Last July, I blogged about Coast to Coast AM disc jockey Art Bell's sudden departure from the airwaves when he disappeared to the Phillipines and emerged, just a few weeks later, as the proud husband of a girl just barely out of her teens. After a brief hiatus, Bell returned to host the show on weekends. I complained that Bell's replacement, the silky-tongued George Noory (who seems like an incredibly nice guy and always greets callers with “Hiya!“) sucked so bad KFI should consider bringing right-wing nutjob John Ziegler back.
“[U]nder Noory's direction, Coast to Coast AM has become increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of KFI's lineup,” I argued. “Hardly a week goes by nowadays without Noory interviewing some right-wing nutjob about how illegals are taking over our country or how NAFTA is just a cover-up for the eventual destruction of the almighty American dollar and its replacement with single currency for the entire Western hemisphere.”
Well, almost exactly a year after I spoke those words, Art Bell has now officially retired—he's done that several times because of back pain and unspecified threats from the secret government cabal that runs the planet in league with aliens who didn't appreciate his efforts to expose the Martians that live inside our hollow planet. But this time, he's serious. Last Sunday, Bell announced he wanted to spend more time with his young wife and baby. He'll only be back on occasionally to fill in for Noory.
That pretty much seals it: Unless you love listening to right-wing wackos all day and night on KFI, there's absolutely no reason to tune into Coast to Coast AM. A perfect example is Noory's show from last night, when George interviewed Jerome R. Corsi, allegedly an author of the stupendously disingenuous Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry and, more recently, Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America's Borders (with Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist. In 2004, the Media Matters website accused Corsi of posting anti-Islamic, anti-Semetic, anti-Catholic and anti-gay comments on a conservative website and the Swift Boat book's other author, John O'Neil, went on TV to distance himself from Corsi, claiming Corsi only edited the book.
None of that came up during Noory's interview of Corsi, of course. Instead, listeners were alerted to an alien conspiracy far greater than the much more entertaining one involving “grays” and spaceships: the conspiracy by President Bush, Vincente Fox and the Queen of England to turn the U.S. into just a region of a new, EU-style “North American Union” of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. In other words, all those “aliens” jumping the border are wasting their time since in a few years, there will be no U.S-Mexico border, Corsi essentially argued. I'd add that Noory then took calls from angry rednecks, but I have no idea because I turned off the radio.
Beam me up, Scotty. . . . There's no intelligent life left on this station.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).