Art Bell’s Open Forum: Conspiracy Talk on Coast to Coast AM and its Legacy in the Internet Age

Abstract

This article examines the late-night call-in talk radio show Coast to Coast AM and its creator and host, Art Bell. One of the most popular radio shows in America at the turn of the 21^st century, the show dealt with pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and the paranormal. From its policy against screening callers to its ‘anything goes’ theme, the show anticipated several consequential characteristics of the Internet. This paper uses Bell’s comments about his show as well as analysis of several episodes from the 1990s to examine Bell’s strategy as host and the larger cultural and historic significance of the show, particularly as it relates to conspiracy culture that has since proliferated on the Internet. The article argues that Bell played the role of a simultaneously open-minded yet sceptical host, and saw himself as curating a forum for free expression and creating entertainment. Bell, who died in 2018, failed to consider, much less appreciate, the consequences of his approach. The article concludes by suggesting how the show is an example of contemporary Gnosticism in presenting a worldview that assumes reality hides many hidden truths that only a few can ever access.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Art Bell, The Art of Talk, ed. Jennifer L. Osborn (New Orleans, LA: Paper Chase Press, 1998), 178.

2 Ibid., 146.

3 Lee Speigel, ‘Paranormal Radio Host Art Bell Mysteriously Disappears From SiriusXM’, Huffington Post, 4 November 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/art-bell-resigns-from-sirius-xm-radio_n_4215776.

4 Dark Network Digital survived into the COVID era when an ownership dispute sent the network into turmoil. Part of the dispute involved the rights to Bell’s final Midnight in the Desert shows. Tom Nobile, ‘It’s no conspiracy. Legacy of late-night radio legend Art Bell is at stake in NJ lawsuit’, NorthJersey.com, 6 May 2021, https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2021/05/06/art-bell-midnight-in-the-desert-dark-matter-archives-conspiracy-radio-nj-lawsuit/7217471002.

5 Delfin Vigil, ‘Conspiracy Theories Propel AM Radio Show into Top 10,’ San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 2006, https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Conspiracy-theories-propel-AM-radio-show-into-Top-2484135.php.

6 For example, weekend host John B. Wells was fired in 2014 after two years on the program because producers felt he was too political. Wells has since gone on to be a prominent voice on the conspiracy fringes of the far-right.

7 Sonia M. Livingstone and Peter K. Lunt, Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate (London: Routledge, 2008); Ian Hutchby, ‘“Witnessing”: The Use of First-Hand Knowledge in Legitimating Lay Opinions on Talk Radio’, Discourse Studies 3, no. 4 (2001): 481–97.

8 Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley, ‘Identity, Categorization and Sequential Organization: The Sequential and Categorical Flow of Identity in a Radio Phone-In’, Discourse & Society 13, no. 5 (2002): 579–602.

9 Jagon P. Chichon, ‘(Mis) Leading Britain’s Conversation: The Cultivation of Consent on the Nigel Farage Radio Phone-In Show’, Discourse & Communication 14, no. 1 (2020): 19.

10 Selected episodes of Coast to Coast from Art Bell’s time as host are available at the ‘Art Bell Vault’ on coasttocoastam.com. Many other unofficial sources of old episode recordings can be found across the Internet. In the pre-podcast era, the show used to sell cassette recordings of episodes.

11 Mike Johnston, ‘Getting to the Bottom of Mel’s Hole’, Daily Record (Ellensburg, WA), 31 March 2012, https://www.dailyrecordnews.com/news/getting-to-the-bottom-of-mel-s-hole/article_d72b6a68-7ac2-11e1-b3ce-001a4bcf887a.html.

12 Ibid.

13 Bell, The Art of Talk, 130–2.

14 Ibid., 178

15 Sally Mcgrane and Joe Pugliese, ‘Voice of the Unexplained,’ Wired 17, no. 5 (May 2009): 28.

16 Bell, The Art of Talk, 179.

17 Ibid., 161.

18 Ibid., 13. Writing the introduction, Alan Corbreth, the Chancellor Broadcasting executive who signed Bell’s first syndication agreement, describes the scene, ‘The real magic of Art's show begins when Art opens the telephone lines. He has created the mood already: the lights are dim, the staff is gone and Art is totally alone with the caller. You can feel the darkness and the conversation alone becomes the light. Art and the caller. One on one.’

19 Michael C. Keith, Sounds in the Dark: All-Night Radio in American Life (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 2001), 38.

20 Jack Dickey, ‘Art Bell, Radio’s Most Popular Weirdo, Returns’, Time, 16 September 2013, https://entertainment.time.com/2013/09/16/art-bell-radios-most-popular-weirdo-returns.

21 Ray LaFontaine, ‘Talk Radio’s Comet Caper’, Washington Post, 23 February 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1997/02/23/talk-radios-comet-caper/0cd6bb47-04eb-40cb-ba1a-044941f917c3.

22 Leon Jaroff and James Willwerth, ‘The Man Who Spread the Myth,’ Time 149, no. 15 (14 April 1997): 46.

23 Ibid.

24 Keith, Sounds in the Dark, 174.

25 Miles Romney, ‘The Voice in the Night Unheard by Scholars: Herb Jepko and the Genesis of National Talk Radio’, Journal of Radio & Audio Media 21, no. 2 (2014): 272–89.

26 Ibid., 279.

27 Marc Fisher, Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation (New York: Random House Publishing, 2007), 116.

28 Donald Bain, Long John Nebel (New York: MacMillan, 1974): xii.

29 Joshua Hammer, ‘Strange Signals From Area 51,’ Newsweek, 13 July 1998, 62.

30 Ibid.

31 For a time in the late nineties, Bell hosted the show for six hours (1:00-7:00 am eastern/10:00 pm-4:00 am west coast).

32 Mcgrane and Pugliese, ‘Voice of the Unexplained’, 28.

33 FCC, ‘Why AM Stations Must Reduce Power, Change Operations, or Cease Broadcasting at Night,’ 11 December 2015, https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/am-stations-at-night.

34 Keith, Sounds in the Dark, 5.

35 Ibid., vii.

36 Alan M. Rubin and Mary M. Step, ‘Impact of Motivation, Attraction, and Parasocial Interaction on Talk Radio Listening,’ Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 44, no. 4 (fall 2000): 635–54.

37 Lindsey Williams, You Can Live: The Source Book of Natural Health Care (Portland, OR: Life and Health Productions, 1989).

38 Peter H. Duesberg, ‘Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality, Cancer Research 47 (1 March 1987): 1199–220; Michael Specter, ‘Panel Rebuts Biologist’s Claims on Cause of AIDS’, Washington Post, 10 April 1988, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/10/panel-rebuts-biologists-claims-on-cause-of-aids/42415cd1-5bcc-4408-912f-7d5de6b12993. A key figure in the panel that disproved Duesberg’s theory was Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the coordinator of AIDS research for the National Insitutes of Health. NPR compares the skepticism of the science on AIDS to the skepticism of the science on COVID in Ryan Benk, Noel King, Reena Advani, ‘Skepticism of Science in a Pandemic Isn’t New. It Helped Fuel the AIDS Crisis’, NPR, 23 May 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/23/996272737/skepticism-of-science-in-a-pandemic-isnt-new-it-helped-fuel-the-aids-crisis.

39 Rebecca Ward, ‘Mainstream Scientists Confront Unorthodox View of AIDS’, Nature 332 (14 April 1988): 574.

40 The study was presented as a paper at the 1993 AIDS Conference and then published as an article three years later: Keith R. Fowke et al., ‘Resistance to HIV-1 infection among persistently seronegative prostitutes in Nairobi, Kenya’, Lancet 348, iss. 9038 (16 November 1996): 1347–51. Note that Williams is not drawing directly from the 1993 conference paper, but rather from a summary of the conference.

41 Michael D. Lemonick, ‘The Killers All Around’, Time 144, No. 11 (12 September 1994): 62–9. The cover reads, ‘Revenge of the Killer Microbes: Are we losing the war against infectious diseases?’ The chart Williams references, which displays data from 1990, lists AIDS as the 8th deadliest infectious disease in the world at that time.

42 CDC, ‘History of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) Outbreaks’, 3 May 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/chronology.html. The West African Ebola outbreak of 2013-16 was the deadliest to date, with 11,310 deaths out of 28,616 cases. Two people treated for EVD in the United States died, the only two deaths from Ebola in the U.S. to date. More recently, the 2018-2020 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killed 2,280 people, the second most deaths ever.

43 Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 52. Contemporary scholarly investigation of Gnosticism traces back to Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

44 Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae, 59. Here Lasch-Quinn is analyzing Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (1968; reprint Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004). Voegelin argues the Gnostic pursuit has always involved a negation of science, though not in the same way religious faith has been accused of doing since the Enlightenment. Christianity accepts the world as God’s creation and sees humanity as the piece in need of remaking, a project that may only be fully attained after death. Gnostics see the world as inherently evil, and believe this evil can be surmounted through knowledge. Lasch-Quinn notes, however, that Gnosticism has bled into Christianity and other modern religions. To bring things full circle, the search for prophetic truths in the Bible has been a topic of interest on Coast to Coast.

45 Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae, 52.

46 Bonnie Bacarisse, ‘The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit’s Women-Hating “Red Pill”’, Daily Beast, 25 April 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-republican-lawmaker-who-secretly-created-reddits-women-hating-red-pill. In another example, Red Pill Expo is a live and recurring event that brings together speakers on a variety of topics, including theories about the dangers of vaccination and 5G radiation, the myth of global warming, and, more recently, COVID conspiracy theories. See Eric Dietrich, ‘Presenting at Red Pill Expo, Montana utility commissioner urges attendees to take their ideas mainstream’, Montana Free Press, 22 November 2019, https://montanafreepress.org/2019/11/22/presenting-at-red-pill-expo-montana-utility-commissioner-urges-attendees-to-take-their-ideas-mainstream.

47 James Crowley, ‘The Matrix” Creator Explains What the Red Pill Really Is and Mens Rights Activists Aren’t Going to Be Happy’, Newsweek, 7 August 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/matrix-creator-red-pill-trans-allegory-mens-rights-activists-1523669.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul A. Arras

Paul A. Arras is an Assistant Professor in the Communication and Media Studies Department at SUNY Cortland. He researches the history of U.S. media and popular culture, and he has previously written about nineties media history in The Lonely Nineties: Visions of Community in Contemporary U.S. Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).