by Mac Johnson
Every once in a while, a manâs mind retreats from the banal details of daily discourse to dwell instead upon the âbig questionsâ of existence: Where did we come from? What is God? Are we alone in the universe? And, of course, Why is talk radio so overwhelmingly conservative?
| My guess would be because people also listened to the alternatives. Briefly. |
The mainstream media dwell on this question endlessly, whenever the subject of their broken stranglehold on all public debate is brought up. Whatever caused the rise of conservative talk radio, they are pretty sure it is a malevolent force, almost certainly conspiratorial in nature.
| I was in on the original conspiracy, y'know. The courier from the Illuminati was wearing a cape and a domino mask, and he arrived at 3.30 a.m. There was a secret knock at the door of our secret hideout, and he had to utter the secret password before we let him in, and then he had to give the secret handshake. I can't tell you what happened next, 'cuz it's secret... |
But, alas, as my medication has finally convinced me, there are very few conspiracies in the world, and we have to look to more organic forces to explain most trends and events.
| Can I still keep my cape? |
Many factors account for the rightward tilt of talk radio, such as: radio is listened to in cars and at work, both of which are not frequented so much by the unemployed clients of the welfare state that would constitute the natural audience for liberal talk radio. OK, that was a cheap shot and not entirely true, but I couldnât resist. Iâll move on now and try to be good.
| Oh, go on. You're on a roll... |
Another, more serious, factor is straightforward: America is, essentially, a conservative nation on most issues. Liberalism is an attempt to change the nationâs culture more than an attempt to accurately represent it. So the audience for conservative radio is naturally larger than that for liberal radio.
| Another factor is that (upper case L) Liberalism is much more about feelings than it is about facts. Unless you're a family member or a close friend, I'm not much concerned with how you feel. And once you've told me how you feel, what do we talk about next? We've got the makings of a 5-minute radio show there, don't we? |
A second factor is that talk radio is slightly cheaper than dog poo to produce and is often made locally. This created the potential for a great deal of diversity in talk radio during the âdark agesâ of television news, when America got all of its news from three identical sources, ABC, CBS and NBCâall of which were essentially the Cliff Notes version of whatever the New York Times had to say that week. I say âpotentialâ diversity because, for many years, it was not realized. Talk and news radio merely aped (blindly, one might say) the style of television news, radio having accepted a role as a medium on the same uplifting level as television intellectually, but without any informative pictures.
| It's hard to recall the pre-80s world of radio, before Rush Limbaugh. I can recall long drives with nothing coherent on the dial but Larry King or Jim Bohannan in the wee hours of the morning. The alterntive to that was Prophet Jones, broadcasting from Detroit, or whatever music happened to be playing, which I believe was exclusively either disco or Mexican. |
But consider the number of radio stations in each city, and the number of cities in America, with each station producing programming and fighting for local market share. The potential for something different to arise was vastly greater in radio than in television. And compared to television, âsomething differentâ could only mean something more conservative. Thus, when something different did arise, it had a ready-made audience in the millions of people that were sick of the left wing axis of drivel, ABC-CBS-NBC.
| Among the early talk radio shows was Mort Sahl, whom I thought a pretty funny fellow when I was 19 or 20. Either I was easily amused in the heady days of my youth, or Mort was pretty predictable and not particularly logical by the early 80s. "Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen," he said, convinced he was being hilarious and iconoclastic. My boredom meter pegged and I switched to a Mexican station. |
So talk radio became conservative because it could, and because there was a market for it when it did. Dan Rather helped create Rush Limbaugh.
| I'd say Larry King had more to do with it. His show was actually pretty successful. Limbaugh took the format and made it interesting, which was more important than the ideological bent. Mort Sahl made a living being an "iconoclast," but Limbaugh made a career goring actual sacred cows. |
Essentially, the process was purely Darwinian. Radio had a larger, more diverse population of programs and a higher rate of âreproductionâ of these programs, so radio naturally evolved into the unfilled niche of conservative programming before it could be filled by television, which was (in evolutionary terms) a rare asexual organism reproducing by infrequent budding.
| Hmmm... I'm not too sure about that. The radio of my youth was Top 40. It was done in by FM radio and by the fact that rock 'n' roll begat disco â how much of Donna Summer and the Commodores could you stand on a long drive? â and that subsequent iterations of rock 'n' roll became antisocial â how much of Sid Vicious could you stand on a short drive?. There's not much talk radio on FM, it's an AM phenomenon; that's because when Top 40 died it was left with nothing to do but farm reports. There was a brief rise of all news radio, but repeating the same news over and over again every half hour's almost as boring as the Commodores. But having listeners give their opinions on the news adds a bit of spice. So I'd call it a natural evolution, indepedent of the teevee. |
But it wasnât just television pushing talk radio to the right. It was also the fact that the government, in its eternal and unlimited wisdom, had created a huge government-funded monopoly of extremely liberal opinion radio, a.k.a. National Public Radio. NPR has something like 20 million listeners per week. It offers a standardized left wing programming package with high production values and little interruption by advertising. It pretty much sops up whatever market for left wing talk radio there is and leaves the remaining radio market disproportionately conservative in outlook.
| I've been forced to listen to NPR on a few occasions. I really have a hard time believing there are that many sophomores in this Great Nation of Oursâ¢. The advantage used to be that when it wasn't feeding us "news" it was often playing classical music. I believe that format's mostly changed now to Music Nobody Listens To, since classical music is European in origin. |
Thus, any commercial radio outlet seeking to offer a liberal talk show would find that his natural listenership had its ears already suckling at the electromagnetic teat of government, or something like that. I can drive from Baja to Bangor and never be outside the broadcast range of two or three NPR stations along the way. Thatâs hard to compete with if you have nothing but a tiny local station and have to sell anti-fungal foot powder every ten minutes. So radio stations inevitably found conservative programming more profitable. Nina Totenberg helped to create Laura Ingraham. You see, sometimes quality programming really is inspired by NPR listeners like you.
NPR is also, by the way, one of the two major reasons that âAir Americaâ radio is such a steamy pile of failed programming. (The other reason is that Air America stinks.)
| I'd call that the primary reason Air Amerikkka is in a state of perpetual trainwreck... |
Air Americaâs natural audience is already in a very long-term relationship (a civil union, really) with NPR.
| But they don't have NPR's health insurance... |
To compete with a government-subsidized behemoth like NPR, Air America would need so much funding that they would have to steal the money or something.
Together, the twin forces of biased television news and socialized radio nearly ensured that commercial talk radio would become conservative.
| I actually don't agree with that. Intelligent, witty discussion of the issues from a liberal point of view would be competitive. There's a guy named Frank di Filippo who joins mostly conservative Ron Smith on our Baltimore station. Frank's a liberal in most instances, but he's also intelligent and well-informed about state politix. If he had his own show, I'd listen to it and only occasionally holler obscenities. But he's a rarity. What's usually trotted out is somebody like Victoria Whatsername, who was on WMAL in Washington for awhile. Listening to her was like listening to a parrot. |
It was not, as is often implied, the result of some secret Rovian conspiracy in which political ideologues funded by billionaire megalomaniacs sought to propagandize listeners to their political agenda. That would be Air America.
| Damn. I guess I'll have to take this cape back to the store. |
Interestingly, this same sort of market-driven evolution can now be seen at work reshaping two other areas of the media. The proliferation of television stations via cable and satellite has finally created enough variation in news networks to allow viewers to select a non-liberal format from the mix: Fox News. Judging by Foxâs success, there is probably room for other such stations. One wonders why MSNBC insists on remaining CNN Jr.
| We've gotten really comfortable with the knowledge that Fox News is there to present an alternative to the predictability of the rest of the newsworld. I'll be really happy when they have some competition, since until they do we're a single hostile buyout away from the stultifying sameness of yesteryear. I'd welcome UPN News, or NBC Rite, or something like that. |
And in the greatest example so far of low-production costs and diverse content knocking down a market-insulated monolith, the internet is busy destroying the newspaper business.
| Which'd be a bad thing if it occurred... |
Eat my digital dust, New York Times Corp.
| Well, that'd be okay, I guess... |
The Internet is somewhat more evenly split between liberal and conservative, however. But hopefully, the government will create National Public Internet News soon and destroy much innovation on the leftward side of the web as well.
| What the internet does is allow us to analyze the news in much the same manner as talk radio. They can give us the news, we'll give them our opinions on it, and we'll call bullshit on it when it doesn't make any sense. There's actually a crying need for raw news collection â that's why we use so many different sources here on Rantburg. The newspapers take the news and mix it with their editorial opinions, not only on the editorial pages, but also on the news pages. That can come in statements of fact, or in which stories they put above the fold, how they write headlines, even in the order of the paragraphs. But if they all read the same, then it doesn't really matter which newspaper you read. If you watch the broadcast network news, then it doesn't matter if you read any newspapers at all. |
In the end, the proliferation of new, more diverse, media will likely become so successful that it could do the unthinkable: create a niche for liberal talk radio.
| Not unless they can come up with somebody who can discuss facts, rather than chasing conspiracies... |
When conservatives have so many internet and television outlets that they are no longer artificially concentrated into the talk radio market, some experienced talk stations will find it more profitable to switch to a left-wing format. But by then, the programming will all be in Spanish anyway. Viva Chavez! |