Bill Nigut’s Farewell Column: It’s all one club and I was in it.
The AJC’s plant in public radio says goodbye with a list of all the pols who loved him before.
In marking Jimmy Carter’s death, amidst lots of local praise, WSB Radio’s conservative Christian talk host Erick Erickson took a contrarian stance: “his theology was worldly and used as a cudgel by secularists to attack Christians, he is the only President to glad hand with the terrorists of Hamas, he was one of very few Presidents who was smaller than [the] office of President, and I should say nothing else to avoid speaking ill of the dead.”
When Joe Biden left office, nonviolently, Erickson wrote “Good Riddance.”
“People want to believe that Biden is a good man with a tragic backstory, but it’s simply not the case. After his daughter and first wife died, Biden immediately left his mourning family to join the Senate. When Hunter Biden impregnated a stripper, Joe ignored his newest granddaughter for years. But Biden was able to do this because the national media let him.”
Erickson had once been a Never Trump critic calling for Jan. 6th “protestors” to be shot and Trump barred from running again. He tried hard to make Ron DeSantis or other challengers a go in the 2024 primaries only to support Trump’s return once his nomination was secured.
Erickson’s since settle back into the conservative media ecosystem, claiming “great strides” in ratings and revenues, and expanding his network in a quest to be the next Rush Limbaugh.
This week Erickson’s colleague in the larger Cox Media Universe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution radio host Bill Nigut, retires. Nigut wrote his own farewell column and it’s rage inducing in another way.
A love letter to the access journalism he’s practiced for decades, it’s a litany of the famous politicians he’s covered and their mutual affection.
“As a reporter, I knew that keeping a certain distance from those you cover is crucial. But I admit I grew to truly like and admire some of those I reported on, and my feelings had little to do with their party affiliation or their position on issues.”
George H. W. Bush gave him his last interview as a candidate, George W. Bush and him had an “easy rapport,” Zell Miller once told him, “I love you.”
There’s no questioning of what that style of journalism has wrought. Or how anemic such “civility” has become in countering the rise of authoritarian politics.
Unlike the aging Joe Biden realizing too late that bipartisanship and “norms and standards” won’t stop a slide into oligarchy, Nigut offers no such warning. It’s no wonder since he owes his career to a regional oligarchy.
Nigut started at Cox Media’s WSB TV in the 1980s. He left in the 2000s to start an arts advocacy group that funded very little art. He then served as Southeast Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League before returning to journalism at Georgia Public Broadcasting.
GPB entered Atlanta radio in 2014 in direct competition with the city’s longtime NPR station WABE.
To do so, the state-run public broadcaster engaged in a secret, backroom deal with Georgia State University’s ambitious President to gain daytime control of beloved college radio station WRAS.
The takeover sparked a populist #SaveWRAS campaign, foreshadowing later anger at establishments and elites.
But Georgia’s establishment and elite all ignored the backlash while flocking to be on Nigut’s show.
It helped that Cox, which already owned both WSB TV and radio plus 4 other radio stations in Atlanta, wanted WRAS as a platform for its newspaper.
In a tone-deaf essay from that year Nigut waxed nostalgic about starting in radio in his 20s and celebrated his return to the “medium I love best” after 40 years.
There was no acknowledgement he was kicking people still in their 20s off the air.
In 2023 his show was canceled after a cut to GPB’s state funding. The AJC claimed Nigut was a victim of “cancel culture” and implied political retaliation. That’s possible, or it could be lawmakers finally tired of GPB blatantly subsidizing the AJC.
The paper soon hired Nigut themselves, tacitly acknowledging he’d been working for them as much as GPB, and never mentioned the political retaliation charge again.
If Cox Enterprises, owned by billionaires who have dominated Atlanta media since 1939 really wanted the AJC to have a daily radio show with Bill Nigut as host, they could have put in on WSB in 2014. They didn’t. Instead they hijacked a college radio station as an extension of their empire. And have never been held accountable. Likely thanks to all the politicians Nigut shouted out.
(Cox Enterprises sold a majority stake in its broadcast stations to Apollo Global in 2019 but retains a minority stake.)
WABE, in its own deference to Cox, then gave the AJC a similar show with Nigut as host. The daily horse race, access to key players and pundits, and Nigut’s vaunted “civility” would save Democracy.
In prioritizing Nigut’s career above all else, Atlanta’s public broadcasters sidelined younger voices, rewarded both “The Atlanta Way” and Georgia’s “Good Old Boy Network,” and made themselves subservient to Cox. Now, when independent scrutiny of billionaires and concentrated wealth is more necessary than ever, our public broadcasters have each sold out.
For his part, Nigut ends his column with no regrets.
“It’s an extraordinary honor to hear many of you say you believe I’ve been a voice of reason and civility. That is how I’ve tried to conduct myself: treating even those with whom I disagree with respect and hoping that I’ve been able to bring clarity to the often tumultuous world of politics.
If I’ve succeeded in doing that I’ll leave with no regrets.”
Meanwhile WSB is number 1 in listenership and its flagship host gets to be a rage-baiting theocrat three hours each day.
Good riddance.
