Is Bonneville's hard-right turn done?

[Deus Ex Machiato]

If I ran a talk station, and knew that the history of progressive talk was a story of disaster and also knew that the centrist / moderate field was served by PBS, I'd redouble my efforts in the conservative area, knowing that "sore losers" make for long TSL.

At the risk of derailing this from the popular game show "Who's Your Favorite County Recorder?" I agree that progressive talk was a disaster. If you consider Air America to be the great experiment in making progressive radio work, then (IMO) the reason it didn't was that they failed to understand why right wing talk radio worked in the first place.

It was built from the ground up. It didn't spring fully formed with conservative hosts in all day parts. Rush built his audience over time, honed his shtick, the finished product became wildly successful after a lot of work and then - and only then - a mold upon which entirely conservative AM radio was built. Air America tried to air-drop a fully-formed progressive talk model into the market, with expensive yet unproven hosts manning multiple shifts, working the kinks out as they went along.

I also agree that "sore losers" work better than smug winners. Rush made his bones railing against Clinton in the 90s. I'm fairly well convinced that on some level, he wanted AlGore to win in 2000, so he'd have an easy target. Suddenly becoming the winning team put him in a pickle, but then something terrible happened which allowed conservative talk radio to be not just the winning team, but the cheerleaders as well. Then Obama won, and grievance politics became profitable again.

Right now? There's not as much money to be made from being the "sober voice of reason" on the radio. Advertisers keen to sell "tactical" vests, "tactical" sunglasses, and "tactical" diaper bags (seriously, this is a thing) will want to advertise their wares at "Patriot Freedom Eagle dot com" to a rapt audience on the airwaves.

KTAR could do well financially to lean into breathless reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and Kari Lake's "brave fight for election integrity."

 

[TheBigA]

KTAR could do well financially to lean into breathless reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and Kari Lake's "brave fight for election integrity."

But as I said before, they were among the top billers before they decided to take sides. There is money to be made by being a straight news station, as WTOP proves every year.

 

[gr8oldies]

At the risk of derailing this from the popular game show "Who's Your Favorite County Recorder?" I agree that progressive talk was a disaster. If you consider Air America to be the great experiment in making progressive radio work, then (IMO) the reason it didn't was that they failed to understand why right wing talk radio worked in the first place.

It was built from the ground up. It didn't spring fully formed with conservative hosts in all day parts. Rush built his audience over time, honed his shtick, the finished product became wildly successful after a lot of work and then - and only then - a mold upon which entirely conservative AM radio was built. Air America tried to air-drop a fully-formed progressive talk model into the market, with expensive yet unproven hosts manning multiple shifts, working the kinks out as they went along.

I also agree that "sore losers" work better than smug winners. Rush made his bones railing against Clinton in the 90s. I'm fairly well convinced that on some level, he wanted AlGore to win in 2000, so he'd have an easy target. Suddenly becoming the winning team put him in a pickle, but then something terrible happened which allowed conservative talk radio to be not just the winning team, but the cheerleaders as well. Then Obama won, and grievance politics became profitable again.

Right now? There's not as much money to be made from being the "sober voice of reason" on the radio. Advertisers keen to sell "tactical" vests, "tactical" sunglasses, and "tactical" diaper bags (seriously, this is a thing) will want to advertise their wares at "Patriot Freedom Eagle dot com" to a rapt audience on the airwaves.

KTAR could do well financially to lean into breathless reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and Kari Lake's "brave fight for election integrity."

If the goal of Republicans have absolute one-party rule was ever achieved, what would there be for conservative talk radio to do? Now, you're in charge of all those Marxist Socialist Communist Pantywaist Leftists have been disenfranchised, there are no drag shows, etc, and people are looking at YOU for solutions. Not as entertaining as Hunter's laptop or Gym Jordan trying to shred Dr, Fauci.

 

[KP]

Fontes was just elected to Secretary of State (AZ).

Fontes was the County Recorder, but lost re-election. He then ran for SoS.

 

[Kent]

I agree that progressive talk was a disaster. If you consider Air America to be the great experiment in making progressive radio work, then (IMO) the reason it didn't was that they failed to understand why right wing talk radio worked in the first place.

Good talk works. Bad talk doesn’t. It’s really that simple. Progressive talk does fine. It’s called NPR. And, yes, I know NPR does a lot of news, which is nonpartisan so long as it's accurate (and NPR usually is), but it's commentary is typically center-left to left.

It was built from the ground up. It didn't spring fully formed with conservative hosts in all day parts. Rush built his audience over time, honed his shtick, the finished product became wildly successful after a lot of work and then - and only then - a mold upon which entirely conservative AM radio was built. Air America tried to air-drop a fully-formed progressive talk model into the market, with expensive yet unproven hosts manning multiple shifts, working the kinks out as they went along.

Air America's biggest problem, as you elude, was bad talk. What little good talk it had wasn’t available a la carte. The one exception to that was Randi's affiliate in West Palm Beach, which carried her before she joined Air America. An acquaintance of mine owned an AM talk station that was mostly conservative but aired a variety of viewpoints as well as non-political talk. One program he aired that proved fairly popular in rural Southwest Missouri between Springfield and Joplin was Ed Schultz. He thought adding Al Franken or Randi Rhodes might work, too, especially if he could air it in the early evenings. He reached out to Air America and was told he had to carry at least two shows, and they had to run in the daytime hours. That was a deal-breaker for him. The cluster where I worked at the time had a talker that was getting more and more political. We had several people call and ask for Franken. We had just lost Art Bell to a new FM talker across the street, and filler programming in the overnight was always tough to come by. I don’t think we ever would’ve cleared Franken. We had just gotten a new manager who thought we weren’t conservative enough, but we made the phone call and were told basically the same thing. Seems like we ended up airing replays of Clark Howard and Suze Orman in the overnights.

Right now? There's not as much money to be made from being the "sober voice of reason" on the radio. Advertisers keen to sell "tactical" vests, "tactical" sunglasses, and "tactical" diaper bags (seriously, this is a thing) will want to advertise their wares at "Patriot Freedom Eagle dot com" to a rapt audience on the airwaves.

You're probably right, though, at least for a time, some large advertisers were asking to be excluded from talk radio. I've been out of radio long enough that I don’t know how much money is truly to be made off of that crowd anymore. Those tactical businesses can only buy so much and only for so long. You have a lot of avails in talk radio, and you’re usually not making much unless you’re selling almost all of them. My experience with the advertisers was that they tended to trickle back to you when they dropped due to controversy. If you were getting the numbers they wanted, they wouldn’t stay away for long. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the large businesses have returned. Agency buys are number based buys anyway. The unfortunate problem with being the sober voice of reason is that most of those hosts just aren’t that entertaining. If the people don’t respond, you’re not going to be on the air for long.

 

[michael hagerty]

Fontes was the County Recorder, but lost re-election. He then ran for SoS.

Fontes lost re-election to County Recorder by fewer than 5,000 votes. He was the first Democrat in that office since at least 1969 and wouldn’t have won if Helen Purcell hadn’t reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent and bought herself a federal voter suppression investigation.

Fontes won SoS by more than 100,000 votes.

 

[Theater of My Mind]

Good talk works. Bad talk doesn’t. It’s really that simple. Progressive talk does fine. It’s called NPR. And, yes, I know NPR does a lot of news, which is nonpartisan so long as it's accurate (and NPR usually is), but it's commentary is typically center-left to left.

The Right has done an excellent job of branding NPR as "liberal" (a.k.a. Progressive). The fact is that NPR offers balanced coverage of issues, usually including guests from both sides in their roundtable discussion style shows.

In the conservative media, anyone not fully on board with their Team Extreme agenda is painted as a Lib. Any sort of intelligent, centrist opinion is seen as a threat to their messaging, and they hate anything that's publicly funded, so NPR is a persistent target of their smears.

 

[Gregg.]

Is NPR liberal? These days, unless your station is overtly conservative, you will be branded as liberal. If NPR does a feature on drought affecting the West, a profile of a New Orleans jazz musician and a lack of doctors on Indian reservations, I think conservatives would brand all those stories as liberal.

But getting back to the original post, KTAR-FM's conservative slant. I don't think Arizona's purple status would lead us to think KTAR-FM should change its conservative programming if it's working. WABC and WMAL-FM do great in the ratings in NYC and Washington, two of America's most liberal locations. On the other hand, KTAR-FM's sister station in Seattle, KIRO-FM, is fairly moderate in its politics. I believe KIRO-FM is Seattle's top billing station. It certainly has better ratings than KTAR-FM. And the nation's best billing talk station, KFI, is moderate too, and always in LA's top ten ratings.

You'd think more stations would follow their lead: Local moderate hosts by day. And non-political talk at night, such as Dave Ramsey and Coast to Coast AM.

What counts is what David told us. KTAR-FM, despite its so-so ratings, is the top billing station in Phoenix. That proves once again that for music stations, you must have good ratings in the key demographics. But for spoken word stations with local hosts and a good news department, the demographics don't matter. Spoken word stations can run more commercials than music stations, with live hosts sometimes reading the spots, a great selling feature. As long as their ratings aren't too low, they are often the winners in billing.

 

[gr8oldies]

Good talk works. Bad talk doesn’t. It’s really that simple. Progressive talk does fine. It’s called NPR. And, yes, I know NPR does a lot of news, which is nonpartisan so long as it's accurate (and NPR usually is), but it's commentary is typically center-left to left.


Air America's biggest problem, as you elude, was bad talk. What little good talk it had wasn’t available a la carte. The one exception to that was Randi's affiliate in West Palm Beach, which carried her before she joined Air America. An acquaintance of mine owned an AM talk station that was mostly conservative but aired a variety of viewpoints as well as non-political talk. One program he aired that proved fairly popular in rural Southwest Missouri between Springfield and Joplin was Ed Schultz. He thought adding Al Franken or Randi Rhodes might work, too, especially if he could air it in the early evenings. He reached out to Air America and was told he had to carry at least two shows, and they had to run in the daytime hours. That was a deal-breaker for him. The cluster where I worked at the time had a talker that was getting more and more political. We had several people call and ask for Franken. We had just lost Art Bell to a new FM talker across the street, and filler programming in the overnight was always tough to come by. I don’t think we ever would’ve cleared Franken. We had just gotten a new manager who thought we weren’t conservative enough, but we made the phone call and were told basically the same thing. Seems like we ended up airing replays of Clark Howard and Suze Orman in the overnights.



You're probably right, though, at least for a time, some large advertisers were asking to be excluded from talk radio. I've been out of radio long enough that I don’t know how much money is truly to be made off of that crowd anymore. Those tactical businesses can only buy so much and only for so long. You have a lot of avails in talk radio, and you’re usually not making much unless you’re selling almost all of them. My experience with the advertisers was that they tended to trickle back to you when they dropped due to controversy. If you were getting the numbers they wanted, they wouldn’t stay away for long. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the large businesses have returned. Agency buys are number based buys anyway. The unfortunate problem with being the sober voice of reason is that most of those hosts just aren’t that entertaining. If the people don’t respond, you’re not going to be on the air for long.

As far as our local News-Talker, all of the regular radio inventory seems to be there, often with endorsements by one of the 3 local hosts. I'm going to guess a lot of those businesses have conservative Republican owners. National business is a different story.

 

[gr8oldies]

Is NPR liberal? These days, unless your station is overtly conservative, you will be branded as liberal. If NPR does a feature on drought affecting the West, a profile of a New Orleans jazz musician and a lack of doctors on Indian reservations, I think conservatives would brand all those stories as liberal.

"If reservations need more doctors, the people there need to get more bootstraps! And jazz is woke!"

 

[gr8oldies]

At the risk of derailing this from the popular game show "Who's Your Favorite County Recorder?" I agree that progressive talk was a disaster. If you consider Air America to be the great experiment in making progressive radio work, then (IMO) the reason it didn't was that they failed to understand why right wing talk radio worked in the first place.

It was built from the ground up. It didn't spring fully formed with conservative hosts in all day parts. Rush built his audience over time, honed his shtick, the finished product became wildly successful after a lot of work and then - and only then - a mold upon which entirely conservative AM radio was built. Air America tried to air-drop a fully-formed progressive talk model into the market, with expensive yet unproven hosts manning multiple shifts, working the kinks out as they went along.

I also agree that "sore losers" work better than smug winners. Rush made his bones railing against Clinton in the 90s. I'm fairly well convinced that on some level, he wanted AlGore to win in 2000, so he'd have an easy target. Suddenly becoming the winning team put him in a pickle, but then something terrible happened which allowed conservative talk radio to be not just the winning team, but the cheerleaders as well. Then Obama won, and grievance politics became profitable again.

Right now? There's not as much money to be made from being the "sober voice of reason" on the radio. Advertisers keen to sell "tactical" vests, "tactical" sunglasses, and "tactical" diaper bags (seriously, this is a thing) will want to advertise their wares at "Patriot Freedom Eagle dot com" to a rapt audience on the airwaves.

KTAR could do well financially to lean into breathless reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and Kari Lake's "brave fight for election integrity."

One must remember that Rush's show was not started as an ideological project. His original syndicator, Ed McLaughlin, was looking for a retirement project at the time ABC wanted to get out of the Talkradio business. He had already taken over syndicating liberal Dr. Dean Edell's show (I'm guessing Edell, if he was still on the air, would have been pro-Covid precautions and vaccines). That's what Air America didn't get as you said---the assumption was that a bunch of big Republican donors sat in a smoke-filled room, plotting to make a conservative talk network, and plucked this guy out of the obscurity of Sacramento and made him a star. AA tried to duplicate what didn't actually happen.

I heard one of Franken's first shows. He went on for 45 minutes, never took a break, never "reset the table" nor identified his guest (who was Senator Joe Biden). Hopefully it got better. There were successful progressive hosts that AA never talked to. Jay Marvin from WLS and KHOW comes to mind. The only radio broadcaster they had was Randi Rhodes. Then there was this "100 writers and producers" thing? WTF?

 

[landtuna]

Fontes won SoS by more than 100,000 votes.

As he should have given his opponent.

I'll stop here and suggest interested parties look up his opponent themselves rather than start a political discussion.

 

[KP]

Why are you telling me this?

 

[base12]

Does this mean we'll finally get the McMahon/Westmoreland/Ankarlo-era-type KTAR back now that our state's no longer the laughinstock of the country?

Ankarlo was part of the right wing conspiracy!!!!! His anti immigartaion stance in 2009 started it!!!!! He is one of the willing participants in ruining KTAR!!!

 

[indieradioguy]

So, basically, until Bonneville's billing numbers change - we're going to be stuck with 550 on 92.3? Time was (not too long ago "time was"), their flagship imaging was: "No hate talk, just great talk." Remember when? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Like the rest of commercial radio, any change to 92.3 is going to be galacial - like molasses - at best.

 

[Legend City]

KTAR was a flagship station, with good ratings.

19th place behind such crap as KFYI.

I posted to Broomhead's FB page, he got angry, but I posted the ratings data, and the fact that there was no red wave in AZ and KTAR has been in a freefall. Major fail by KTAR.

 

[b-turner]

If what David says in a page one post, the station is a top biller in the market. It seems it's 'place' is not hurting them. I just don't understand why a person is crusading to smear a station (ie: the above post). Unless you're an owner, have rights to republish ratings and want to continue to try to hurt them, then spend your time that way if you choose but I'm thinking there surely can be something you could champion that could make a positive difference. You seem to have the dedication for a positive project but I doubt you can force the station to change what is working for them no matter how dedicated.

 

[Theater of My Mind]

If what David says in a page one post, the station is a top biller in the market. It seems it's 'place' is not hurting them...
...
I doubt you can force the station to change what is working for them no matter how dedicated.

That's a good point. Engaging with the host won't accomplish anything. He should be making his thoughts known to the advertisers since they're the ones keeping the station a top moneymaker in spite of the polarizing content and terrible ratings.

 

[indieradioguy]

If what David says in a page one post, the station is a top biller in the market. It seems it's 'place' is not hurting them. I just don't understand why a person is crusading to smear a station (ie: the above post).

Please don't make this something it's not. I'm simply pointing out that for a city this size (we've got the Superb Owl coming here again, for pete's sake), it's hard not to be embarrassed by what 92.3 has become. The former home of Pat McMahon, Preston Westmoreland, Ted Simons - all heavyweights - is now anchored by a guy who's apparently tone deaf to what people are talking about? There's no crusade, no smear. Once MAGA finally leaves Arizona, Bonneville is going to look awfully silly peddling their "conservative circus" to a blue state that doesn't even listen to radio anymore.

 

[davideduardo]

Once MAGA finally leaves Arizona, Bonneville is going to look awfully silly peddling their "conservative circus" to a blue state that doesn't even listen to radio anymore.

You are assuming that just a tad under half of the population is suddenly going to cease being conservative. In fact, when a party is not in power, its voices tend to get louder and its followers more adamant.

Even in states and cities that are overwhelmingly blue, conservative talk stations do extremely well. And in a state where it took well over a week to get decisive results in a number of elections, this is not an overwhelmingly decisive change and will, most likely, encourage conservatives to be even more active.