Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

To study the history of American broadcasting is to share a room with many — for lack of a better term — assholes. These ghostly assholes still haunt us, because electronic communications gave them so much power while they lived.

I've written about the bigoted and xenophobic painter Samuel Morse, who made telegraphy accessible to the masses; the egotistical founder of NBC, David Sarnoff; his frenemy William Paley, lord-potentate of CBS.

Contemporaries would put the hard-living radio personality Tallulah Bankhead in the category of a-hole, as did listeners insulted by the audio blackface of Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, better known Amos and Andy.

Why focus on jerks of yore? It’s because modern media, especially podcasting, makes much more sense when you understand the numerous flaws of these foundational personalities.

This truth applies especially to the mid-20th-century superstar Walter Winchell, a combination gossip columnist/radio-talk king/political operator/backstabber whose example might send you running for the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path in despair.

Winchell made assholery his whole brand, his spectacle, his shtick for decades in print and on the air. For just as long, Very Important journalists and gatekeepers wrung their hands about his popularity and attacked him, hoping to shut him down.

That effort was clearly a bust, as Winchell's ghostly essence has now spread itself wide and far in the general culture. His invisible vibes permeate every metric we use to measure and market ourselves.

As Jon Meacham put it in the New York Times in 2017: