While both Brad Friedman and Sue Wilson have written in detail here at The BRAD BLOG about the recent closure of progressive talk radio stations in cities such as Portland and Seattle, along with the FCC’s failure to enforce the public interest obligations of the conglomerates that own those stations, there’s an interesting development on the other side of the dial, at least in Boston, where the demise of right-wing talk radio — in a region where the format once dominated — hints at a downward spiral for a key element of the conservative entertainment complex.
The latest sign of right-wing radio’s malaise may be seen in the apparent demise of Boston’s WTKK-FM.
The Greater Media Inc.-owned smooth-jazz-turned-right-wing-talk station is reportedly preparing to undergo yet another format change in early-January, returning to music.
As a conservative who listened to WTKK for years, I’m amused by this development, especially in light of the continued industry-wide fallout over Rush Limbaugh’s verbal assault on Sandra Fluke earlier in the year.
Friedman and Wilson have shown conclusively that good progressive radio is not being allowed to succeed — that the national corporate interests of these large media conglomerates (just as predicted by some media observers decades ago, following the passage of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996) are being placed ahead of the local public interest obligations which broadcast licensees are required to meet in exchange for their use of our public airwaves.
With the challenges now being faced by good progressive talkers facing obstacles stacked against their success, is there anything wrong with enjoying the spectacle of seeing bad right-wing radio fail, as appears to be the case in Boston at year’s end?…
For over a decade, WTKK’s top star was former Pat Buchanan political advisor Jay Severin. Once a nighttime star on Entercom-owned crosstown rival WRKO-AM, Severin had a deep voice but a shallow intellect; as a 2001 Boston Globe profile observed…
As Dan Kennedy noted years ago in the Boston Phoenix, Severin’s “Extreme Games” broadcast decreased the IQ of the Boston talk-radio crowd with these bon mots:
• On Hillary Clinton: “that cynical, criminal, sociopathic bitch … one of the worst people on the planet.”
• On Janet Reno: “she’s a lesbian, evidently.”
• On taxpayer-funded services he doesn’t want to see: “free turkey basters for reproducing lesbians.”
(Media Matters compiled a similar list of Severin’s shockers in 2005.)
Severin’s hot tongue and cold brain led him into a years-long feud with Boston Globecolumnist Scot Lehigh, who revealed in 2005 that Severin had falsely claimed to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. Four years later, Severin was suspended for racist invective about immigrants from Mexico, and promised to produce a kinder, gentler broadcast upon his return.
Well, that didn’t last long: just two years later, Severin was fired for boasting about his sexual exploits and making light of the concept of sexual harassment. Severin soon made his way to Clear Channel-owned WXKS-AM, but found himself out of a gig one year later when WXKS switched to an all-comedy format. (He’s now with Glenn Beck’s entity The Graze, er, The Blaze.)
WTKK’s other star was Michael Graham, who joined the station in 2005 after being forced out of WMAL-AM in Washington, D.C., then owned by ABC Radio, for declaring that “Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization.” For most of his WTKK career, Graham, who recently announced his departure from the station, avoided Severin’s shameless sleaze: in fact, I considered him a friend, invited him to appear as a guest on my own talk-radio program The Notes in April 2010, favorably reviewed his 2010 book That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom, and appeared as a guest on his “That’s a Wrap” segment on January 14, 2011.
However, I can’t look past Graham’s disgusting declarations about dwarfism and discrimination in August 2011, remarks that turned out to be a reprise of earlier anti-dwarfism potshots from May 2011. The remarks were not only ludicrous, but incoherent even from Graham’s political perspective. Don’t conservatives believe in merit? If someone with dwarfism is the most qualified person for a given job, shouldn’t that person get the job, and not be discriminated against while on the job? Wouldn’t it make more sense for Graham to support, not mock, the plaintiff in this case?
But such is the upside-down logic of what is promoted as “conservative” talk radio today.
While the troubles faced by progressive talk radio are often, opportunistically, regarded by those on the Right as “evidence” that Americans are simply not interested in “liberal views” over our public airwaves, less frequently noted — largely due to the lack of a similar left-wing “echo chamber” on our public airwaves — is that right-wing talk now faces problems as well competing in the “free market” (where such a market can be found in talk radio, anyway.)
WTKK, which carried Don Imus, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham in its heyday, and WXKS, which carried Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Mark Levin before going under, aren’t the only stations to fall flat in a once-vibrant, right-wing talk radio market. Salem Radio Network-owned WTTT, home of agitprop ayatollahs Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt, switched to Spanish gospel music in the late-2000s. In addition, WRKO-which carried Rush Limbaugh from 1994-2010 before losing him to WXKS, only to reacquire him this year — let go of four hosts in 2012; the station, which features Washington Times columnist Jeff Kuhner and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, in addition to Limbaugh and Levin, is no longer a ratings powerhouse, and isn’t much of a political powerhouse either (as outgoing US Senator Scott Brown, who was worshiped on the station for years, can attest).
Why has right-wing talk tanked in Boston? Simple. The shows became repetitive claptrap. The era of independent conservative and libertarian views (of the sort expressed by erstwhile talk-radio titans Jerry Williams, David Brudnoy and Gene Burns) gave way to the era of blind pro-GOP cheerleading. The quality of the shows declined, and so did the audience.
In a seminal May 1997 Boston Phoenix article entitled “The Death of Talk Radio,” Dan Kennedy recognized early signs of the collapse of conservachat. Reading his piece again now is like reading one of climate scientist James Hansen’s papers from the early-1980s; in both cases, it’s stunning to see just how accurate they would prove to be.
Kennedy drew a connection between media consolidation, thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic President, and the overall decline in the quality of the talk radio product:
In Boston, for instance, WRKO and WHDH once competed for the talk-show audience. In 1993, though, American Radio Systems, which owns WRKO, bought WHDH, something it would not have been allowed to do prior to deregulation. For a while the company continued to operate both as talk stations; on ‘HDH, [Howie] Carr faced off against [Jerry] Williams.
But as soon as it was clear that Carr had established himself as the new ratings champ, American Radio Systems moved Carr into Williams’s slot on WRKO and essentially folded WHDH, replacing its spot on the dial (AM 850) with WEEI, an all-sports station and the Boston home of Don Imus.
Having a monopoly makes it easier for a station owner to fill up his time slots with cheap syndicated programming. One can hardly fault American Radio Systems for running top-rated programs such as those hosted by Limbaugh, Dr. Laura [Schlessinger], and the I-man. But WRKO now offers no local programming between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. And at WEEI, the day’s local programming doesn’t start until noon, even though Boston is arguably one of the most sports-obsessed cities in the country.
Although one would hardly know it from listening to the likes of the foul-mouthed Howard Stern, some observers worry that the trend toward media concentration will also result in an increasingly bland talk-radio environment.
After Disney purchased ABC, for instance, it dumped left-wing syndicated host Jim Hightower, who’d been critical of the merger.
…
You might think that Gene Burns, well-known for his libertarian views, would hail deregulation as some sort of triumph of the market. Yet Burns — a founder and past president of the National Association of Talk Show Hosts — contends there’s no such thing as a free market in radio. Instead, he argues that commercial enterprises operate radio stations as government-protected monopolies. His solution: “total deregulation,” which would allow anyone to launch small radio stations without the approval of the Federal Communications Commission.
…
“Out of that primal mix, I think, some clever operators would emerge,” Burns says. “But they’re never going to let that happen. If they did, they would die from a wound of a thousand cuts.”
Burns’ highlight of the problem (if not his proposed solution) echoes the very premise that Brad Friedman has been highlighting at The BRAD BLOG for some time: the continuing lack of real, free market competition in talk radio, and the destructive effect it has had on progressive talk in recent years. His observations on the vertical integration — the very definition of monopoly control — between corporate station owners and national syndicators (now, often one and the same) violates anti-trust standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court, and now all but ignored by DOJ and FCC alike, from as long ago as 1948’s U.S. v. Paramount ruling which ended the major movie studio grip, and complete control, of film distribution to national theater chains which those same studios owned.
The Supreme Court case led to the major movie studios selling off their theaters around the country. In the meantime, major media corporations have been able to gobble up virtually all of the stations they like in each major market and push their own syndicated products across the public airwave bandwidth they have been allowed to license, while the DoJ and the FCC look the other way and allow the media powerhouses to establish monopolies akin to those broken up by U.S. v. Paramount.
With the incipient demise of WTKK, the previous deaths of WXKS and WTTT, and the poor health of WRKO, it’s clear that talk radio in Boston is beginning to resemble Muhammad Ali in the last two years of his boxing career. Will the format begin to die off in other major cities as well? Is the Boston situation just an outlier, or a harbinger of a new trend away from Republican radio rallies?
If it’s the latter, then it’s a development that’s long overdue. Whatever intellectual value conservachat once held has long since gone away. I’m not going to miss jokes about Mexican immigrants and the disparagement of people with dwarfism. I’m not going to miss over-the-top invective about Democrats and shameless sucking up to Republicans.
In a darkly funny New York piece about National Review’s recent post-election cruise, Jonah Goldberg is quoted saying…
I’ll leave the author of Liberal Fascism — and a man who once seemed to recognize the flaws of talk radio — to deal with his fears, imagined or otherwise. Meanwhile, here’s hoping that more Americans follow Boston’s lead and reject the lies peddled by right-wing radio — the lies about climate change being a hoax, about America being a center-right nation, about President Obama’s alleged fondness for Marxism, and so on.
May the anti-conservachat sentiment in Boston spread throughout the nation — and rush more reactionaries right off the radio.
D.R. Tucker is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer and a former contributor to the conservative website Human Events Online. He has also written for the Huffington Post, the Boston Herald, ClimateCrocks.com, FrumForum.com, the Ripon Forum, Truth-Out.org, TheNextRight.com, and BookerRising.com. In addition, he hosted a Blog Talk Radio program, The Notes, from August 2009 to June, 2010. You can follow him on Twitter here: @DRTucker.
Some feel that WTKK was actually kind of moderate–
Jim Braude, Marge Eagan (can be liberal in some
ways), Imus, Mike Barnicle (years ago), Mike
Smerconish (Obama supporter etc.)
Meanwhile as I’ve pointed out before other than the NPR stations liberal BOSTON has just about no progressive talk. Jeff Santos who had bought time on 1510 now buys 1 hour on a Worc. station and 1 on a minor AM outlet…that’s it. Had these big companies felt libtalk would work they would have put it on. (CC did…for 2 years on 1200/1430…
OK conserv talk flopped. So why didn’t they decide to go with libtalk again?
Well this leaves WRKO (conserv.) as the only full time outlet, though WBZ has it at night (conserv Dan Rea and various hosts).
Not the biggest fan of
Severin or Graham, I’ll admit.
Also while Entercom (WRKO) head David Field is supp. a big leftist–and Ent. airs prog talk
on WWKB Buffalo–they haven’t sought fit to put it on their WRKO (other than when Steph Miller’s
old show aired late nights in the late 90s), probably because conservative talk works better.
Agenda? Their agenda is to make money, and this
explains now why many such stations are now going to…sports. (NBC/Dial Global; ESPN; Fox/Clear
Channel; Yahoo, and CBS Sports/Cumulus) Younger audiences want to talk football playoffs not
fiscal cliff. And they want to sell Bud.
WTKK conservative? Well, maybe, if your politics are left of Mao, I suppose.
It is no surprise that talk on TKK has failed, the station has made a consistant move from true conservative talk radio to more ‘moderate’ and ‘liberal’ talk — Eagan was as giddy as a teenage schoolgirl who discovers the football quarterback thinks she’s ‘cute’ when Obama was re-elected and Scott Brown lost. Braude, if anything, is the more level-headed out of those two, at least he doesn’t think there is some giant right-wing conspiracy to control his uterus and confiscate his ovaries.
Meehan? Smerconish? At best you could label both of those guys moderates, and I think that’s being generous (did Smerconish mention he interviewed Obama?)
With the dismissal of Severin years ago, Graham became the top-billing “conservative” at TKK, and long-time listeners would probably label him more of a libertarian than a ‘conservative’ in the common vernacular, and I don’t think he believes half of what he states, its more to get a rise out of half of the audience and a laugh out of the other half.
Ultimately, though, radio is a ratings business, and the ratings book / market share determines your advertising rates. I am not surprised that conversative talk radio disappears from the over-the-air airwaves, it has a higher labor cost (the “on-air talent” which has to talk 24-7) than, say, robotically-managed all-music radio stations, which you can manage with a skeleton-crew of low-paid engineers who make sure the computers are up and the transmitter is on.
The market is much different from the late 80’s / early 90’s, which I would say where talk-radio’s hey-days, when Rush Limbaugh first arrived on the scene. Today, you have so many alternatives — streaming internet, satellite radio, podcasts, etc.
If anything, I’m amazed that broadcast radio is actually alive and operating at all, given the operating costs compared to the alternatives available today. Who wants to listen to broadcast music when I have a selection of 10k+ MP3s on my computer and iPod?
After TKK switches over to its new format at 10am on Wednesday, mark your calendar, so we can have this discussion again in another 10 years, when they switch formats to something else …
Vin, it’s always interesting to hear what a conservatives view of a ‘Liberal” is. I can assure you, as a dyed in the wool progressive, that no liberal in our great city would ever listen to any of those hosts you imply are more “liberal” than conservative. Now, If they put on REAL progressive talk, with ACTUAL progressives, then you could feasibly make the argument that TKK failed because they went “liberal”. They did not. They simply featured some hosts who are not right wing zealots.
Another point to consider: from this past election cycle. If you had invested heavily as the r party had in the news cycle. And It had not paid off, just as this past election cycle. Remember this is the third time they have tried it. And still have not gotten to the english cycle of job destruction, as proposed by the fox pundits. You may be upset. And start pulling back from your losses. But that means even as distorted as the news cycle was, as much as they lied to your face, they were presenting a service, that your local papers and news shows will have to fill. Remember, less accuracy, less calling a lie a lie, means slander is more prevelent in the news cycle, and some reporters are starting to say, “should we not call a lie out when it is presented?”
Unfortunatly not enough, and which ones do you trust with the “getting the real story out” now.Thanks rupert.
Speaking of right wing media, looks like Mr Carbon Tax himself just sold Current TV to Big Oil. I love it. As they say, “everybody has a price.”
I guess left-wing climate fearmongers may finally be signing off. Oh the humanity of it all!
I just heard the station in Seattle died today. As you may guess, its now sports. The cards are still stacked against us–as far as progressive media goes. So we have to change that. This is just little ol’ me trying to take on Golieth here. Maybe in 2013 the issue of media reform will gain steam. Who knows.
http://signon.org/sign/restore-the-airwaves
Davey,
And how is your olde buddy Oil-Qaeda doing up in the Arctic these daze?
Just like religion, radio-station “management” believes in dogma, and one element of that dogma is that sports-radio garners more revenue per-ratings-point and cumulative audience number than any other format. OK, it may be true of ONE sports station, possibly two in a market with four major-league teams (to the limited extent that the NHL is a mjor league even when playing). But in Boston there are FOUR sports streams (two co-owned) and even the third-rated such outlet may find itself on the short end of the stick. It strikes me that even MASSIVE spenders on radio like Geico or Auto Zone, etc, may pull back from buying time on signals with NO listeners even if they’re affiliated with nets like Fox Sports, CBS, NBC or Yahoo!.
You gotta wonder sometimes exactly what it’d take from Mother Nature to get these seemingly brain dead climate change deniers to acknowledge reality. But the answer may simply be–nothing, no how, no way. Too much investment in a wacky belief system promoting/perpetuating too much inflexibility of thought to change. Or something.
David,
The or something is the common addiction we share.
It’s always just a matter of time before these cycles turn around. I’d predict we’ll see a more moderate Republican base over the next decade or so and they’ll probably regain the White House in the 2020 election. Wouldn’t surprise me if Democrats went too far left during this time as well. That’s the way it always seems to work! Alan
David #10
Davey is not a climate-change denier. He denies AGW however. Saw this today:
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/561/2012/esdd-3-561-2012.html
Referring to yourself in the 3rd person is weird. So is denying our part in climate change.
Got no respect at all for a position that is so impossibly head-in-the sand. Don’t have time for people, like yourself, so hopelessly lost in such a non-reality based alternative reality. Promoting such suicidal ignorance you become a drag on everything that needs to be done.
But, maybe that’s been your goal all along?
DAMN, WHAT A GOD GIVEN TURD. CAN WE PLEASE GET BEYOND SUCH AN IDIOT? I HAVE SO MUCH HOPE FOR OUR COUNTRY.
GGT. God Given Turd. An oh yeah Colbert, I may have ” coined it” so there you go. Love you anyway. 🙂
David #14,
Did you read the paper?
Climate is dynamic. We have gone in and out of at least five ice ages. Humans did not participate in any of them (virtually). Ignore history if you want. I once thought that this whole AGW crap would reveal itself in 20 or so years. Now I think it will be revealed as crap much sooner.
If you guys (David and Ancient) are so concerned, turn off your computers and your lights and save the planet.
Speaking of weird…why is that you dont call it global warming any more? Why is it “climate change?” What is the optimal global temperature of the earth anyway? To what temperature should we be turning the thermostat? What standard deviation about that mean is acceptable?
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdrGS__yg6Q
Becuz … you little dumper I care about what happens to the whole uNlike your little mind scape which holds you only accountable to your OWN, INSTEAD OF TO YOUR WHOLE i FEEL WE MUST ACT TOGETHER. BUT HEY, YINZ GUYS CAN KEEP US ALL OFF OUR GAME! ASSHOLE jUST BY BEING WHO YOU CHOOSE TO STAND BY, NUMBERS BE DAMNED. WHAT KIND OF LIFE DO YOU STAND FOR ?
What a cool conservative this D.R. Tucker is. We need more conservative voices like him that are committed to REALITY rather than the alternative make believe universe that conservatives seem to inhabit to the country’s detriment these days.
{Ed Note: Commercial spam deleted.}
DC @17,
You have revealed your head to be full of crap right now. You are a poseur. You pretend to be a person engaged in critical thinking. But you deny the reality of overwhelming scientific consensus for ideological reasons. Intellectual fraud. No thanks.
Sonia #20,
Great question. Here is what Davey says: “Be sure you’re right–then go ahead!
The motto Davey lives by.
Davey Crocket is now giving heartfelt and yet disingenuous advice to commercial spam and doing it in the third person.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
DL #26,
Did not know it was spam…heartfelt apology!
In Boston it’s tough to figure out what station could go all-talk to take WTKK’s place (they btw are stunting with diff. formats every day). Just RKO, and WBZ at night and for the most part the closest thing to prog talk is the NPR stations
(WGBH is putting Jim and Margery on Tue for 2 hours, hmmm?) other than the time Santos buys.
Interesting insight from KMGX at radiodiscussions: “Talk radio is no longer hip, younger audiences are largely uninterested. Most of the hosts are in their 50s and 60s, primarily white with large stock portfolios. This is a problem with radio in general, but talk radio suffers the most from an aging audience. In 20 years, the landscape of talk radio will not look nearly as fruitful as it does today and it’s fairly sparse even now. Again, much like the rest of the industry, there is a significant amount of competition from outside sources that are all eating away at the audience and talk radio just doesn’t get it, they haven’t for a long time and management probably won’t anytime soon.Someone mentioned that a few of these hosts try to pass themselves off as ‘regular guys just like the listeners’, that is pretty amusing. Radio doesn’t have the stones to do anything risky, especially put a ‘regular person’ on the air.”
http://radiodiscussions.com/smf/index.php?topic=224930.30