schmave said:
But if liberal talk couldn't succeed in Detroit, that's pretty telling. A station here in Columbus has failed twice carrying the format (granted everywhere in Ohio outside the northeast and core urban areas is majority right). Then again, Michigan approved right-to-work recently and a lot of people, including me, probably didn't see that coming.
Is it changing demographics or the simple fact liberals repeatedly have shown they have no idea how to make the format work?
All of my life, radio has been changing but most of us did not see immediately how it was changing, or how that change would affect us, whether we were part of the industry, or part of the audience.
There is a bit of humor, sometimes told BY old people, some times told ABOUT old people: "Life is like a roll of toilet paper.... the nearer to the end you get, the faster it spins."
Not too many years ago, radio was not a "sides-taker". People inside and outside of radio assumed that unlike newspapers, radio was not to take sides on political issues. In the hey-day of radio stations taking a stab at "on air editorials" there were messages in support of civic projects which then tended to not be political in nature. Support the Industrial Development Committee. Support the Human Rights efforts. Support the bond issue for a new sewer system in your town. Give-or-take 20 years ago, all of that changed. We can say the success of Rush Limbaugh was because he is an extraordinary talent, or we can say the success came because radio decided it could swim in the "pool of political controversy". Twenty years from now, maybe we can come to some agreements on what the mixture of talent and raw opportunity was.
Anybody who claims to know whether progressive programming will eventually work on radio or not is simply whistling in the dark while walking down the street that cuts through the graveyard. I would argue that the jury is still out on that one. Based on what we see right now, a number of people take some comfort in one of two positions: (1) Liberal radio will not work. (2) Progressives at this point have no concept of how to make use of radio.
What we are seeing right now in Michigan and Ohio and other "Rust Belt" states is equally hard to explain. And since I no longer live in that area, I am not in a position to observe and judge how radio is dealing with the question we are discussing, and not in a position to observe and judge how progressives are dealing with capturing the power of radio.
I have no comfort level, however, with those who declare with assurance that we have now proven for a fact that it is impossible to have successful liberal/progressive radio. We went through a lot of years of listening to Rush before we moved from seeing him as a fluke and seeing him as a success.
We are still in... but apparently coming out of a really lousy economic period as a nation, which in turn has forced broadcasters to hunker-down, spend less effort experimenting and more effort identifying and adopting ideas that are "proven successes".
We may to put this conversation on hold for about 10 years and then reconvene the club for further discussion of all this deep philosophical questions. In the meantime, radio must continue to survive, succeed and plow ahead.... and both political camps mus continue to survive, succeed and plow ahead.
