Every Saturday morning, Chuck Mertz can be found in the WNUR studios of Louis Hall, providing news coverage of the hellish existence we lead. His weekly radio segment, “This Is Hell!,” serves as a sobering reminder that this world is far from ideal. In Mertz’s words, “This is a bad place, and things need to be fixed.”
Mertz’s interest in radio began in high school. He’d always wanted to be a journalist, but he realized he would need to be able to drive. Being legally blind, he knew that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. So instead he turned to the airwaves, finding himself in the thick of the “really exciting Detroit radio culture.” When Detroit’s radio scene began dying out in the late ‘80s, Mertz made his big move, this time to Chicago.
It was “on a total goof” that he decided to call the WNUR offices one day. He’d been working for the Chicago Tribune and Fox News, but knew he wanted to return to radio. “I didn’t want to be going to a murder scene and sticking a microphone into someone’s face,” he says. WNUR informed him that they were looking for public affairs broadcasting, which Mertz had experience with, so he accepted the position.
Sitting in on one of his live shows, which start at 9 a.m. on Saturdays, there’s a definite sense of duty that emanates from him. After all, he willingly gets out of bed on the weekends to inform the world of the stories that major news corporations are either reporting incorrectly (or are just plain ignoring).
“I had this kind of moment where all of a sudden I realized, ‘Is there a heaven? Is there a hell?’ Well, what if this is hell? What if this is as bad as it gets?” he says. “Too often people have this like, really optimistic idea that the world is a good place, and it really isn’t. There are lots of horrible things going on.”
It takes a certain kind of dedication to remind everyone on a weekly basis of how truly awful the world is, but maybe there’s hope for humanity yet. After all, “This Is Hell!” is the most popular show on WNUR, indicative of the dissatisfaction of the world populace.
“I hate feel-good news coverage,” Mertz says. “It makes people ignore the reality of what’s going on in the world.”
Mertz says people usually buy into the narrative of the major news broadcasters because they don’t want to question the state of the world—they just want to know without having to think critically about what they’re being told. Yet considering his large following, both in the Chicagoland area and internationally, it almost seems as if Mertz is disproving what he set out to prove in the first place.
There’s still a long way to go, though. Mertz’s show doesn’t fit into the conventional narrative of radio news broadcasting—or any type of news broadcasting really, except for perhaps "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." Even then there’s a marked difference between those shows and “This Is Hell!”. Mertz says the difficulty lies in the fact that, “Nobody wants that whatsoever because it’s the opposite of what everyone else is doing in radio.”
The truths Mertz forces his listeners to confront may be why he and his show are so commercially unattractive to news outlets. Still, we can count on him to tell the truth, even when it’s hell.