In the crowd

Well before he became Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, Andy Griffith was pretty hot stuff and about to get hotter.

Just off a Broadway run in the mid-1950s, he arrived in the northeast Arkansas town of Piggott to take his first movie role. Legendary director Elia Kazan had teamed with legendary writer Budd Schulberg to craft a picture titled A Face in the Crowd. All the principal cast members — Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Tony Franciosa — would enjoy seriously successful careers on stage, screen and television.

Griffith would portray a boozy yokel named Larry Rhodes, soon to be nicknamed “Lonesome” by a traveling radio reporter who recognized his populist potential and who shared his conviction that P.T. Barnum was correct: There was one born every minute.

Before long Lonesome was one of the brightest stars in the broadcast firmament, radio and television, adored by the masses for his proclaimed disdain for the establishment, for his willingness to insult, impugn and otherwise breach the standards of civil discourse, even simple decency. Politicians sought his favor. He became wealthy, Rhodes — incapable of embarrassment, invulnerable to reproach.

He spoke for the little man, you see, not the privileged.

Of course it was not the elites whom Rhodes held in contempt but his listeners and viewers, those rubes and hayseeds, the gullible of town and (mostly) country, they who had longed for a voice and at last had found him, someone to stand up for them.

Only when a guilt-ridden enabler calculatedly left open a microphone did the faithful hear the unguarded, unexpurgated Rhodes.

Only then could they begin to accept that their tribune was a charlatan.

Other Lonesomes would come along, not in the fiction of film or the printed page, but in real life.

In fact the species was centuries old, its evolution hastened by technology: moveable type, the telegraph, radio, television, the internet, the smartphone.

Which brings us to a pair of contemporary Lonesome Rhodes, both of whom have left the platform, one perhaps temporarily and the other having moved to that big one in the sky.

They would be Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News (and briefly an Arkansas newspaper editorial writer), and Jerry Springer, he of nationwide television syndication.

A defamation lawsuit filed against Fox by a voting machine company (settled for almost $900 million) revealed the cynicism that has powered Carlson and his primetime Fox colleagues to stardom.

Dozens, scores of emails between the hosts, their producers and network executives made plain their skepticism, or outright disbelief, of the election fraud allegations that they broadcast night after night after night.

But granting airtime to hoaxsters and indulging ballot fraud fantasies, one Carlson email said, was necessary to keep Fox’s core audience from defecting to a rival network even more indulgent of right-wing conspiracy theories.

As for his on-air near-idolization of Donald Trump, well, Carlson’s emails contain a starkly different appraisal: “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer … I’ve been thinking this every day for four years” and “I hate him passionately.”

Surely there was more to Carlson’s firing than mere hypocrisy; the litigation disclosed plenty of very similar emails from the other Fox evening headliners.

All of them were publicly praiseful of the former president and his crackpot claims while privately furious with their own network’s reporters for having the temerity to tell the audience that Joe Biden had indeed won Arizona and that there was no evidence of Trump being robbed of victory.

It’s a big world, with plenty of room in the information spectrum for players and plenty of viewers eager for assurances that nothing is their fault, so likely Carlson will soon find a new venue.

Jerry Springer, however, has left the studio for good, though his handiwork can still be found in video archives.

Like Carlson, Springer’s estimation of his audience, assiduously courted, was exemplified by the programs he spent almost three decades delivering to them. “You Slept with My Stripper Sister” is but one example. Another: “Angry Women Smackdown.”

Springer, a political liberal, acknowledged he never watched his product and, asked if he kept contact with his program’s participants after they appeared, snarked “Have you seen our guests?”

The “guests” — the program — found an audience across the Atlantic, prompting one British observer to lament, if unselfconsciously, the incalculable damage to America’s reputation.

Springer, counting his millions, at least had the decency to apologize for his show, but by the time he ended its run he had helped spawn a dozen or more imitators.

The focus of the freak shows quickly expanded from the societal margins to include the political fringes. “Talk radio” takes one to a different galaxy.

There will always be faces in the crowd; new Lonesomes are incubating even now.

The question is how much discord they can foment before their audience catches on. If it

does.