In 1987, America’s media regulators abandoned a policy known as the “Fairness Doctrine” – a set of rules stipulating that broadcast coverage of controversial issues must be fair and balanced. The rationale for dropping the rule was that the free market had provided sufficiently diverse media voices for the people to form their own opinions.
One by-product of this watershed decision was the spectacular rise to prominence of a radio talk show host called Rush Limbaugh. White, middle-aged and mad as hell, Limbaugh made his mark during the Clinton era with his bellicose tirades against political correctness, establishment “dittoheads,” “feminazis,” “environmental wackos,” Arabs, gays, drug addicts, foetus-killers, immigrants, Democrats, and, worst of all, the elitist, biased and downright anti-American “liberal media.”
Before the decade was out, Limbaugh was syndicated on hundreds of stations around the country and had some fifteen million loyal listeners. Ronald Reagan called him “the number one voice for conservatism in our country,” and when Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of the conservative Washington Times, credited one person for the Republican Party’s success over the past ten years, he chose neither Al Gore nor Monica Lewinsky.
“Starting (with the congressional elections) in 1994, I think Limbaugh made the difference in electing the Republican majority,” said Blankley. “In the following three elections he made the difference in holding the majority. And in 2000, in the presidential race— he was the difference between Gore and Bush winning Florida, and thus the presidency.”
But Limbaugh wasn’t working alone. His stellar success inspired an industry. In 1980, there were only 75 talk stations in America. Today, there are well over a thousand, peopled almost exclusively by angry, white, conservative voices.
A few attempts have been made to install a left-leaning Limbaugh, but none has proved commercially viable. Some see this as proof that the talk format is inherently incompatible with a liberal world-view; that talk radio is better suited to the hell and brimstone diatribes of tin-eared ideologues than nuanced and tolerant debate. Others hold that liberals have simply been unable to find a spokesperson of Limbaugh’s calibre.
But March saw the launch of Air America, a self-proclaimed “liberal radio network,” funded by a coalition of card-carrying Democrats, that aims to snatch a chunk of the AM spectrum for the left.
“Every day in America on the 45 top-rated talk radio stations, there are 310 hours of conservative talk. There is a total of five hours of talk that comes from the other side of the aisle,” said Jon Sinton, one of the network’s senior executives. “Just from a pure business perspective, it appeared to us that you could drive a truck through this hole in the market.”
Sinton puts past failures of liberal talkers down to the fact that most left-leaning hosts found themselves sandwiched between arch-conservatives. “It finally hit me. You don’t put a Led Zeppelin record on after country.”
So Air America decided to lease its own stations, rather than simply syndicating liberal talent across existing talk outlets. The timing seemed spot-on. Limbaugh and his disciples owed their early success partly to the frustration of Clinton-era conservatives who perceived themselves as marginalised and voiceless. Today, the shoe is on the other foot. The Republican Party’s grip on all three branches of government has ushered in some radical policies, and with an election around the corner, liberals are caught up in an anti-Bush frenzy. Fertile soil for liberal talk radio, one might think.
But if Air America’s early performance is any gauge, one would be mistaken.
Air America’s programming has been roundly panned in both the liberal and conservative press, and though official audience figures have yet to be released, early signs are not encouraging. To make matters worse, a contract dispute saw the network’s signal dropped from two of the country’s three largest markets, and it is still struggling to maintain even a meagre national footprint.
To its credit, however, the network has hired some top-notch talent. Heading the line-up is Al Franken, a politically astute comedian and writer of such bestsellers as “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations,” and “Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.”
Franken is white, middle-aged and mad as Limbaugh. As the title of his books suggest, he specialises in fingering the right-wing media for the half-truths, exaggerations and misquotations that surface on conservative internet blogs, talk shows and cable television, where they are echoed so often as to render their actual truth or falsity entirely redundant. But he has yet to find his radio legs. The witty reductios ad absurdum in his books can come across on talk radio as insipid, or worse, hysterical, particularly to audiences familiar with Limbaugh’s confident polemics.
Air America’s problem, however, is not a lack of programming talent. Its real quandary is an existential one that goes to the heart of its self-proclaimed status as a “liberal network.”
Such positioning neglects a valuable lesson in the success stories of right-wing media. Rush Limbaugh didn’t succeed by selling himself as a right-winger, but by repeatedly insisting that his word is the impartial, gospel truth, and that he only seems biased because media establishment is skewed so far to the left.
Similarly, the conservative Fox News cable channel won its staggering ratings – precipitating an envious rightward shift by the entire cable news industry – not by touting its blind conservatism, but by creating the illusion of objectivity, adopting slogans like “Fair and Balanced,” and “We Report, You Decide.”
Fox’s appeal consequently extends well beyond die-hard conservatives. According to a recent independent survey, 32% of the channel’s regular viewers are “centrists,” and 18% call themselves “liberals.”
In contrast, by wearing its politics on its sleeve, Air America is limiting its audience to a small niche of mainstream liberals. Anyone falling outside of this description might justifiably regard “liberal talk” as synonymous with “Democratic-party propaganda.”
I am not suggesting that the network mimic Fox and Limbaugh by disingenuously claiming neutrality while pushing a partisan agenda. On the contrary, what American talk radio needs is not another partisan voice, but rather one that genuinely endeavours to be fair and balanced.
Despite two attempts by Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, media outlets are no longer under any obligation to present both sides of an argument. Therein lies the hole through which Air America should be driving its truck – leading by example in the spirit of generous, open-minded debate rather than slanted attack-dog politics.
Talk radio thrives on opinion, and it would be foolhardy to suggest that hosts should be as impartial as news reporters. But by adding a few conservative voices to its mix, Air America would reach a larger, more diverse audience, thus proving that a new, more honest brand of talk radio is commercially viable. If it can achieve that, then Limbaugh and his ilk will finally have cause for concern.
Tim Spira is The Media’s correspondent in New York.