CNN's Michael Smerconish playing with fire

Taking talk radio/cable news performer Michael Smerconish at face value would lead to inaccurate speculation.

He presents himself as garishly loud, gleeful in antagonizing ideologically oppositional guests, of markedly superficial intellect, and pretty much disagreeable in damn near every way.  

Never judge a book by its cover, though.

His website, http://www.smerconish.com/, lists numerous and impressive educational and professional achievements. Smerconish, his poison-clown schtick to one side, has over the decades realized many highly significant ambitions and received a host of industry recognitions. 

But it also seems that early on, Smerconish charted a media commentator success strategy familiar to countless large and limited-market talking heads who'd pursued triumphs before him.

The plan is not complex. At each possible turn, simply provoke as many listeners as possible. Court deafening controversy and blood-rushing enmity among those persons tuning in. Make oneself the story by waving, pulling faces, constantly belittling and cutting off guests, and shouting without let up. 

Get millions of viewers to shake with profound rage at your sneering, bird-flipping antics. Poke the bear.

Ratings may skyrocket, depending on commitment and ability.
But, there is a terrible downside possible:

In 1984, talk radio host Alan Berg was assassinated by right-wing terrorists he had challenged. Like Smerconish, Berg was an attorney as well as radio personality, and tended toward heated, on-air confrontations.

Certainly, Berg's frequent attacks on organized racists merit applause. One imagines few more detestable objects for public ridicule.

Anyone inferring from this essay a belief on the present author's part that either Berg or Smerconish bears even the slightest bit of responsibility for preventing violent, deranged idiots' crimes could not be more wrong.

The wonderful first amendment safeguards stormy rhetoric -- whether it owes to passionate principle or is merely contrived for disposable entertainment -- just as it does any innocuous speech form.

I'll go further: Citizens' free expression rights are by logical implication imperiled by the threat of violent assaults on any speakers. And any persons who would allow repression of ideas they do not share are simultaneously making possible the stifling of ones they themselves harbor.

Recognizing that there are random crazies out in listener-land, ones not capable of processing involved ideas without taking ugly retaliative action, is not endorsing them. Nor is it asserting that speakers filter themselves to suit the comfort of kooks.

But Smerconish should remember that such do lurk out there.