Chuck Harder
From RationalWiki
Chuck Harder is a talk radio host from Florida. His show "For the People" was popular during the 1990s and heard on many AM talk stations and shortwave. He never could make up his mind if he was liberal or conservative though. He tacked both ways and mostly tried staking out a position of radical centrist populism and producerism, while scheduling frequent guests from across the political spectrum. Ralph Nader and Pat Choate (Ross Perot's 1996 running mate) were guests seemingly at least 2 or 3 times a week, but he also gave airtime to some notorious wingnuts like Eustace Mullins, and UFO charlatans like Richard Hoagland. He was at his best when he took on consumer advocacy and labor and trade issues, and interesting issues like railroad and alternative energy advocacy, and at his worst when he let some of his wingnuttier guests have their say without seriously challenging them. In particular he gave far too much airtime to people airing conspiracy theories about the Clintons during the late 1990s, and to pseudolaw advocates.
His show is still on, but is a pathetic shadow of its former self It's only on a few stations now, falling victim to media consolidation, a botched partnership with the United Auto Workers trying to start a new radio network (leading to Harder being forced out and lawsuits and such), and stations dropping shows like his in favor of a strictly conservative talk radio format. The real problem, though, is that he seems to have stopped trying - he schedules guests without bothering to learn what they are about before the show, and then talks at cross-purposes with them, no longer takes live calls, and his website looks like it hasn't been updated since 1998.
Although not strictly a conservative, the rise of his show during the 1990s is often seen as part of the broader milieu in which conservative talk radio arose. Nation magazine was particularly critical, slamming him in a 1995 article by Marc Cooper, "The Paranoid Style", which began by praising Harder's support for labor unions and his criticism of Newt Gingrich but then detailed his detours into wingnuttiness.[1]
