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Until this month, Tom Jordan co-hosted the morning All Talk show on Detroit’s WJR (760-AM), a “heritage news-talk” radio station broadcast from Detroit’s New Center and, for more than a century, a powerful voice of the Motor City.
But that prestigious, 50,000-watt, clear-channel signal no longer broadcasts the voice of Jordan, he says, because he was “blacklisted” by progressive politicians who refused to appear on his biased program. Seems like this talker talked himself out of a talking job.
“It went up as high as the White House,” Jordan said on Friday during his new podcast on the internet. “. . . We tried to get the surrogates on for Kamala Harris . . . They wouldn’t come on because certain conservative hosts like myself were being blacklisted because we weren’t Democrat-friendly enough.”
His podcast Tom Jordan Talks appears on weekdays on Wayne Radio at 9 a.m. Curiously, that’s when WJR carries All Talk with Kevin Dietz, formerly Jordan’s sidekick for almost three years. On a different podcast with Tudor Dixon, Jordan said more about WJR.
“In the past few months, I was specifically told, specifically, that ‘We’re going to change the way we do things,’” (at WJR) Jordan told Dixon, who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for governor in 2022.
Jordan did not name anyone, specifically, who told him of the policy change at WJR. Despite multiple requests, there was no response or comment last week from the station’s program director Ann Thomas, a longtime WJR hand who was promoted to that job 14 months ago.
Jordan said WJR told him not to share his opinions throughout the majority of the show and to let others speak even when he disagreed with them. During his stint at WJR, Jordan had a tendency to dispute progressive guests and callers by talking over them and cutting them off, sometimes with lies.
“So, I was specifically told, ‘We want to have continued access to these people,’” Jordan said to Dixon. “And they specifically told me that ‘We no longer want to be considered a conservative talk-radio station. We’re trying to shed that label.’”
Despite its prestige and powerful signal, WJR has lost clout in the media market, as have legacy media brands like daily newspapers. The most recent Nielsen ratings (for August) show WJR ranked 16th in the Detroit market with a 2.7 share of listeners. (The leader at 8.5 is 97.1 FM “The Ticket,” a sports station).
The leader among AM stations is WWJ (950-AM), where Jordan worked as a newscaster before WJR and became disenchanted, he said, with what he calls leftist media bias. Primarily a news station, with some sports, WWJ places ninth in the overall market at 5.4, double the audience of WJR.
For the most part, Jordan’s knee-jerk opinions on WJR were simplistic boiler-plate talking points from the MAGA script.
For instance: Former President and current Republican candidate Donald Trump did not really inspire the January 6 lynch mob; abortion is murder and women have no right to choose it; Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a liberal-socialist-Communist-Marxist; most of the news media is corrupt and practicing propaganda over journalism; Trump won’t implement the sinister and radical “2025 project” of his boosters because he says he has nothing to do with it; the Justice Department has been “weaponized” for “lawfare;” so-called “critical race theory” is racism in reverse for both whites and Blacks; marijuana is addictive and might make you psychotic; and the FBI is targeting Bible shoppers.
With a clear “tuxedo voice,” practiced cadence, and professional delivery, Jordan is a master blender of sweeping generalizations, counterfactual reasoning, straw-man arguments, and bad-faith debate.
Let’s hear Tom, now, for a sample.
“The Democratic, far-left, liberal tentacles have reached deep within the media and within the government and within the corporate world as well,” Jordan said on his podcast Friday.
Kooky as some of his opinions are, few are as malignant as those of Mark Levin, a syndicated talk-show screecher who continues to pollute WJR’s air on many weeknights for three hours, starting at 8 p.m.
Among Levin’s favorite targets are Arabs and Muslims, especially around Detroit. For instance: Levin calls Dearborn “Dearborn-istan.”
On this topic, Jordan’s words rivaled Levin’s last October when Jordan attacked U.S. Rep. Rashida Talib of Michigan following the Hamas terrorism from Gaza into Israel. That violence killed 1,200 persons; hundreds were wounded or kidnapped.
Tlaib is the only Palestinian American in Congress; her district includes parts of Dearborn; outside her office on display was a Palestinian flag.
“She supports, it seems, Hamas, a terrorist regime,” Jordan said of Tlaib last October. “She’s denouncing Israel. That’s absolutely un-American. She is a terrorist sympathizer at this point. She sympathizes with Hamas.”
Jordan added at that time that Tlaib also “probably sympathizes” with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
“She should be gone,” Jordan said of Tlaib. We must assume Jordan meant “gone” as in “voted out of Congress” and not something more menacing. And now it is Jordan who is “gone” from his former role, but still a voice in the podcast wilderness.
Although Jordan never quotes the Koran, he sometimes quotes Bible verses off the top of his head to make points. In fact, in signing off his podcast on Friday, Jordan invited his audience to join him on Sunday at a Christian church in Waterford, north of Detroit, where he is a pastor and preacher. In this way, he’s still all talk.
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Joe Lapointe
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