Ears Wide Shut: Epistemological Populism, Argutainment and Canadian Conservative Talk Radio
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Although scholars have identified political talk radio (PTR) as an important site of political socialization, the current literature has largely failed to examine the political relevance of PTR's rhetorical strategies and has virtually ignored Canadian PTR altogether. This article addresses these gaps by analyzing Adler On Line, Canada's only nationally syndicated commercial PTR program, to show that how Canadian PTR talks, particularly its use of populist rhetoric, plays a central role in establishing what type of political deliberation and debate is possible within it. Divided into two main sections, the article first explores how Adler On Line renders a particular epistemological framework authoritative. The second section then analyzes the rules and norms of political expression and debate encouraged by the show's style of argutainment debate. The article concludes with a more speculative evaluation of the practical consequences as well as the theoretical and normative implications of these discursive practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".