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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Those who do locate Malloy can hear him ridicule "President Dazed and Confused" and the "Bush Crime Family," playing songs like "Thick as a Brick" or "Pencil-Necked Geek" for sardonic punctuation. They hear regular callers ranging from the Cincinnati trucker nicknamed Gizmo to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. They hear newscasts from an outfit called the Workers Independent News Service, whose slogan promises, "WINS is not about what big business wants you to hear. It's about us." What they don't hear very much of is paid advertising -- though the regular buyers include Advil and Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing -- and for a commercial network that is a problem.
So the question remains exactly what to make of Malloy's experience, what larger insight into the political shape of talk radio it yields.
Malloy and a number of media critics and scholars place substantial blame for the political slant of talk radio on two acts of government. First, in 1987, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the fairness doctrine, which required radio stations to present at least a semblance of political balance. Then, in 1996, the Clinton administration pushed through the Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the ownership of radio stations. The former action gave legal latitude to dogmatic talk shows; the latter drastically reduced competition.
To put it in more personal terms, when Malloy started in talk radio 18 years ago some 400 companies owned radio stations. Now six conglomerates dominate. The ideological alternative that Malloy had provided early in his career to Ludlow Porch is no longer required.
Radio experts disagree, however, on whether the radio conglomerates of today push a conservative agenda out of true belief or apolitical greed. "You can't avoid the fact that corporate owners are sympathetic to right-wing politics, especially on business and economics," said Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois in Champaign. "And if any show is remotely close to a gray area, you'll go with whatever's close to the politics of your advertisers."
War with Iraq brought several radio corporations into overt advocacy. Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest owner of radio stations, with 1,225 affiliates, sponsored pro-war rallies in several cities. Cumulus, another major owner, organized the demolition of CDs by the Dixie Chicks after one of the group's members publicly criticized President Bush. Protest songs, a staple of FM in the Vietnam era, received scant commercial airplay this time. The presence of Colin Powell's son Michael as chairman of the FCC exerts a chilling effect on radio dissent during wartime, media critics such as McChesney maintain.
The counterargument holds that conglomerates simply choose programming that is demonstrably profitable. By this line of reasoning, liberal talk radio suffers for the same reason free-form music does: It requires management to take a risk. Conservative talk radio, in contrast, boasts a proven model in Rush Limbaugh. His show can be syndicated into scores of markets, and his style can be cloned.
"Radio on the left lacks compelling personalities like Limbaugh," said Alan Stavitsky, a scholar of the radio industry and the School of Journalism and Communication's associate dean at the University of Oregon. "The thing to understand about Rush is that he was trained as a disc jockey. He began in music radio. He brings that ethos and those production values to his program." (Limbaugh also never bothered registering to vote for more than a decade, as Paul D. Colford revealed in his unauthorized biography.)
The most prominent efforts by liberals to crack the talk-radio market, in contrast, involved the politicians Jerry Brown, Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower. Effective stump speakers, none mastered the improvisation, conversation and give-and-take of talk radio. Only Hightower remains on the air, though in drastically reduced form. Instead of hosting a talk show, he contributes two-minute commentaries to about 100 stations, mostly in small markets.
For all that, liberal talk radio is not quite so marginal as it may first appear. When critics decry the dearth of such shows, Michael Harrison of Talkers magazine notes, they are referring to one part of the radio universe: commercial radio for white audiences. There, he estimates, 80 percent of the political shows indeed espouse a conservative message.
