To the Left’s Frustration, Talk Radio Abides as a Force in Elections

Facing the prospect of a rough Election Night, Democrats searching for scapegoats have settled on a familiar villain: talk radio. The left has long pined for the demise of the only media space where conservatives dominate, but in 2022 the industry carries unparalleled influence with the GOP base.In a New York Times column, Reid J. Epstein called Senator Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, “an analog creature in the modern digital world,” noting that he “has made at least 325 appearances on talk radio shows” in 2022, including several on the “Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” of which I am a producer.Mr. Epstein lamented that such programs are friendly to the senator and “rarely challenge him,” a concern that never troubles outlets like the Times when President Biden faces no pushback for false claims about everything from football stardom to his son Hunter’s laptop.Talk radio’s emergence began in 1987, when President Reagan, a broadcaster in his youth, repealed 1949’s Fairness Doctrine. The move opened the airwaves to everybody; stations no longer had to program for government bureaucrats at the expense of the audience.The Congressional Research Service wrote in 2011, “The FCC reasoned that increased competition in the marketplace, First Amendment concerns, and evidence that the Fairness Doctrine actually chilled speech rather than facilitating it, justified abandoning the policy.”The year after the doctrine disappeared, my late boss, Rush Limbaugh, began his national program. “The fact is that there are more points of view, there are more opportunities,” he said in 2010 of the repeal’s impact, noting that when he started, “there were about 125 talk radio stations in the country.”Today, there are thousands. “You have greater diversity of opinion,” Limbaugh said, “everything from Chinese opera to favorite carrot cake recipes. … Nobody is denied. Nobody.” Limbaugh’s wife, Kathryn Adams Limbaugh, and his brother, David, document this revolution in their new book, “Radio’s Greatest of All Time.”“The Rush Limbaugh Show,” they write, “aired on more than 650 radio stations nationwide” at its peak, saturating every corner of the republic. Although the Fairness Doctrine is often conflated with rules requiring “equal time,” a burden that applies to candidates not to individuals, talk radio is equal time to media narratives that tilt left.Those who chafed under the doctrine’s restrictions — including the late, liberal host Alan Colmes — flourished after its repeal. Yet some partisans still mourn its power to discourage speech that they can’t or don’t want to compete with in the arena of ideas.After winning his fifth Marconi Award from the National Association of Broadcasters in 2014, Rush Limbaugh explained the medium’s uniqueness. “A good radio program will create what I call ‘active’ rather than passive listening,” he said. “Active listening is the audience 100 percent engaged, hanging on everything that happens.”This is another strength of talk radio. In 2015, Limbaugh described getting “more comments on the ties that I was wearing” for a television hit than what he said. Although no radio host today has his talent — most would trade their microphones for a cable news gig — the hunger for a place where conservative voices aren’t mocked remains voracious.If a candidate wants to be heard, there’s no substitute for access to its audience, though guests aren’t a requirement. Despite broadcast poohbahs who insisted they knew better, Limbaugh did his show solo from the start, preserving his freedom to speak his mind about those in power.“I’ve harbored no illusions that all those people in Washington are my friends,” as he put it in 2003. “They come and go.” He wanted to endure. This didn’t mean that he criticized hosts who welcomed candidates, but his success, as he often said, was “not determined by who wins elections.”Politics, it has been said, is “showbiz for the ugly,” but the superficial doesn’t matter on talk radio where — when done well — issues rule. This is why it remains the go-to stop for candidates seeking to connect with voters. And if the right performs better at it, the left would be wise to ask why, and not blame the messengers for losses at the ballot box.

To the Left’s Frustration, Talk Radio Abides as a Force in Elections

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