Ideological Bleed-Through on Specialty Shows

[Steven21]

Your Larry King comment is very misleading. The failure of that show had everything to do with style, scheduling and changing priorities, not ideology.

That's your spin on the story. He was the biggest name in radio, with a better track record than Rush, and stations had a lot of wiggle room with scheduling. If they cleared a right winger in mid-days, why wouldn't they follow him with a more moderate host with big name guests? These very same stations have now put Hannity in that exact same time slot. So much for their commitment to local programming. Larry's failure in daytime was a lesson to programmers for what works in daytime talk. So that approach to radio moved to NPR. Terry Gross is Larry's ideological successor.

As for "laid back," what do you want from a moderate? Leykis was more laid back before he started booking strippers. Maybe Larry needed some strippers on his show.

See, in your mind moderates are laid back--which means you STILL don't get it. Like many, you equate being moderate with having little emotion or passion. That is so misguided. You seem reasonably intelligent, yet you cannot grasp this easu-to-understand point.

And you sure like to revise history, don't you?

The Larry King clearance issue was not a closely held secret---except from you apparently.

As far as stations putting Hannity in the same spot: Are you serious? Almost 10 years elapsed between King in daytime and Hannity's rollout.
Do I need to school you on the monumental change in conventional wisdom regarding local vs. syndicated talk programming during those pivotal years, particularly post-Telecom?

And as far as Leykis being "laid back" before he went for the T&A stuff: Seriously, you must've NEVER heard Tom Leykis and are just making this stuff up as you go along. Leykis was already a firecracker when I first started hearing him in the late 80s on KFI. He was heavy-duty issues-oriented and EXTREMELY passionate about it.

You are waaaay off base on these points.

 

[TheBigA]

See, in your mind moderates are laid back--which means you STILL don't get it. Like many, you equate being moderate with having little emotion or passion. THAT is as wrong as wrong can be.

That's because you can't name an emotional moderate.

And you sure like to revise history, don't you?

Not at all. Where did I say clearance was not an issue? You seem to be putting words in my mouth in order for you to disagree.

 

[Steven21]

See, in your mind moderates are laid back--which means you STILL don't get it. Like many, you equate being moderate with having little emotion or passion. THAT is as wrong as wrong can be.

That's because you can't name an emotional moderate.

And you sure like to revise history, don't you?

Not at all. Where did I say clearance was not an issue? You seem to be putting words in my mouth in order for you to disagree.

Hello?

Is this keyboard on?

Tom Leykis is a pretty emotional moderate. He is/was actually more emotional/passionate than most conservatives.

Now you're going to disect something you heard him say once and proclaim him to NOT be a moderate, etc. etc. etc.

Ho hum.

As far as the King clearance issue: you very clearly (yet incorrectly) implied it wasn't an issue ( your requisite backpedal, I believe).

There are plenty of people who are PASSIONATE and EMOTIONAL and are NOT one-sided Sean Hannity-style. Can I give a bunch of examples of those on the air like this? It's difficult, considering the overwhelming majority of those on the air are Rush clones.

You really need to talk to normal everyday people. There are so many in society who are passionate in their opinions, but have opinions that vary from liberal to coservative, depending on the issue. You would call them moderate---which in your opinion means laid back or unemotional. And you are again WRONG in that assumption.

 

[TheBigA]

Now you're going to disect something you heard him say once and proclaim him to NOT be a moderate, etc. etc. etc.

No. I said what I meant to say about him, which is, he ceased dealing with political issues a long time ago, and now he's off the air. Try and come up with someone who is still working.

There are plenty of people who are PASSIONATE and EMOTIONAL and are NOT one-sided Sean Hannity-style. Can I give a bunch of examples of those on the air like this?

I'm not asking for a bunch. One would be a good place to start. But he should be #1 in his daypart.

 

[Steven21]

Now you're going to disect something you heard him say once and proclaim him to NOT be a moderate, etc. etc. etc.

No. I said what I meant to say about him, which is, he ceased dealing with political issues a long time ago, and now he's off the air. Try and come up with someone who is still working.

There are plenty of people who are PASSIONATE and EMOTIONAL and are NOT one-sided Sean Hannity-style. Can I give a bunch of examples of those on the air like this?

I'm not asking for a bunch. One would be a good place to start. But he should be #1 in his daypart.

That's exxactly the point: The format has gotten to where there aren't any moderates that come to mind. They've all been eliminated for the sake of perpetuating the stereotype that talk hosts have to be hardcore conservatives!

Or BIG A, are you trying to tell us that talk radio stations have only done well with conservative hosts? That would come as a surprise to many :-Xof the biggest stations in the country that did well before the format became a conservative haven. Actually, a number of those stations don't even have the numbers they had when the opinions were more varied.

The chronology of events that has the format where it is today is less about ideology than it is about copycats and cookie cutters---something very familiar to all radio formats.

People like you have your mind made up. You have re-written the history that explains how we got to this point and refuse to recognize that talkradio DOES NOT have to cater to ideologues to viable---only one type of ideologue no less.

That's what the niche has become, so let it be said:
Talkradio formally belongs to very conservative people. Nobody else would enjoy entertaining and stimulating conversation. So let's never, ever put someone on the air who doesn't parrot Limbaugh.

The End.

What great radio.

 

[TheBigA]

That's exxactly the point: The format has gotten to where there aren't any moderates that come to mind. They've all been eliminated for the sake of perpetuating the stereotype that talk hosts have to be hardcore conservatives!

Sounds like you're making excuses.

If a moderate can't succeed, then what's the point of forcing one on a public that's already made up its mind? They didn't support moderates when they were on the air, so why should radio put them on the air, and potentially lose money, just for the chance that one might catch on? Who takes the risk? Shouldn't the person who takes the risk have the choice as to who gets the air time? Isn't that the way the system works?

 

[Steven21]

That's exxactly the point: The format has gotten to where there aren't any moderates that come to mind. They've all been eliminated for the sake of perpetuating the stereotype that talk hosts have to be hardcore conservatives!

Sounds like you're making excuses.

If a moderate can't succeed, then what's the point of forcing one on a public that's already made up its mind? They didn't support moderates when they were on the air, so why should radio put them on the air, and potentially lose money, just for the chance that one might catch on? Who takes the risk? Shouldn't the person who takes the risk have the choice as to who gets the air time? Isn't that the way the system works?

So all of the major talk outlets in the country who have dominated their respective markets for years, were staffed with all-conservatives all-the-time?

WRONG.

That mindset demonstrates a total lack of understanding as to the chronology of events that has talkradio sounding the way it does today.

The talkradio Monday-morning quarterbacks like to come in 20 years down the road and hypothesize about why talkradio has the bent it now does.



is so widespread.

 

[TheBigA]

The talkradio Monday-morning quarterbacks like to come in 20 years down the road and hypothesize about why talkradio has the bent it now does.

I sense a conspiracy theory here.

There is none. It's all about money. Don't waste your time thinking it has anything to do with ideology. If that's why things were only about ideology, Oprah & Friends would be on terrestrial radio instead of XM. She took the money and ignored her fan base, who mostly listen to terrestrial.

Don't lecture me about what talk radio used to be. It doesn't matter. No one cares. All the old folks are either retired or dead. You come up with a way for moderates to make money, and you'll win. Otherwise, listen to NPR. The end.

 

[Steven21]

The talkradio Monday-morning quarterbacks like to come in 20 years down the road and hypothesize about why talkradio has the bent it now does.

I sense a conspiracy theory here.

There is none. It's all about money. Don't waste your time thinking it has anything to do with ideology. If that's why things were only about ideology, Oprah & Friends would be on terrestrial radio instead of XM. She took the money and ignored her fan base, who mostly listen to terrestrial.

Don't lecture me about what talk radio used to be. It doesn't matter. No one cares. All the old folks are either retired or dead. You come up with a way for moderates to make money, and you'll win. Otherwise, listen to NPR. The end.

You are way off base and completely misunderstood the point.

There is NO conspiracy to cram an ideology down anyone's throat. I never said that. There has been, however, a systematic steering of the format in one direction, in the same way that music radio sees a type of format doing well and copies it everywhere, irrespective to whether or not anything else will also work.

Talk programmers, like music programmers, are not on the whole a very creative bunch. They love to copy what was working--even if they don't know the exact reason(s) it is working. In the early 90s, after Limbaugh had become big, talk programmers started skewing programming in that direction and hiring Rush clones near and far. Many not only parroted Rush, they even sounded like him in timber and cadence. So, systematically, the format became more and more of a club, where reasonable people were not allowed. The audience slowly but surely evolved with that.

Was this the right approach? Since it is working at the moment, it's difficult to explain to some (and-you-know-who-you-are) why it doesn't HAVE to be this way.

But you cannot explain this to them, because thanks to Monday morning quarterbacking, they've decided that talkradio is only for conservatives now. If you understand the chronology of events over the last 20 years, that has this format sounding the way it does, you would realize it has less to do with preferred oin-air ideology and more instead to do with radio just being radio: Shallow and myopic.

even sounded like Rush

 

[Oldbones]

Talkradio is really devolving into this total one-trick pony. VERY shortsighted.

As it is, many younger people think AM radio is just about politics. Now even older non-extremists are stereotyping the format as well. AM radio isn't now JUST politics---it's only CONSERVATIVE politics!

B-O-R-I-N-G.

Anyone who tells you it has to be this way is lazy and/or an ideologue.

Stations go with what works. Conservative talk seems to work. Recall what a smashing success Air America was? As far as mixing ideologies on a station, that doesn't seem to work any better than throwing in an AC/DC song on a soft AC. All you do is drive your audience away. The choir likes to be preached to.

You're right though that it does become self-perpetuating. Someday it will burn itself out, and AM will be dead.

 

[smedge2006]

Rather than plow through old ground or refute the same old talking points about Air America ("Look, we put the format on the radio equivalent of a 1982 K-Car in our market and it didn't win the Grand Prix so it's a failure!") I'll try one more time to get this thread back on its original track. If specialty shows begin parroting the political takes offered during the week, are they not in danger of driving away the listeners who don't listen during the week but don't mind a little gardening or home improvement advice on Saturday morning and -- more critically -- are they not in danger of driving away the big-ticket ADVERTISERS for whom the garden show or the fix-it show is their only investment in AM talk radio in the entire week?

 

[DToTheJ]

I would say Larry Kudlow's local weekend show on WABC/New York would qualify for this thread. He has a daily show on CNBC, and he's known for financial talk. But last week in particular, he started going into a rant about Obama and ACORN and Van Jones - I wonder if he was auditioning for a spot on Fox Business, let alone Fox News!

 

[DToTheJ]

Another example: Steve Cordasco - he hosts a weekly financial show ("The Big Money") on Philadelphia's W{HT but was heard subbing for the aforementioned Kudlow on WABC a couple of times. I've heard some anti-Obama vernacular from Cordasco from time to time, as well. Like WABC, WPHT clears conservative talkers like Limbaugh and Hannity on their daily lineups.

 

[smedge2006]

Cordasco and Kudlow seem to have a case of Rick Santelli syndrome.

A lot of the weekend alternative-health radio talk shows are also adopting the paranoid style and conflating the Federal Trade Commission's battles with quacks with the battle over health care: "Obama wants to take away your health freedom!" Some alternative hosts are picking up the phrase "If you think health care is expensive now, wait till it's free." It's not quite "Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?", the most famous marketing phrase in alternative-health history, nor is it "Death begins in the colon", but it's moving up the health radio charts.

 

[Bob1370]

"Stations go with what works. Conservative talk seems to work. Recall what a smashing success Air America was? As far as mixing ideologies on a station, that doesn't seem to work any better than throwing in an AC/DC song on a soft AC. All you do is drive your audience away. The choir likes to be preached to."

How well is it working today? Rush still has his core listeners, guys born between 1925 and 1955. So do Hannity and the other best known national talkers who are carried on most of the same stations that pulled those folks in with Rush 25 years ago.

When Rush, and the talk stations that carry him, got started in the late 1980s they were the 35-54 prime demos talk radio wanted. Those listeners are still there and still loyal, but they're now 55 to 84. To an alarming degree, the succeeding generations don't seem to have followed them into the Rush tent. Air America didn't capture the younger contingent of possible talk listeners because they just offered the same style with a different political slant, and did it more amateurishly for the most part. Instead, some of those listeners went with Stern until he left broadcast radio, others gravitated to sports talk, and the upscale college grads among them went to their local NPR affiliate for both the local and national news and talk they wanted.

There is an example from the past that may be instructive today. When talk radio got started, KABC built a big audience, and for a time between the 70s and the mid-90s was the number one billing station in the country, by fielding a righty-lefty mix of hosts who had energy and wit in common even if they argued with each other (and the callers) on the air. It started as a way to get around the Fairness Doctrine but even after the rule was gone, it worked as a programming philosophy. What talk radio needs now is to get beyond the box it placed itself in.

 

[jerry367]

"Stations go with what works. Conservative talk seems to work. Recall what a smashing success Air America was? As far as mixing ideologies on a station, that doesn't seem to work any better than throwing in an AC/DC song on a soft AC. All you do is drive your audience away. The choir likes to be preached to."

How well is it working today? Rush still has his core listeners, guys born between 1925 and 1955. So do Hannity and the other best known national talkers who are carried on most of the same stations that pulled those folks in with Rush 25 years ago.

When Rush, and the talk stations that carry him, got started in the late 1980s they were the 35-54 prime demos talk radio wanted. Those listeners are still there and still loyal, but they're now 55 to 84. To an alarming degree, the succeeding generations don't seem to have followed them into the Rush tent. Air America didn't capture the younger contingent of possible talk listeners because they just offered the same style with a different political slant, and did it more amateurishly for the most part. Instead, some of those listeners went with Stern until he left broadcast radio, others gravitated to sports talk, and the upscale college grads among them went to their local NPR affiliate for both the local and national news and talk they wanted.

There is an example from the past that may be instructive today. When talk radio got started, KABC built a big audience, and for a time between the 70s and the mid-90s was the number one billing station in the country, by fielding a righty-lefty mix of hosts who had energy and wit in common even if they argued with each other (and the callers) on the air. It started as a way to get around the Fairness Doctrine but even after the rule was gone, it worked as a programming philosophy. What talk radio needs now is to get beyond the box it placed itself in.

There seems to be a lot of revisionist history regarding talkradio and what "works".

Talkradio used to have a much more centrist balance---clearly a reflection of society at large. This worked well in many cities, including the majors. When Rush came along, just like musicradio, programmers copied the "formula". They ended up skewing the format far right, which systematically turned the format into a one-ideology echo chamber. Monday morning QBs insist that this is becuase only conservative talk works or that anyone who's not conservative isn't entertaining, etc. etc. All of that is nonsense. If you understand the evolution of the format, yu'll realize that normal people will listen to talk, but you have to APPEAL to normal people---and you will never do that with what the format has become.

Additionally, there is no way our up-and-coming adults are going to warm to this boring and predictable whine-fest.

 

[TheBigA]

normal people will listen to talk, but you have to APPEAL to normal people---and you will never do that with what the format has become.

I think that's true, but "normal people" are not a single mass. The right wing crazies are, so they are tangible. You can count them, and know pretty much what works for them, and how they're respond.

"Normal people" don't. They have lives that are more important than what's happening on the radio or even in the world in general, and they aren't really motivated to act as a group. That makes them harder to program to.

Which means that they are very similar to music audiences, and why music formats aren't appealing to some younger people who don't fit into certain defined groups. In radio we program to groups in "formats." That's how radio has operated for about 45 years. Before that, you had variety formats that could play different genres of music, and even breat for talk every now and then. But that was at a time when there were only a few thousand radio stations and no other media competition.

 

[jerry367]

normal people will listen to talk, but you have to APPEAL to normal people---and you will never do that with what the format has become.

I think that's true, but "normal people" are not a single mass. The right wing crazies are, so they are tangible. You can count them, and know pretty much what works for them, and how they're respond.

"Normal people" don't. They have lives that are more important than what's happening on the radio or even in the world in general, and they aren't really motivated to act as a group. That makes them harder to program to.

Which means that they are very similar to music audiences, and why music formats aren't appealing to some younger people who don't fit into certain defined groups. In radio we program to groups in "formats." That's how radio has operated for about 45 years. Before that, you had variety formats that could play different genres of music, and even breat for talk every now and then. But that was at a time when there were only a few thousand radio stations and no other media competition.

Simply having one-sided ideological talkers wouldn't seem so pathetic if it weren't for the crazy nonsense I'm hearing pass for "talk" these days.

Must it be this no-holds-barred, appeal to the lowest common denominator in the crazy crowd approach?

I am by no means high brow. I can appreciate a wide range of talent no matter the ideology--left, right, whatever--as long as they have an entertaining and engaging persoanlity. What I cannot deal with is having my intelligence insulted with empty-headed fear-based drivel that is rampant across the AM dial.

If you are a reasonable person and enjoy entertaining and spirited conversation, there is practically NOTHING for you to listen to on talkradio around this country. It's pathetic.

 

[TheBigA]

Must it be this no-holds-barred, appeal to the lowest common denominator in the crazy crowd approach?

For the most part, advertisers don't care, as long as it attracts a big number. Some may specify they don't want to be in certain extreme shows. But if the show is lowest common denominator, and gets bigger numbers than a more level-headed show, it gets the advertising.

 

[Oldbones]

Talkradio used to have a much more centrist balance---clearly a reflection of society at large. This worked well in many cities, including the majors. When Rush came along, just like musicradio, programmers copied the "formula". They ended up skewing the format far right, which systematically turned the format into a one-ideology echo chamber.

I'd guess this is more a chicken-and-egg situation. Did Rush, Hannity and others of their ilk "skew the formula far right", or did they just ride the horse in the direction it was already going? It's hard to argue that they brought talk radio to a new generation...the old school talkers that preceded them were getting pretty stale themselves and had little appeal to much of anyone under 55 or so. And we've come full circle.

Additionally, there is no way our up-and-coming adults are going to warm to this boring and predictable whine-fest.

No more than the boomers had much use for the boring and predictable talkers that their parents listened to. When today's idealistic youth become cranky & middle aged they'll find their own equivalent whine-fest. Chances are it won't be on radio, more likely some technology that hasn't been invented yet.