I’m a talk jock. A radio talk show host. If you’re a bed-wetting left-winger, the current vernacular of liberalism would require that you call me a preacher of hate. If you like what I do, it’s talk radio. If you don’t, it’s hate radio.
I’m also a lawyer. I started running my mouth on the radio in 1970. Four years later I decided to fill my off-air hours with law school. Three more years and I had passed the bar and was having those “attorney at law” cards printed.
The plan was just to cruise along with both careers, practicing law and talk radio, until one overpowered the other either in my heart or my wallet. That happened in 1992, when I bade farewell to clients and devoted myself to listeners.
Heart…not wallet.
No disrespect intended to the legal profession, but I still walk into my radio studio every single day with the words “beats the hell out of practicing law” on my lips. And believe me, it does. Every lawyer learns that his worst enemy out there is his client. A talk jock’s worst enemy is a slow news day. There are far more clients than slow news days. I made the right choice. Besides, I don’t have to bill listeners to pay the mortgage.
Life is good.
Now, I’m not trying to slam the legal profession. I know many fine and dedicated lawyers. I also know some that should be doing front-end work at the local tire shop. One thing I know is true, though: I don’t have a lot of talk-show hosts telling me how much they’d love to practice law, but I do have a lot of lawyers telling me how much they’d love to hang up the shingle and run their mouths on the radio for three hours a day.
Well, get in line.
Now, let me tell you about my job. Some of you seem to think that my purpose in doing the show is to present and win converts to a certain political ideology. Or maybe you think my assignment is to garner support for some particular candidate or proposition.
Wrong.
My job description is simple. I’m supposed to be interesting and compelling enough for about four eight-and-one-half-minute segments out of every hour to attract listeners from certain predefined demographic groups, and then keep them listening long enough for the radio stations to play some commercials for them. The longer they listen, the more commercials they hear. The more commercials they hear, or the more people who hear the commercials, the more money the radio stations make…and the more of that money that will end up in my pocket.
That’s it. That’s my job.
That is the essential truth of talk radio.
I’m not there to change the world. I’m not there to create social upheaval. I’m not there to get one politician elected or another defeated. Like anyone else on the radio, I’m there to keep you, the listener, interested enough to stay tuned until the time comes for us to play the next block of commercials. Some jocks do it with music; I’m one of those who do it with ideas. With luck, if I’ve done my job, you’ll even be interested enough to sit through that commercial break while I catch my breath, then listen to me for another few minutes, so I can then play even more commercials.
I’ve never heard another talk-radio host admit any of this to his audience, nor do I expect to. Perhaps it’s more fun, or more fulfilling, to believe that you’re part of—dare I say the leader of—some great crusade for God, motherhood, and Krystal Hamburgers than to consider yourself highly paid filler inserted between commercials.
I’m happy doing what I do. And judging from the number of people who approach me in public, I gather a few of you would like to take over when I retire.
“I’m hoping to get in the business. I want to be a radio talk show host!” they say.1 “What can you tell me?”
My best piece of advice is to move to a small radio market and get a job doing anything they’ll let you do at the local talk station. Sooner or later you can weasel yourself into a weekend slot, then maybe a daily show. Keep plugging away at it. And whatever you do, never get to the point where you start believing that your listeners are your followers. Once you’ve bought that idea, it’s a slide back to obscurity. They’re not your followers. They’re your listeners. You’re there to entertain them, not to lead them. I’ve never forgotten that. Maybe that’s why I’ve lasted.
Once you’ve snagged that talk show spot on some station in the number-185 radio market…stick with it. You won’t make any money. You’ll probably have to work an extra job. But you’ll soon develop the ability to put odd twists on obscure news stories, present them to the audience, and play with their reactions.
If you’re hoping for a long career, be honest with your listeners. If you say something, mean it. Nobody has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
I titled this chapter “The Terrible Truth About Talk Radio” for several reasons. First, I wanted to ’fess up about what we’re supposed to do. Second, I wanted to explain just why it is that conservatives and libertarians seem to be so much more successful at this than liberals.
People who listen to talk radio have some of the most finely tuned bullshit detectors you’ll find anywhere. They can smell a phony right through the radio dial, and that’s exactly where they head when they detect one. Talk radio listeners will accept and tolerate any position on any issue if it’s presented with rationality and a modicum of logic. They’ll also tolerate irrational and illogical banter if it’s presented with a good dose of humor.
This means that liberals are pretty much screwed when it comes to success in talk radio. They have the facts working against them, and they can’t carry forth an argument using logic or reason. And as far as a sense of humor is concerned…well, let me know how your search for a truly funny liberal turns out.
Liberals are very successful in the printed media. They’re also successful in what is commonly, though erroneously, referred to as TV journalism. There’s a reason for this.
Let’s consider two hypothetical liberals: one a columnist, the other a talk show host. And let’s take an issue of great importance on which they share opinions—say, gun control.
The liberal columnist and talk show host get together and write a quick essay on the need for more stringent gun control measures. The columnist has his piece published in one hundred newspapers. The talk show host offers the very same words as his opinion at the beginning of his talk show, heard on one hundred radio stations.
So what happens after the liberal columnist and talk show host have each had their say? Thousands of liberals who read the column agreed with every word they read. Thousands of left-wingers who listen to the talk show host’s statements agree with every word they heard. Thousands of readers and listeners, of course, are of the considered opinion that they haven’t heard or read such a load of dog squeeze in years. Agreement and disagreement; fans and detractors.
So where does it go from here?
The columnist retreats into his office, sits down in his leather recliner, pulls out a Cuban, and has a few nice puffs. His e-mail in box fills up with expressions of outrage over his column. Readers are sending him letters with copies of articles relating statistics that prove convincingly that the columnist’s position on the gun control matter is startlingly wrong. He never reads the e-mails, nor does he see the letters. They are all carefully screened by some intern or assistant who is careful to feed his ego with reader accolades rather than criticism. If one discouraging word should get through, the columnist can chose to either consider or ignore it. No matter what course he chooses, nobody else is the wiser—especially not the readers.
Contrast the easy life of the columnist to that of the liberal talk show host. The liberal talk jock purveys the same views as the writer, perhaps in the very same words, making the same case expertly and convincingly. Thousands of listeners agree; thousands don’t. So far, the scenario plays out pretty much the same either way.
But wait…what’s that sound? The telephones!
While the liberal columnist is enjoying his cigar, the liberal talk show host has to defend his position to a steady stream of callers. The columnist can chose to merely bask in brilliance of his own reflection in the mirror behind his desk, while the talk show host has to spend the next few hours defending his position against arguments based on fact, reason, and logic.
The columnist’s isolation allows him to protect his image as a learned man possessed of brilliant ideas. He faces a challenge only if he chooses to do so. The talk show host crumbles under the onslaught of contrarian arguments, and limps to the end of the show humiliated and bowed under the weight of fact and logic.
It would all be so much easier for the liberal talk show hosts if they just didn’t have to take phone calls. Then again, after they wrapped up their “America is bad, the United Nations is good; individualism is bad, collectivism is good; capitalism is bad, a government-controlled economy is good; private medical care is bad, socialized medicine is good; Fox News is bad, CBS and CNN are infallible; minorities are bad, and the jury is out on most white people” routine, they might find it hard to fill the remaining two hours and forty-five minutes of their show.
SO…WHAT’S A GOOD LIBERAL TO DO?
About what? About talk radio? About the fact that pretty much the only way you can get a liberal talk show lineup on the radio is to buy the time?
Oh…you didn’t know about that?
Well, you’ve no doubt heard of Air America, the great experiment in liberal talk radio network. Al Franken and Gang? Yup! That’s the one. The Great Experiment in Broadcast Bankruptcy. Well, a quick look at the history of Air America illustrates why lefty-talk on the radio is pretty much a nonstarter.
First, let’s lay out one fundamental difference between the Air America crew and syndicated conservative hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mike Gallagher, and the rest, including myself. Air America pays (or had to pay) many of its radio stations to carry their programming. I am not aware of one major daily syndicated conservative or libertarian talk show that has to pay to have its shows aired. The radio stations pay them.2 A combination of very poor ratings and this pay-as-you-go business model—sometimes adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—is bound to lead to problems. Problems like, oh, insolvency.
There’s another way you can make a success out of a liberal radio talk show: Find a liberal who’s actually entertaining! Sure, there are some, though your chances of finding Faith Hill folding towels in an East Los Angeles Laundromat are much better.
For liberals with entertainment value, Ed Schultz comes to mind. Ed is entertaining and pleasant, and his show works. But Ed’s handlers have to keep him sequestered somewhere in the frozen wasteland of North Dakota to make sure he doesn’t get too much exposure to the real America. I suspect that if Ed ever moved to some American population center where he actually has to step over urban campers (and their waste matter) to get home at night, and where doors have locks, he might start sounding a bit different on the radio. Plus, last time I checked, North Dakota wasn’t exactly at the top of Osama’s to-do list.
So talk radio doesn’t work all that well for liberals, but it’s terrific for conservatives and libertarians, who dominate the airwaves.
So it is, so it always will be. Right?
Not so fast. The future of talk radio depends on just who has a grip on the machinery of the federal government, and right now that grip is in the hands of a Democrat Congress and a White House that’s eager to placate them. Considering the positioning of the chess pieces, let’s just say that the future of talk radio isn’t all that bright.
On November 8, 2006, the day after the great Republican melt-down in Congress, I started opening my show with the phrase “Counting down the last two and-one-half years of talk radio…” The 2008 elections may tilt the scales once and for all, but at this point I’m firmly convinced that Democrats will try to destroy talk radio.
Think about it. Why shouldn’t they?
Of course, there’s that little thing we call freedom of expression—but remember, we’re talking Democrats here. These are people who are far more concerned with their idea of the “common good” than they are with individualism. Democrats might tell you that the effect of what is said in the public arena carries far greater consequences than any individual’s right to self-expression on the so-called “public airwaves.”
Hold on a minute. Before we get into the methods the Democrats will likely use to get rid of their talk radio nemeses, I need to make a point about this “public airwaves” nonsense.
As even the bush-league despots of the world have long known, if you want to control a population, you need to control that population’s access to information. Perhaps you’ve noticed, but every time some tyrant wannabe launches an attempt to take over a government, he sends rebels or troops to the television and radio stations and to the newspapers. Step 1: Control the media. (All right, that’s probably Step 2. Step 1 is usually putting the current leader out of commission.)
Well, our American political class has noticed the same thing.
When the first ten amendments to our Constitution were added, the people drafting them still had a greater appreciation for the power of the people than the power of government. By the time Marconi started tickling crystals with cat hairs, things had changed.
Our founding fathers protected our access to information unfiltered through the political process with their First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Back then there were only two ways that information could be passed from one individual to another. You either spoke it or you wrote it. Hence, both methods have absolute Constitutional protection.
Now, of course, you can broadcast that information; a concept unimagined by the powdered-wig crowd.
Politicians greeted the arrival of radio with more worry than wonderment. Here was a means of spreading information not only to vast numbers of people, but to vast numbers of people who can’t even read! Stories of political misdeeds in Washington could spread throughout the country in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. Political errors and misjudgments would be more difficult to contain once every American with a pulse and access to a newfangled radio heard about them.
By the time broadcasting arrived on our doorstep, the love of freedom and the preservation of the liberties of the people weren’t what you would call foremost on the minds of politicians. Then as now, the acquisition and maintenance of political power came first. Whatever came second was far, far behind.
It was clear: this radio thing had to be brought under control, sooner rather than later.
On what pretext, though, could the Imperial Federal Government of the United States seize control over broadcasting? Well, let’s see. The signals somehow fly through the air, and everybody has a right to their share of the air, don’t they? After all, if you’re denied air, you die! That must mean that everyone owns the air, and if that’s true, then it’s reasonable for them to expect their wonderful elected officials to control what flies through that air—including Fibber McGee and Molly, not to mention any future Rush Limbaughs.
Brilliant! If the people own the airwaves, the people get to say what can and cannot be broadcast there! And, of course, they’ll do that through their elected officials!
And presto, the power of broadcasting was now officially controlled by the government.
The airwaves are public only because our founding fathers didn’t know they existed, just as they couldn’t have envisioned personal computers or Xerox machines back when they were knocking out copies of the Constitution and its amendments in pen and ink. In 1776 air was for breathing, not much else. If Thomas Jefferson and his buddies had foreseen the era of broadcasting, there’s no doubt that First Amendment protections would have been guaranteed for radio and television.
Today, politicians have invented plenty of further excuses for the fact that First Amendment guarantees aren’t extended to broadcasting. One favorite excuse is to say that this government control is necessitated by the fact that broadcasting frequencies are limited, and that to control their allocation and use is, somehow, to protect the people.
That’s utter nonsense. Atlanta, Georgia, has one daily newspaper and forty-plus radio stations, plus about six television stations. The one daily newspaper operates free of government control and censorship. The nearly fifty broadcast outlets do not.
Consider this: Every day in America more people get their evening news from Entertainment Tonight, an insipid syndicated television show covering celebrity news, than from CBS, NBC and ABC combined. On the day I wrote this, one of the lead stories on ET’s website was the newsbreak that a pair of sunglasses once belonging to Steve McQueen brought $70,000 at an auction.
We are, in many ways, at a point our founding fathers could never have envisioned. Today, in America, most people get their daily news from agencies that are licensed to operate and to one extent or another controlled by the federal government—thanks to the absurd concept of “public ownership of the airwaves,” a fiction created to allow the government to control an emerging means of spreading information to large numbers of people in very little time.
So how will the Democrats use their power over broadcasting to destroy talk radio?
It’s called the “Fairness Doctrine,” and it presents so great a threat to the free expression of ideas in this country that it deserves its own chapter.
That would be the next one.