Thom Hartmann | |
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.jpg) Hartmann speaks at the 2010 Chicago Green Fest | |
| Born | Thomas Carl Hartmann (1951-05-07)May 7, 1951 (age 74) Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Michigan State University |
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| Website | thomhartmann |
Thomas Carl Hartmann (born May 7, 1951) is an American radio personality, author, businessman, andprogressivepolitical commentator.[1][2] Hartmann has been hosting a nationally syndicated radio show,The Thom Hartmann Program, since 2003 and hosted a nightly television show,The Big Picture, between 2010 and 2017.
Hartmann was born inGrand Rapids, Michigan,[3] one of four children of Jean and Carl Thomas Hartmann.[4] His paternal grandparents were fromNorway, and his maternal ancestry includes Welsh and English forebears.[5][6] He lived in Detroit at age two, and later grew up inLansing, Michigan.[7][8] Interested in politics from a young age, he was raised in a conservative, right-wing, Midwestern household. He campaigned with his staunchly Republican father forBarry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election, when he was thirteen.[9] Hartmann was expelled from high school during tenth grade for starting a newspaper that protested against the Vietnam War. He later earned aGED.[10]
Hartmann enrolled atLansing Community College and transferred toMichigan State University, majoring inelectrical engineering.[11] In 1968, Hartmann opened his first business, a repair shop named "Electronics Joint," located next to Michigan State University, and became a part-time disc jockey at local country music station WITL-FM.[12][13] WithStudents for a Democratic Society, Hartmann protested against theVietnam War.[14] Hartmann had been interested in consciousness and spirituality since childhood, and by 1969 his interest evolved from ahippie subculture toChristian mysticism. During that year, he met the head of the Coptic Fellowship, Kurt Stanley, and Hamid Bey, an Egyptian Coptic priest who founded the Coptic Fellowship in the U.S.[15] In 1971 Hartmann was ordained as a minister with Coptic Fellowship International. He has since been a keynote speaker at Coptic conferences nationally. In 1973, Hartmann returned to Detroit to work as an engineer withRCA.[7]
Hartmann began his business career in the early 1970s while in his 20s, co-founding the Woodley Herber Co., which sold herbal products, potpourris and teas, and operated until 1978.[16] During this time, Hartmann obtained degrees in herbology and homeopathic medicine. Hartmann moved to New Hampshire to start the New England Salem Children's Village,[17] which currently operates inRumney, New Hampshire. He was its executive director for five years and served on the board of directors for more than 25 years. The childcare's model was based on the GermanSalem International organization. Through his affiliation with that group, he helped start international relief programs.[citation needed]
Hartmann founded International Wholesale Travel and its retail subsidiary Sprayberry Travel in Atlanta in 1983, a business which in the intervening years generated over $250 million in revenue.[18][19] According to their website, Sprayberry Travel was lauded by theWall Street Journal in 1984 as an early adopter of frequent travel programs, analogous to airline-industry frequent-flyer programs.[20] He sold his share in the business in 1986, and retired with his family to Germany to work with the international relief organization Salem International.[21] In the late 1970s, he was a trainer in advertising and marketing for American Marketing Centers (now defunct), and in 1987, after returning from Germany, founded the Atlanta advertising agency Chandler, MacDonald, Stout, Schneiderman & Poe, Inc., doing business as the Newsletter Factory.[22] He sold his interest in that company in 1996, and again retired to Vermont.
Having worked as aDJ and news director at Lansing radio stations from 1968 to 1978,[3] Hartmann started a radio show in February 2003 on a local station in Vermont; a month later[citation needed] it was picked up on theI.E. America Radio Network and onSirius Satellite Radio. In 2005, he moved from Vermont to Oregon and, in addition to continuing his national show, also co-hosted a local talk show inPortland, Oregon (with Carl Wolfson, the late Heidi Tauber, and later Christine Alexander) onKPOJ. The station, initially an affiliate ofAir America Radio, carried the program until 2007 when the station took on a sports talk format.
Hartmann's national program, on the air since 2003 and now airing from noon to 3 p.m., was chosen by Air America to replaceAl Franken on most Air America affiliates in 2007.[23] From 2008 to 2011,Talkers Magazine rated Hartmann the most popular liberal talk show host in America, ranking as No. 8 among all talk-show hosts in 2011 and 2015.[24] According to his then-syndicator Dial Global, more people listened to Hartmann's show on more stations than any other progressive talk show in America.The Thom Hartmann Program is estimated by industry magazineTalkers to have 7 million unique listeners per week.[25]
As of March 2016, the show was carried on 80 terrestrial radio stations in 37 states, as well as onSiriusXM Progress channel 127.[26] A community radio station in Africa,Radio Builsa inGhana, also broadcasts the show. Various local cable TV stationssimulcast the program. In addition toWestwood One, the show is now also offered viaPacifica Audioport to non-profit stations in a non-profit-compliant format and is simulcast onDish Network channel 9415 andDirecTV channel 348 via Free Speech TV. The program also airs in London, England.
Many guests appear on the show expressing a variety of points of view on diverse social and political topics. Some guests proffer progressive views similar to Hartmann's, but more than half areconservatives,libertarians, orAyn Rand Institute members[27][failed verification] who espouse opposing views. Due to his eagerness to invite people who disagree with him, vigorous discussion and debate between the host and guests usually ensues; "My goal in my conversations with conservatives is not to create a spectacle, and not to win the argument, not to prove that I'm the smartest guy in the room or that I'm a tough warrior and I can smack down people." For many years, Sen.Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared every Friday for the "Brunch with Bernie" segment.[28] Other regular phone-in guests includeReps.Mark Pocan (Mid-day with Mark)[29] andRo Khanna,[30] both members of theCongressional Progressive Caucus.Ellen Ratner of the Talk Radio News Service provides Washington commentary daily. Victoria Jones, who is theWhite House correspondent for Talk Radio News Service, appears occasionally, as doesRavi Batra, an economics professor atSMU.[31]
Like most talk radio shows,The Thom Hartmann Program takes calls from listeners. When callers asked Hartmann how he was, he used to reply, "I'm great, but I'll get better." After a time, some callers would regularly try to elicit this response, so he's stopped replying this way routinely. Hartmann ends each show with the phrase, "Activism begins with you; democracy begins with you. Get out there; get active!Tag, you're it!"
Michael Harrison, publisher of radio industry trade magazineTalkers, offered this appraisal of Hartmann:
He's entertaining, he's informative, he's an original thinker, he's an author, and he's an original source. In other words, he's not a B-level talking-points host that so many on both the left and the right are.... He's the kind of a host that other people can get their talking points from.[32]
Hartmann hosted a one-hour daily TV show at 7 p.m. ET Monday to Friday,The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, which was editorially directed by his wife and was broadcast from the Washington, D.C., studios of theRT America news network. The show featured many conservative guests who routinely sparred with Hartmann. Hartmann co-produced the program with RT, who provided studio and carriage, while Hartmann retained full editorial control of his programming. The RT network aired the program via Dish Network, DirecTV, and on selected local-origination andpublic-access television cable TV channels globally.[31] After hosting the program for seven years, Hartmann announced his departure as host on September 29, 2017.[citation needed]
Hartmann has published more than twenty books on diverse topics. The title with the most critical acclaim isThe Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. In 1999, he was invited by theDalai Lama to spend a week inDharamsala after the Dalai Lama read the book. Hartmann won the Project Censored Award in 2004 forUnequal Protection. As a result of a book onspirituality,The Prophet's Way, he was invited in 1998 to meetPope John Paul II.
He also publishes The Hartmann Report, a daily progressive newsletter.[33]
Hartmann is a practitioner of the pseudo-scientificNeuro-Linguistic Programming, having been trained byRichard Bandler. Hartmann popularized some of NLP's concepts inCracking the Code (2007), arguingNewt Gingrich andFrank Luntz made use of them in the 1980s and 1990s forRepublican Party causes, while advocating using them to advance liberalism. His bookHealing ADD also utilises NLP techniques. Co-authored withLamar Waldron, Hartmann'sUltimate Sacrifice (2005) echoes the conspiracy theory that theMafia ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy and thatLee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent.[34]
Hartmann was one of several contributors toAir America, the Playbook, a collection of essays, transcripts, and interviews by liberal radio personalities. It was published in 2006 and was onThe New York Times Best Seller List for October 8, 2006.[35]
Leonardo DiCaprio made a web movie titledBefore The Flood, inspired byThe Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Hartmann appears in DiCaprio's 2007 documentaryThe 11th Hour, as well as the feature documentary filmDalai Lama Renaissance (withHarrison Ford), andCrude Impact. In 2010, Warner Brothers and Leonardo DiCaprio[36] announced they are making a motion picture based on the bookLegacy of Secrecy, authored by Lamar Waldron and Hartmann. Hartmann also narrated the 2011 documentary filmHeist: Who Stole the American Dream?[37]
In September 2013, Hartmann was granted an honorarydoctorate of humane letters fromGoddard College inPort Townsend, Washington.[38] According to Pres. Barbara Vacarr, "Thom's work as a journalist, author and community activist is a living example of the very mission of Goddard College, and what our students are committed to: advancing cultures of rigorous inquiry, collaboration and lifelong learning, where individuals take imaginative and responsible action."
Hartmann served on the board of Voqal, a collaboration of EBS licensees working to advance social equity.[39]
Hartmann hasprogressive/liberal politics, describing himself as part of theradical middle.[40] His books includeUnequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, in which he argues that the 1886U.S. Supreme Court decision inSanta Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394) did not actually grantcorporate personhood, and that this doctrine derives from a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court clerk's notes. Hartmann considers this a clear contradiction of the intent of theU.S. Founding Fathers.[41] He has also written on theseparation of church and state, drawing uponThe Federalist Papers to argue that the Founding Fathers warned against the notion of the United States being a Christian nation. He contends that the2000 and2004 American elections were stolen through electronic tampering, denial of thevoting franchise by rigged voting lists, and limiting availability of voting machines in selected precincts. He also accused theBush administration of eroding democracy andindividual freedoms.[citation needed]
Hartmann is a vocal critic of the effects ofneoliberalglobalization on the U.S. economy, claiming that economic policies enacted during and since the presidency ofRonald Reagan have led, in large part, to many American industrial enterprises' being acquired by multinational firms based in overseas countries, leading in many cases to manufacturing jobs—once considered a major foundation of the U.S. economy[citation needed]—being relocated to countries in Asia and other areas where the costs of labor are lower than in the U.S. and the concurrent reversal of the United States' traditional role of a leading exporter of finished manufactured goods to that of a primary importer of finished manufactured goods (exemplified by massive trade deficits with countries such as China). Hartmann argues that this phenomenon is leading to the erosion of theAmerican middle class, whose survival Hartmann deems critical to the survival of American democracy. This argument is expressed in Hartmann's 2006 book,Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It. One of the book's main arguments is that mediaderegulation leads to corporate media's shifting the American consensus towards the acceptance ofprivatization and massive corporate profits—which causes the shrinking of the middle class.[citation needed]
In a 2013 interview withPolitico, Hartmann described his political philosophy asdemocratic socialism:
I've lived in Europe. I think that the countries that call themselves democratic socialist—Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland—have the most functional political and economic system. So, somebody says, what's your political philosophy? I'd say Democratic socialism. But boy, the crap you take when you say “socialist,” because people don't understand it. They think I'm talking about Soviet-style socialism, which I'm not.[42]
Hartmann has three children with his wife Louise.[43] Hartmann has been a vegetarian since he was a teenager.[44]
Hartmann has written aboutattention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) andadult attention-deficit disorder (AADD), and has proposed (in 1978, published in 1992) thehunter vs. farmer hypothesis, suggesting that ADHD is an expectedevolutionary adaptation to hunting lifestyles where individuals have the ability to rapidly shift focus and external attention, while holding multiple trains of thought. This ability, Hartmann theorizes, causes difficulties for those who live and work in cultures in which "farming"—planned, predictable, organized, repetitive behaviors—is typical.[citation needed] His first book on the disorder,Attention Deficit Disorder: a Different Perception was described byScientific American as "innovative and fresh".[45] Hartmann has established specialized schools[quantify] for children with ADHD, such as the Hunter School inRumney, New Hampshire,[46] which he co-founded with his wife Louise.
He also operated the "ADD Forum" and "DeskTop Publishing Forum", along with several others, onCompuServe.[47]
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