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"All Democrats are fat, lazy, and stupid," the talk-show host said in grave, serious tones as if he were uttering a sacred truth.
We were driving to Michigan for the holidays, and I was tuning around, listening for the stations I'd worked for two and three decades ago. I turned the dial. "It's a Hannity For Humanity house," a different host said, adding that the Habitat For Humanity home he'd apparently hijacked for his own self-promotion would only be given to a family that swears it's conservative. "No liberals are going to get this house," he said.
Turning the dial again, we found a convicted felon ranting about the importance of government having ever-more powers to monitor, investigate, and prosecute American citizens without having to worry about constitutional human rights protections. Apparently the combining of nationwide German police agencies (following the terrorist attack of February 1933 when the Parliament building was set afire) into one giant Fatherland Security Agency answerable only to the Executive Branch, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, was a lesson of history this guy had completely forgotten. Neither, apparently, do most Americans recall that the single most powerful device used to bring about the SS and its political master was radio.
Is history repeating itself?
Setting aside the shrill and nonsensical efforts of those who suggest the corporate-owned media in America is "liberal," the situation with regard to talk radio is particularly perplexing: It doesn't even carry a pretense of political balance. While the often-understated Al Gore recently came right out and said that much of the corporate-owned media are "part and parcel of the Republican Party," those who listen to talk radio know it has swung so far to the right that even Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater would be shocked.
Average Americans across the nation are wondering how could it be that a small fringe of the extreme right has so captured the nation's airwaves? And done it in such an effective fashion that when they attack folks like Tom Daschle, he and his family actually get increased numbers of death threats? How is it that ex-felons like John Poindexter's protegee Ollie North and Nixon's former burglar G. Gordon Liddy have become stars? How is it that ideologues like Rush Limbaugh can openly promote hard-right Republicans, and avoid a return of the dead-since-Reagan Fairness Doctrine (and get around the desire of the American public for fairness) by claiming what they do is "just entertainment"?
And, given the domination of talk radio by the fringe hard-right that represents the political views of only a small segment of America, why is it that the vast majority of talk radio stations across the nation never run even an occasional centrist or progressive show in the midst of their all-right, all-the-time programming day?
Even within the radio industry itself, there's astonishment.
Program directors and station managers I've talked with claim they have to program only hard-right hosts. They point out that when they insert even a few hours of a centrist or progressive talk host into a typical talk-radio day, the station's phone lines light up with angry, flaming reactions from listeners; even advertisers get calls of protest. Just last month, a talk-radio station manager told me solemnly, "Only right-wingers listen to AM radio any more. The lefties would rather read."
How could this be? After all, an "environmentalist" Democrat - Al Gore - won the majority of the popular vote in the last presidential election, with a half-million more votes than any other presidential candidate (of any party) in the entire history of the nation. How could it be that there are only two Democratic or progressive voices in major national radio syndication, and only a small handful in partial syndication or on local shows?
The issue is important for two reasons.
First, in a nation that considers itself a democratic republic, the institutions of democracy are imperiled by a lack of balanced national debate on issues of critical importance. As both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia learned, a steady radio drumbeat of a single viewpoint - from either end of the political spectrum - is not healthy for democracy when opposing voices are marginalized.
Second, what's happened recently in the radio industry represents a business opportunity of significant 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 needs of the nation's Rush-bonded listeners, and the all-right-wing-talk radio format emerged, dominated by Limbaugh and Limbaugh-clones in both style and political viewpoint.
Thus, the extreme fringe of the right wing dominates talk radio not because all radio listeners are right-wingers, but, instead, because the right wingers and their investors were the first to the market with a consistent and predictable programming slant, making right-wing-talk the first large niche to mature in the newly emergent talk segment of the radio industry. Listeners always know what they'll get with Rush or one of his clones, and programming to a loyal and identifiable audience is both the dream and the necessity of every radio station's management.
Which brings us to the opportunity this represents for Democrats, progressives, radio stations, and those interested in supporting democracy by bringing balance to the nation's airwaves.
Going back to the music radio programming analogy, think of Rush and Rush-clone-right-wing-talk as if it were Country/Western music. It's unique, instantly recognizable, and has a loyal and definable audience, just like any of the specific music niches. This explains why it's nearly impossible to successfully program progressive talk in the halfway fashion that's often been tried (and often failed) up to today.
The rules are the same as in music programming: any competent radio station program director knows they'll get angry listeners if they drop an hour of Rock or Rap into a Country/Western programming day. It's equally easy to predict that if you were to drop an hour or three of a progressive talker like Mike Malloy or Peter Werbe into a day dominated by Rush and his clones, the listeners will be outraged. After all, those particular listeners thought they were tuned into an all-right-wing station.
But that response doesn't mean - as conservatives in the radio industry suggest - that there is no market for progressive talk radio. What it means is that there's not yet an awakening in the broadcast industry to the reality that they're missing a huge unserved market. But, like with right-wing talk, for balanced or progressive talk radio to succeed it must be programmed consistently throughout the day (and with talent as outrageous and interesting as Rush and his most successful clones).
Most stations who today identify themselves as "talk radio" stations are really programming the specific niche of "hard-right-Republican-talk-radio," and the niche of "progressive-and-Democratic-talk-radio" (which would speak to an equal sized market) is just beginning to emerge and mature. Only a small handful of stations have made a serious effort to program progressive talk, and the only national network to offer any of it in a serious fashion, the "i.e. America Network," hasn't yet made the distinction between "progressive talk" and "soft/advice talk," and, thus, doesn't offer a full day and night's lineup of "hard" progressive talkers along with their "soft" talkers who break up the day.
The key to success for both radio stations and networks is to realize that talk radio isn't a monolithic niche - it's matured into a category, like music did in the 1950s - and within that category there are multiple niches, including the very large demographic niches of conservative talk, relationship-advice talk, progressive talk, and sports talk, and smaller niches of travel talk, investment talk, medical talk, local talk, etc.
The station programmers I've talked with who've tried a progressive or centrist talker for an hour or two, only to get angry responses from dittoheads, think this means only extreme-right-wing talkers (and, ideally, convicted felons or those who "declare war on liberals") will make money for their station. And, because they've already carved out the hard-right-Republican-talk niche and alienated the progressive/Democrat niche, they're right.
But for stations who want to get into talk in a market already dominated by right-wing talkers on competing stations, the irrefutable evidence of national elections and polls shows that believing only right-wingers will bring listeners (and advertisers) is a mistake. All they need do is what anybody with music programming experience would recommend: identify their niche and stick with it. (Cynics say stations won't program Democrats because owners and management are all "rich Republicans": to this, I say they should listen to some of the music being profitably produced and programmed by America's largest publishing and broadcasting corporations. Profits, for better or worse, are relatively opinion-free.)
By running Democratic/progressive-talk in a programming day free of right-wing talkers, stations will open up a new niche and ride it to success. This is a particularly huge opportunity for music stations who look with envy at the success of talk stations in their market, but haven't been willing to jump in because all the best right-wing talkers are already on the competition: all they need do is put on progressive talkers, and they'll open a new, unserved, and profitable niche.
And, with right-wing ideologues now in charge of our government, the time has never been better: as Rush showed during the Clinton years (the peak of his success), "issues" talk thrives best in an underdog environment. It's in the American psyche to give a fair listen to people challenging the party in power.
Those stations that take the plunge into progressive talk will serve democracy by offering a loyal opposition (which Americans always appreciate), and earn healthy revenues in an industry where it's increasingly difficult to find a profitable niche. And whichever network is first to realize this simple reality and provide stations with solid progressive or Democrat talk programming will build a strong, viable, and financially healthy business.
If you're in the business, consider seriously this advice from an old radio station programmer. And if you listen to radio, call your local stations (both talk and music) to let them know that you want to hear progressive or Democrat voices, and will even patronize the advertisers of such shows when they run them.
It's time to revitalize democracy and rational political discourse by returning balance to our nation's airwaves, and the profits to be made in this huge unfilled niche may be just the catalyst to bring it about.
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"All Democrats are fat, lazy, and stupid," the talk-show host said in grave, serious tones as if he were uttering a sacred truth.
We were driving to Michigan for the holidays, and I was tuning around, listening for the stations I'd worked for two and three decades ago. I turned the dial. "It's a Hannity For Humanity house," a different host said, adding that the Habitat For Humanity home he'd apparently hijacked for his own self-promotion would only be given to a family that swears it's conservative. "No liberals are going to get this house," he said.
Turning the dial again, we found a convicted felon ranting about the importance of government having ever-more powers to monitor, investigate, and prosecute American citizens without having to worry about constitutional human rights protections. Apparently the combining of nationwide German police agencies (following the terrorist attack of February 1933 when the Parliament building was set afire) into one giant Fatherland Security Agency answerable only to the Executive Branch, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, was a lesson of history this guy had completely forgotten. Neither, apparently, do most Americans recall that the single most powerful device used to bring about the SS and its political master was radio.
Is history repeating itself?
Setting aside the shrill and nonsensical efforts of those who suggest the corporate-owned media in America is "liberal," the situation with regard to talk radio is particularly perplexing: It doesn't even carry a pretense of political balance. While the often-understated Al Gore recently came right out and said that much of the corporate-owned media are "part and parcel of the Republican Party," those who listen to talk radio know it has swung so far to the right that even Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater would be shocked.
Average Americans across the nation are wondering how could it be that a small fringe of the extreme right has so captured the nation's airwaves? And done it in such an effective fashion that when they attack folks like Tom Daschle, he and his family actually get increased numbers of death threats? How is it that ex-felons like John Poindexter's protegee Ollie North and Nixon's former burglar G. Gordon Liddy have become stars? How is it that ideologues like Rush Limbaugh can openly promote hard-right Republicans, and avoid a return of the dead-since-Reagan Fairness Doctrine (and get around the desire of the American public for fairness) by claiming what they do is "just entertainment"?
And, given the domination of talk radio by the fringe hard-right that represents the political views of only a small segment of America, why is it that the vast majority of talk radio stations across the nation never run even an occasional centrist or progressive show in the midst of their all-right, all-the-time programming day?
Even within the radio industry itself, there's astonishment.
Program directors and station managers I've talked with claim they have to program only hard-right hosts. They point out that when they insert even a few hours of a centrist or progressive talk host into a typical talk-radio day, the station's phone lines light up with angry, flaming reactions from listeners; even advertisers get calls of protest. Just last month, a talk-radio station manager told me solemnly, "Only right-wingers listen to AM radio any more. The lefties would rather read."
How could this be? After all, an "environmentalist" Democrat - Al Gore - won the majority of the popular vote in the last presidential election, with a half-million more votes than any other presidential candidate (of any party) in the entire history of the nation. How could it be that there are only two Democratic or progressive voices in major national radio syndication, and only a small handful in partial syndication or on local shows?
The issue is important for two reasons.
First, in a nation that considers itself a democratic republic, the institutions of democracy are imperiled by a lack of balanced national debate on issues of critical importance. As both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia learned, a steady radio drumbeat of a single viewpoint - from either end of the political spectrum - is not healthy for democracy when opposing voices are marginalized.
Second, what's happened recently in the radio industry represents a business opportunity of significant 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 needs of the nation's Rush-bonded listeners, and the all-right-wing-talk radio format emerged, dominated by Limbaugh and Limbaugh-clones in both style and political viewpoint.
Thus, the extreme fringe of the right wing dominates talk radio not because all radio listeners are right-wingers, but, instead, because the right wingers and their investors were the first to the market with a consistent and predictable programming slant, making right-wing-talk the first large niche to mature in the newly emergent talk segment of the radio industry. Listeners always know what they'll get with Rush or one of his clones, and programming to a loyal and identifiable audience is both the dream and the necessity of every radio station's management.
Which brings us to the opportunity this represents for Democrats, progressives, radio stations, and those interested in supporting democracy by bringing balance to the nation's airwaves.
Going back to the music radio programming analogy, think of Rush and Rush-clone-right-wing-talk as if it were Country/Western music. It's unique, instantly recognizable, and has a loyal and definable audience, just like any of the specific music niches. This explains why it's nearly impossible to successfully program progressive talk in the halfway fashion that's often been tried (and often failed) up to today.
The rules are the same as in music programming: any competent radio station program director knows they'll get angry listeners if they drop an hour of Rock or Rap into a Country/Western programming day. It's equally easy to predict that if you were to drop an hour or three of a progressive talker like Mike Malloy or Peter Werbe into a day dominated by Rush and his clones, the listeners will be outraged. After all, those particular listeners thought they were tuned into an all-right-wing station.
But that response doesn't mean - as conservatives in the radio industry suggest - that there is no market for progressive talk radio. What it means is that there's not yet an awakening in the broadcast industry to the reality that they're missing a huge unserved market. But, like with right-wing talk, for balanced or progressive talk radio to succeed it must be programmed consistently throughout the day (and with talent as outrageous and interesting as Rush and his most successful clones).
Most stations who today identify themselves as "talk radio" stations are really programming the specific niche of "hard-right-Republican-talk-radio," and the niche of "progressive-and-Democratic-talk-radio" (which would speak to an equal sized market) is just beginning to emerge and mature. Only a small handful of stations have made a serious effort to program progressive talk, and the only national network to offer any of it in a serious fashion, the "i.e. America Network," hasn't yet made the distinction between "progressive talk" and "soft/advice talk," and, thus, doesn't offer a full day and night's lineup of "hard" progressive talkers along with their "soft" talkers who break up the day.
The key to success for both radio stations and networks is to realize that talk radio isn't a monolithic niche - it's matured into a category, like music did in the 1950s - and within that category there are multiple niches, including the very large demographic niches of conservative talk, relationship-advice talk, progressive talk, and sports talk, and smaller niches of travel talk, investment talk, medical talk, local talk, etc.
The station programmers I've talked with who've tried a progressive or centrist talker for an hour or two, only to get angry responses from dittoheads, think this means only extreme-right-wing talkers (and, ideally, convicted felons or those who "declare war on liberals") will make money for their station. And, because they've already carved out the hard-right-Republican-talk niche and alienated the progressive/Democrat niche, they're right.
But for stations who want to get into talk in a market already dominated by right-wing talkers on competing stations, the irrefutable evidence of national elections and polls shows that believing only right-wingers will bring listeners (and advertisers) is a mistake. All they need do is what anybody with music programming experience would recommend: identify their niche and stick with it. (Cynics say stations won't program Democrats because owners and management are all "rich Republicans": to this, I say they should listen to some of the music being profitably produced and programmed by America's largest publishing and broadcasting corporations. Profits, for better or worse, are relatively opinion-free.)
By running Democratic/progressive-talk in a programming day free of right-wing talkers, stations will open up a new niche and ride it to success. This is a particularly huge opportunity for music stations who look with envy at the success of talk stations in their market, but haven't been willing to jump in because all the best right-wing talkers are already on the competition: all they need do is put on progressive talkers, and they'll open a new, unserved, and profitable niche.
And, with right-wing ideologues now in charge of our government, the time has never been better: as Rush showed during the Clinton years (the peak of his success), "issues" talk thrives best in an underdog environment. It's in the American psyche to give a fair listen to people challenging the party in power.
Those stations that take the plunge into progressive talk will serve democracy by offering a loyal opposition (which Americans always appreciate), and earn healthy revenues in an industry where it's increasingly difficult to find a profitable niche. And whichever network is first to realize this simple reality and provide stations with solid progressive or Democrat talk programming will build a strong, viable, and financially healthy business.
If you're in the business, consider seriously this advice from an old radio station programmer. And if you listen to radio, call your local stations (both talk and music) to let them know that you want to hear progressive or Democrat voices, and will even patronize the advertisers of such shows when they run them.
It's time to revitalize democracy and rational political discourse by returning balance to our nation's airwaves, and the profits to be made in this huge unfilled niche may be just the catalyst to bring it about.
"All Democrats are fat, lazy, and stupid," the talk-show host said in grave, serious tones as if he were uttering a sacred truth.
We were driving to Michigan for the holidays, and I was tuning around, listening for the stations I'd worked for two and three decades ago. I turned the dial. "It's a Hannity For Humanity house," a different host said, adding that the Habitat For Humanity home he'd apparently hijacked for his own self-promotion would only be given to a family that swears it's conservative. "No liberals are going to get this house," he said.
Turning the dial again, we found a convicted felon ranting about the importance of government having ever-more powers to monitor, investigate, and prosecute American citizens without having to worry about constitutional human rights protections. Apparently the combining of nationwide German police agencies (following the terrorist attack of February 1933 when the Parliament building was set afire) into one giant Fatherland Security Agency answerable only to the Executive Branch, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, was a lesson of history this guy had completely forgotten. Neither, apparently, do most Americans recall that the single most powerful device used to bring about the SS and its political master was radio.
Is history repeating itself?
Setting aside the shrill and nonsensical efforts of those who suggest the corporate-owned media in America is "liberal," the situation with regard to talk radio is particularly perplexing: It doesn't even carry a pretense of political balance. While the often-understated Al Gore recently came right out and said that much of the corporate-owned media are "part and parcel of the Republican Party," those who listen to talk radio know it has swung so far to the right that even Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater would be shocked.
Average Americans across the nation are wondering how could it be that a small fringe of the extreme right has so captured the nation's airwaves? And done it in such an effective fashion that when they attack folks like Tom Daschle, he and his family actually get increased numbers of death threats? How is it that ex-felons like John Poindexter's protegee Ollie North and Nixon's former burglar G. Gordon Liddy have become stars? How is it that ideologues like Rush Limbaugh can openly promote hard-right Republicans, and avoid a return of the dead-since-Reagan Fairness Doctrine (and get around the desire of the American public for fairness) by claiming what they do is "just entertainment"?
And, given the domination of talk radio by the fringe hard-right that represents the political views of only a small segment of America, why is it that the vast majority of talk radio stations across the nation never run even an occasional centrist or progressive show in the midst of their all-right, all-the-time programming day?
Even within the radio industry itself, there's astonishment.
Program directors and station managers I've talked with claim they have to program only hard-right hosts. They point out that when they insert even a few hours of a centrist or progressive talk host into a typical talk-radio day, the station's phone lines light up with angry, flaming reactions from listeners; even advertisers get calls of protest. Just last month, a talk-radio station manager told me solemnly, "Only right-wingers listen to AM radio any more. The lefties would rather read."
How could this be? After all, an "environmentalist" Democrat - Al Gore - won the majority of the popular vote in the last presidential election, with a half-million more votes than any other presidential candidate (of any party) in the entire history of the nation. How could it be that there are only two Democratic or progressive voices in major national radio syndication, and only a small handful in partial syndication or on local shows?
The issue is important for two reasons.
First, in a nation that considers itself a democratic republic, the institutions of democracy are imperiled by a lack of balanced national debate on issues of critical importance. As both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia learned, a steady radio drumbeat of a single viewpoint - from either end of the political spectrum - is not healthy for democracy when opposing voices are marginalized.
Second, what's happened recently in the radio industry represents a business opportunity of significant 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 needs of the nation's Rush-bonded listeners, and the all-right-wing-talk radio format emerged, dominated by Limbaugh and Limbaugh-clones in both style and political viewpoint.
Thus, the extreme fringe of the right wing dominates talk radio not because all radio listeners are right-wingers, but, instead, because the right wingers and their investors were the first to the market with a consistent and predictable programming slant, making right-wing-talk the first large niche to mature in the newly emergent talk segment of the radio industry. Listeners always know what they'll get with Rush or one of his clones, and programming to a loyal and identifiable audience is both the dream and the necessity of every radio station's management.
Which brings us to the opportunity this represents for Democrats, progressives, radio stations, and those interested in supporting democracy by bringing balance to the nation's airwaves.
Going back to the music radio programming analogy, think of Rush and Rush-clone-right-wing-talk as if it were Country/Western music. It's unique, instantly recognizable, and has a loyal and definable audience, just like any of the specific music niches. This explains why it's nearly impossible to successfully program progressive talk in the halfway fashion that's often been tried (and often failed) up to today.
The rules are the same as in music programming: any competent radio station program director knows they'll get angry listeners if they drop an hour of Rock or Rap into a Country/Western programming day. It's equally easy to predict that if you were to drop an hour or three of a progressive talker like Mike Malloy or Peter Werbe into a day dominated by Rush and his clones, the listeners will be outraged. After all, those particular listeners thought they were tuned into an all-right-wing station.
But that response doesn't mean - as conservatives in the radio industry suggest - that there is no market for progressive talk radio. What it means is that there's not yet an awakening in the broadcast industry to the reality that they're missing a huge unserved market. But, like with right-wing talk, for balanced or progressive talk radio to succeed it must be programmed consistently throughout the day (and with talent as outrageous and interesting as Rush and his most successful clones).
Most stations who today identify themselves as "talk radio" stations are really programming the specific niche of "hard-right-Republican-talk-radio," and the niche of "progressive-and-Democratic-talk-radio" (which would speak to an equal sized market) is just beginning to emerge and mature. Only a small handful of stations have made a serious effort to program progressive talk, and the only national network to offer any of it in a serious fashion, the "i.e. America Network," hasn't yet made the distinction between "progressive talk" and "soft/advice talk," and, thus, doesn't offer a full day and night's lineup of "hard" progressive talkers along with their "soft" talkers who break up the day.
The key to success for both radio stations and networks is to realize that talk radio isn't a monolithic niche - it's matured into a category, like music did in the 1950s - and within that category there are multiple niches, including the very large demographic niches of conservative talk, relationship-advice talk, progressive talk, and sports talk, and smaller niches of travel talk, investment talk, medical talk, local talk, etc.
The station programmers I've talked with who've tried a progressive or centrist talker for an hour or two, only to get angry responses from dittoheads, think this means only extreme-right-wing talkers (and, ideally, convicted felons or those who "declare war on liberals") will make money for their station. And, because they've already carved out the hard-right-Republican-talk niche and alienated the progressive/Democrat niche, they're right.
But for stations who want to get into talk in a market already dominated by right-wing talkers on competing stations, the irrefutable evidence of national elections and polls shows that believing only right-wingers will bring listeners (and advertisers) is a mistake. All they need do is what anybody with music programming experience would recommend: identify their niche and stick with it. (Cynics say stations won't program Democrats because owners and management are all "rich Republicans": to this, I say they should listen to some of the music being profitably produced and programmed by America's largest publishing and broadcasting corporations. Profits, for better or worse, are relatively opinion-free.)
By running Democratic/progressive-talk in a programming day free of right-wing talkers, stations will open up a new niche and ride it to success. This is a particularly huge opportunity for music stations who look with envy at the success of talk stations in their market, but haven't been willing to jump in because all the best right-wing talkers are already on the competition: all they need do is put on progressive talkers, and they'll open a new, unserved, and profitable niche.
And, with right-wing ideologues now in charge of our government, the time has never been better: as Rush showed during the Clinton years (the peak of his success), "issues" talk thrives best in an underdog environment. It's in the American psyche to give a fair listen to people challenging the party in power.
Those stations that take the plunge into progressive talk will serve democracy by offering a loyal opposition (which Americans always appreciate), and earn healthy revenues in an industry where it's increasingly difficult to find a profitable niche. And whichever network is first to realize this simple reality and provide stations with solid progressive or Democrat talk programming will build a strong, viable, and financially healthy business.
If you're in the business, consider seriously this advice from an old radio station programmer. And if you listen to radio, call your local stations (both talk and music) to let them know that you want to hear progressive or Democrat voices, and will even patronize the advertisers of such shows when they run them.
It's time to revitalize democracy and rational political discourse by returning balance to our nation's airwaves, and the profits to be made in this huge unfilled niche may be just the catalyst to bring it about.
"Bureau of Labor Statistics data is what determines the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits," said Rep. John Larson. "It should alarm everyone when a yes-man determined to end Social Security is installed in this position."
U.S. President Donald Trump's pick to replace the top labor statistics official he fired earlier this month has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" that needs to be "sunset," comments that critics said further disqualify the nominee for the key government role.
During a December 2024 radio interview, Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni said it is a "mathematical fiction" that Social Security "can go on forever" and called for "some kind of transition program where unfortunately you'll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes, but never actually receive any of those benefits."
"That's the price to pay for unwinding a Ponzi scheme that was foisted on the American people by the Democrats in the 1930s," Antoni continued. "You're not going to be able to sustain a Ponzi scheme like Social Security. Eventually, you need to sunset the program."
Trump's choice for the Commissioner of the Bureau Labor Statistics called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" in an interview:
" What you need to do is have some kind of transition program where unfortunately you'll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes, but… pic.twitter.com/MXL7k1C644
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) August 12, 2025
Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), one of Social Security's most vocal defenders in Congress, said Antoni's position on the program matters because "Bureau of Labor Statistics data is what determines the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits."
"It should alarm everyone when a yes-man determined to end Social Security is installed in this position," Larson said in a statement. "I call on every Senate Republican to stand with Democrats and reject this extreme nominee—before our seniors are denied the benefits they earned through a lifetime of hard work."
Trump announced Antoni's nomination to serve as the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) less than two weeks after the president fired the agency's former head, Erika McEntarfer, following the release of abysmal jobs figures. The firing sparked concerns that future BLS data will be manipulated to suit Trump's political interests.
Antoni was a contributor to the far-right Project 2025 agenda that the Trump administration appears to have drawn from repeatedly this year, and his position on Social Security echoes that of far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who has also falsely characterized the program as a Ponzi scheme.
During his time in the Trump administration, Musk spearheaded an assault on the Social Security Administration that continues in the present, causing widespread chaos at the agency and increasing wait times for beneficiaries.
"President Trump fired the commissioner of Labor Statistics to cover up a weak jobs report—and now he is replacing her with a Project 2025 lackey who wants to shut down Social Security," said Larson. "E.J. Antoni agrees with Elon Musk that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and said that middle-class seniors would be better off if it was eliminated."
"This sends a chilling message that the U.S. is willing to overlook some abuses, signaling that people experiencing human rights violations may be left to fend for themselves," said one Amnesty campaigner.
After leaked drafts exposed the Trump administration's plans to downplay human rights abuses in some allied countries, including Israel, the U.S. Department of State released the final edition of an annual report on Tuesday, sparking fresh condemnation.
"Breaking with precedent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not provide a written introduction to the report nor did he make remarks about it," CNN reported. Still, Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, called him out by name in a Tuesday statement.
"With the release of the U.S. State Department's human rights report, it is clear that the Trump administration has engaged in a very selective documentation of human rights abuses in certain countries," Klasing said. "In addition to eliminating entire sections for certain countries—for example discrimination against LGBTQ+ people—there are also arbitrary omissions within existing sections of the report based on the country."
Klasing explained that "we have criticized past reports when warranted, but have never seen reports quite like this. Never before have the reports gone this far in prioritizing an administration's political agenda over a consistent and truthful accounting of human rights violations around the world—softening criticism in some countries while ignoring violations in others. The State Department has said in relation to the reports less is more. However, for the victims and human rights defenders who rely on these reports to shine light on abuses and violations, less is just less."
"Secretary Rubio knows full well from his time in the Senate how vital these reports are in informing policy decisions and shaping diplomatic conversations, yet he has made the dangerous and short-sighted decision to put out a truncated version that doesn't tell the whole story of human rights violations," she continued. "This sends a chilling message that the U.S. is willing to overlook some abuses, signaling that people experiencing human rights violations may be left to fend for themselves."
"Failing to adequately report on human rights violations further damages the credibility of the U.S. on human rights issues," she added. "It's shameful that the Trump administration and Secretary Rubio are putting politics above human lives."
The overarching report—which includes over 100 individual country reports—covers 2024, the last full calendar year of the Biden administration. The appendix says that in March, the report was "streamlined for better utility and accessibility in the field and by partners, and to be more responsive to the underlying legislative mandate and aligned to the administration's executive orders."
As CNN detailed:
The latest report was stripped of many of the specific sections included in past reports, including reporting on alleged abuses based on sexual orientation, violence toward women, corruption in government, systemic racial or ethnic violence, or denial of a fair public trial. Some country reports, including for Afghanistan, do address human rights abuses against women.
"We were asked to edit down the human rights reports to the bare minimum of what was statutorily required," said Michael Honigstein, the former director of African Affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor. He and his office helped compile the initial reports.
Over the past week, since the draft country reports leaked to the press, the Trump administration has come under fire for its portrayals of El Salvador, Israel, and Russia.
The report on Israel—and the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—is just nine pages. The brevity even drew the attention of Israeli media. The Times of Israel highlighted that it "is much shorter than last year's edition compiled under the Biden administration and contained no mention of the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza."
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have slaughtered over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local officials—though experts warn the true toll is likely far higher. As Israel has restricted humanitarian aid in recent months, over 200 people have starved to death, including 103 children.
The U.S. report on Israel does not mention the genocide case that Israel faces at the International Court of Justice over the assault on Gaza, or the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The section on war crimes and genocide only says that "terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah continue to engage in the
indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians in violation of the law of armed conflict."
As the world mourns the killing of six more Palestinian media professionals in Gaza this week—which prompted calls for the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency meeting—the report's section on press freedom is also short and makes no mention of the hundreds of journalists killed in Israel's annihilation of the strip:
The law generally provided for freedom of expression, including for members of the press and other media, and the government generally respected this right for most Israelis. NGOs and journalists reported authorities restricted press coverage and limited certain forms of expression, especially in the context of criticism against the war or sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza.
Noting that "the human rights reports have been among the U.S. government's most-read documents," DAWN senior adviser and 32-year State Department official Charles Blaha said the "significant omissions" in this year's report on Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank render it "functionally useless for Congress and the public as nothing more than a pro-Israel document."
Like Klasing at Amnesty, Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN's executive director, specifically called out the U.S. secretary of state.
"Secretary Rubio has revamped the State Department reports for one principal purpose: to whitewash Israeli crimes, including its horrific genocide and starvation in Gaza. The report shockingly includes not a word about the overwhelming evidence of genocide, mass starvation, and the deliberate bombardment of civilians in Gaza," she said. "Rubio has defied the letter and intent of U.S. laws requiring the State Department to report truthfully and comprehensively about every country's human rights abuses, instead offering up anodyne cover for his murderous friends in Tel Aviv."
The Tuesday release came after a coalition of LGBTQ+ and human rights organizations on Monday filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department over its refusal to release the congressionally mandated report.
This article has been updated with comment from DAWN.
"We will not sit idly by while political leaders manipulate voting maps to entrench their power and subvert our democracy," said the head of Common Cause.
As Republicans try to rig congressional maps in several states and Democrats threaten retaliatory measures, a pro-democracy watchdog on Tuesday unveiled new fairness standards underscoring that "independent redistricting commissions remain the gold standard for ending partisan gerrymandering."
Common Cause will hold an online media briefing Wednesday at noon Eastern time "to walk reporters though the six pieces of criteria the organization will use to evaluate any proposed maps."
The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group said that "it will closely evaluate, but not automatically condemn, countermeasures" to Republican gerrymandering efforts—especially mid-decade redistricting not based on decennial censuses.
Amid the gerrymandering wars, we just launched 6 fairness criteria to hold all actors to the same principled standard: people first—not parties. Read our criteria here: www.commoncause.org/resources/po...
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— Common Cause (@commoncause.org) August 12, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Common Cause's six fairness criteria for mid-decade redistricting are:
"We will not sit idly by while political leaders manipulate voting maps to entrench their power and subvert our democracy," Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement. "But neither will we call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarian tactics that undermine fair representation."
"We have established a fairness criteria that we will use to evaluate all countermeasures so we can respond to the most urgent threats to fair representation while holding all actors to the same principled standard: people—not parties—first," she added.
Common Cause's fairness criteria come amid the ongoing standoff between Republicans trying to gerrymander Texas' congressional map and Democratic lawmakers who fled the state in a bid to stymie a vote on the measure. Texas state senators on Tuesday approved the proposed map despite a walkout by most of their Democratic colleagues.
Leaders of several Democrat-controlled states, most notably California, have threatened retaliatory redistricting.
"This moment is about more than responding to a single threat—it's about building the movement for lasting reform," Kase Solomón asserted. "This is not an isolated political tactic; it is part of a broader march toward authoritarianism, dismantling people-powered democracy, and stripping away the people's ability to have a political voice and say in how they are governed."