various forms of mental illness, whereas

Coughlin was a straight-forward fascist sympathizer. He constructed the vast majority of his conspiracy theories through the lens of anti-semitism, which is a rather narrower focus than most of the dreary rubbish peddled by Jones & his ilk.

I mean, Coughlin peddled conspiracy theories, sure, but behind every one - all fictions - he chose to blame "The Jews" for being the perpetrator of them. As an (obviously) practicing Christian, he did not see the existence of these supposed conspiracies as a religious affair, but, rather, an ideological one.

Modern conspiracy theory, however, is a religion unto itself. A quasi-secular one, to be sure, but a religion nevertheless, complete with gods & devils and back-handed betrayals and unjust murder-most-foul committed routinely by shadowy, nearly omnipotent forces at war with humanity in a cosmic struggle between good & evil.

I encourage you to try this experiment:

Get yourself a pen and a pad of paper. Tune into any of the TV-preacher shows, like the kind put on by the "Trinity Broadcasting Network" based out of California. Catch John Hagee or Rod Parsley's show for a really good demonstration of the effect I am about to describe.

Once tuned in, turn your back to the TV and listen to the sermon being delivered.

Every time you hear the words "God," "Jesus," "Messiah," "Redeemer" or "Christ," write down "JFK," "John F. Kennedy," or "President Kennedy."

Every time you hear the words "Crucifixion," "Crucified," or "Cross," write down "assassinated."

Every time you hear the words "Pilate" (or "Pontius Pilate") or "Romans" write down the words "Military Industrial Complex" or "New World Order."

Every time you hear the word "Judas" (or "Judas Iscariot") write down the words "LBJ," "Lyndon Johnson," "Secret Service," "military officers," "Dallas Police," or "The Warren Commission."

Every time you hear the word "sinners" write down the word "Southerners," "John Birch Society," or "Cuban Nationals."

Every time you hear the words "Devil" or "Satan" or "demonic" write down the words "J. Edgar Hoover," "Bush," "FBI," "CIA," "Dulles," "Mafia," "Clay Shaw," or "Guy Banister."

Every time you hear the word "Calvary" write down the words "Dealey Plaza" or "Dallas."

Every time you hear the words "Prophet" or "Apostle Paul" write down the words "Jim Garrison."

Every time you hear the words "Satan's/Lucifer's/The Devil's lies" write down the words "official conspiracy theory" or "the government report."

And finally, last but not least, every time you hear the words "saved" or "redeemed" write down the words "found the smoking gun" or "began thinking for myself."

I seriously urge one & all to invest at least thirty minutes of their time conducting this experiment listening to the televangelists, and then take the tally of substitution-of-terms I've recommended above and compare it against the type of posts/rhetoric one runs across in just about any conspiracy theory discussion board or thread.

I believe any that do will find the comparison of terms quite striking. And revealing.

[greyl]

10. Great, enlightening post. nt

[apocalypsehow]

12. Thanks for saying so - I appreciate it.

:thumbsup:

[mrarundale]

11. Straw man argument

Not all conspiracy theorists, particularly 911 official story conspiracy theorists, do not do those things...although they do assign extraordinary capabilities to individuals with about 40 different Islamic sounding names.

[OnTheOtherHand]

4. reread what Rolling Stone said about the audience size

But inside, blinking banks of high-tech recording gear fill the studio where he broadcasts The Alex Jones Show, a daily talk show that airs on 63 stations nationwide. Jones draws a bigger audience online than Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck combined....

According to the listing at RushLimbaugh.com, Limbaugh is on over 600 stations.

I think you got fooled by a little Rolling Stone bait-and-switch -- with plausible deniability as to intent, of course.

I would be very interested to know how many people listen to Alex Jones.

[salvorhardin]

5. I was skeptical too. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

The key part is "bigger audience online". How do they know? Stats provided by Alex Jones?

But even Limbaugh's audience size is debatable. Various numbers have been floated ranging from 14 million to 50 million. Yet Limbaugh's own radio network has said that it:

...estimated last year <2008> that 3.59 million people were in Limbaugh's audience during an average quarter-hour of his program, based on a review of Arbitron's piecemeal data about hundreds of stations.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/06/AR2009030603435.html

Well, if you go by quarter-hour ratings then I could be counted as a Limbaugh listener as I sometimes tune into WOWO to catch the weather or something at the top of the hour. While I think it's unfair to require someone listen to all three hours of Limbaugh's show to count them as a listener (especially since many markets only carry part of Limbaugh's show), I also think using quarter-hour ratings is probably over-counting Limbaugh's listeners.

Then you've got to consider whether Arbitron's ratings are accurate at all. That's a highly charged topic in the radio world right now. Many people think that Arbitron is hugely inaccurate in small markets and their newish Portable People Meter technology is often thought to incorrectly identify what station is tuned to. Indeed, the PPMs sometimes even pick up on the radio signals in cars next to the device, misreporting that a person is listening to a particular station when they're not even listening to the radio at all.

I can't find any stats for Glenn Beck's overall potential radio audience size or actual listener ratings but I have to believe it's just a fraction of Limbaugh's audience.

So even though I'm skeptical that Jones has more listeners (counting online and radio listeners) than Limbaugh and Beck, if you count Jones' online listeners, I do think it's possible.

[OnTheOtherHand]

6. my point was just...

that you seem to have attributed a claim to the article (that Jones has "a bigger audience than Limbaugh and Beck combined") that the article doesn't actually make, unless it comes later on. And I think the article positively invites that confusion. It may just have been a typo on your part. But Rolling Stone had a lot of time to think about what that first graf should say.

Yeah, I really have no basis for an opinion on how large Jones's online audience is. I'm cynical enough to think that if there were any good reason to think that it rivaled Limbaugh's and Beck's total audiences, Rolling Stone would have reported that instead. But that ducks the question.

Do most online listeners listen to the show via infowars.com? Alexa.com shows its "daily reach" as generally around 0.07% of global internet users. That's pretty big. How big? Not sure, but it's somewhat larger than the reach for dailykos.com (around 0.046% over the last three months), which according to sitemeter.com averages something like half a million "site visits" per day. (rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com each averages around 0.02%.) So I would guess that infowars.com gets something shy of a million site visits per day. But there are obvious reasons on both sides why that isn't a trustworthy estimate of how many people listen to the Alex Jones Show online. Other folks may have some ideas about how to carry forward the analysis.

[salvorhardin]

7. Well, late at night, sloppy typing

Online stats are always slippery things. Probably the best way to calculate Jones' audience would be to use daily unique IP addresses from his streaming provider but I doubt Jones would ever release that.

[jakeXT]

8. Glenn Beck's Shtick? Alex Jones Got There First (Part 2 Rollingstone)

'He rips me off and spins the information, often injecting lies into the truth,' says Jones
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/glenn-becks-shtick-alex-jones-got-there-first-20110304

[salvorhardin]

9. Thanks! eom.