It’s The Money Stupid: The Failure of Liberal Political Talk

Most liberals assume that conservatives dominate talk radio because conservative programmers and station owners are ideologues, interested in propagating their political perspective. This paper reveals that this assumption is false. At most, the views of owners and programmers are a small factor in the uniformly conservative programming on most talk stations. Instead, liberal talk radio has struggled primarily because many liberal hosts have fundamentally failed to understand that radio is primarily an entertainment medium; they have been too focused on pushing their political agenda or having serious discussions and not sufficiently stimulating, entertaining, or humorous. Rather than concentrating on entertainment, many liberal programs have been reactive, born out of an attempt to level the playing field and neutralize the political impact of conservative talk. Additionally, while the best talk hosts have prior radio experience of some sort, the vast majority of failed liberal hosts were comedians or politicians with minimal to no radio experience. Furthermore, structural defects, such as low wattage stations and minimal advertising dollars, a fragmented potential audience, and the success of Rush Limbaugh, which spawned a path dependency among programmers, have hindered liberal radio.  Indeed, liberal talk has struggled because liberals have found the news and commentary that they seek elsewhere, in many cases, because they gave up on AM radio as conservative programming proliferated. By the time that programmers tried liberal radio on one of their AM stations, the potential audience no longer existed.  Finally, Air America, the most ambitious effort to build liberal talk radio, failed because of business mistakes and a business plan totally mismatched to the amount of available capital. Overall, if programmers and owners believed that liberal talk could match or exceed the profits produced by conservative talk, the vast majority would have no problem putting liberal programs on the air.