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proportions. The station manager I talked with is wrong, because of something in science known as "sample bias." He was assuming his radio listeners represent all radio listeners, a critical error.
Here's why the talk radio scene is so dominated by the right, and how it can become more democratic. First, a very brief history:
When radio first became a national force in the 1920s and 1930s, most stations programmed everything. Country/Western music would be followed by Big Band, followed by Mozart, followed by drama or comedy. Everything was jumbled together, and people needed the newspaper program guides to know when to listen to what.
As the market matured, and drama and comedy moved to television, radio stations realized there were specific market segments and niches within those segments to which they could program. And they realized that people within those niches had very specific tastes. Country/Western listeners only wanted to hear Country/Western - Big Band put them off, and classical music put them to sleep. Classical music fans, on the other hand, became irritated when Country/Western or the early versions of Rock 'n Roll came on the air. And Rock fans clicked off the moment Frank Sinatra came on.
So, as those of us who've worked in the business saw, stations began to program into these specific musical niches, and it led to a new renaissance (and profit windfall) in the radio business.
But to make money in the new world of radio that emerged in the 1950s, you had to be true to your niche.
When I was a Country/Western DJ, if I had tried to drop in a song from The Rolling Stones, my listeners would have gone ballistic, calling in and angrily complaining. Similarly, when I was doing morning drive-time Rock, it would have been suicide to drop in four minutes of Mozart. Smart programmers know to always hold true to their niche and their listeners.
At first, radio talk shows were seen as a way of fulfilling FCC community service requirements. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was a reporter and news anchor at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, we had an afternoon talk show that ran from 2 to 3 pm. Usually hosted by the station's general manager, the late Chuck Drake, and sometimes fill-in hosted by us in the news staff, the show was overtly run to satisfy the FCC's mandate that stations "serve the public interest." Thus, our talk show focused mostly on public-interest issues, from local and national politics to lost dog reports, and we tried hard to present all viewpoints fairly (as was then required by the FCC's Fairness Doctrine).
In that, we were following a long radio tradition. Modern talk radio as a major force in America started in 1926, when Catholic priest Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves. By the mid-1930s, as many as a full third of the entire nation - an estimated 45 million people - listened to his weekly broadcasts. His downfall, and the end of the 15-year era of talk radio he'd both created and dominated, came in the early 1940s when the nation was at war and Hitler was shipping millions of Jews to the death camps. For reasons still unknown (Alzheimer's is suspected), Coughlin launched into hard-right anti-Semitic tirades in his broadcasts, blaming an international Jewish conspiracy for communism, the Great Depression, World War II, and most of the world's other ills. His sudden shift to the radical right disgusted his listeners, and led his superiors in the Catholic Church to demand he retire from radio and return to his parish duties where he died in relative obscurity. Many say the Fairness Doctrine came about in part because of Coughlin.
A generation later, a new Father Coughlin emerged in the form of Rush Limbaugh, an articulate and talented talk-show host out of Sacramento. Joe Pyne (a conservative who almost always had a liberal with him on the air) was dead, and conservative investors and programmers were looking to unseat the fabulously popular liberal talker Alan Berg and bring "balance" to America's airwaves. (In June of 1984, the year Rush began "issues talk" on Sacramento's KFBK, Berg was machine-gunned to death by right-wingers claiming they were from the Aryan Nation.) Within four years, Rush rose to national status by offering his program free of charge to stations across the nation. Station managers, not being business dummies, laid off local talent and picked up Rush's free show, leading to a national phenomena: the Limbaugh show was one of America's greatest radio success stories, spreading from state to state faster than any modern talk show had ever done. (Such free or barter offerings are now standard in the industry.)
And, station managers discovered, there is a loyal group of radio listeners (around 20 million occasional listeners, with perhaps one to five million who consider themselves "dittoheads") who embraced Rush's brand of overt hard-right spin, believing every word he says even though he claims his show is "just entertainment" to avoid a reemergence of the Fairness Doctrine and the political-activity provisions of McCain/Feingold. The sudden success of Rush led local radio station programmers to look for more of the same: there was a sudden demand for Rush-clone talkers who could meet the
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