While WSBA's morning show is an affront to the sensibilities of anyone who believes talk radio should be, at the very least, interesting, I think the moves were made in a sincere effort to <i>differentiate</i> the station from the far superior and more powerful WHP, rather than a corporately-mandated maneuver.
For a while there, Glenn Beck seemed like a sinking ship, losing affiliates in markets great and small, and abandoning the comedy that made the program one of the best I have ever heard in my life. He's since gotten back to it, but I fear it may be too late. Michael Savage is a singular voice in the talk radio morass, but it's easy to see how older audiences (such as the ones that dominate York) can easily get burned out by him and his seemingly endless nostalgic monologues about life as a child in Brooklyn.
If WSBA thinks that Mike Huckabee could be a winner, owing to his Chick-Fil-A episode from last month, they are truly smoking some top-shelf crack. Because Huckabee wasn't even interesting enough to qualify for the usual 15 minutes of fame, and I wager that he still isn't.
Mark Levin, on the other hand, is fantastic. He is superior to Sean Hannity by every conceivable measure, but WHP draws killer numbers for Hannity and Savage both, so there's simply no daypart for him in Harrisburg.