Whether we like it or not, Donald Trump will not be in the White House on Wednesday, January, 20th, 2021. That is inauguration day for Joe Biden.
After the Electoral College certified Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, that was, more or less, the end of President Trump having a legitimate chance of overturning the election results. On January 6th, the House and Senate formally meet to ratify the victory.
While there are still plenty of questions surrounding the 2020 election, and I hope many of those irregularities get investigated in some capacity moving forward, that doesn’t change the reality that Joe Biden is going to reside in the White House next month.
For news talk radio, there needs to be a thought process as to what a Post-Trump World looks like for your station. For the past four years, the national topics were like shooting fish in a barrel. If you were a morning show host, you’d wake up to a barrage of tweets that allowed you to set up new angles on your show. If you were an afternoon host, you might get to carry a live Trump press conference where he would spar with CNN’s Jim Acosta and the rest of the media in his typical WWE-style of verbal confrontation.
But the Trump Show is over in just weeks.
As has been noted by many in recent weeks, this is a much bigger problem for cable news outlets than it is for news talk radio. MSNBC and CNN, in particular, made a living the last four years telling their audiences that every minor problem they had in their lives, their spouse distancing themselves, their kids misbehaving, were somehow Donald Trump’s fault. That charade is over.
On the other hand, FOX News enjoyed great access to the President and the entire administration, which is obviously not going to be the case under the next administration. FOX is in better shape going into a Biden administration, as it can go back to playing the “dissenting” role it played in the Obama years. And it’s a role FOX knows very well and has mastered.
For news talk radio, the concern is, or should be, less, because when talk radio is at its best, it’s live and local anyway. The Trump Show has allowed some of that to dissipate in recent years, as Trump was still the lightning rod that even the audiences of local shows wanted to know more about.
But now, while there will be plenty of time to goof on Joe Biden’s gaffes, of which there will be plenty, these won’t be show-carryers like Trump. They’ll be fine bits to laugh at, but likely just segways and nothing more. Joe Biden just isn’t interesting. Plus, with a divided government in Washington D.C., barring Biden going all out on executive orders on things like student loan bailouts (which is possible), it’s unlikely much will get done at our federal level.
As we discussed here a few weeks ago, this means that hosts will need to get back to their local communities as much as possible. Maybe they squeezed a little more juice out of these recent weeks and the lawsuits that ensued, but those days are numbered.
Meantime, the imaging for many stations will likely need to be tweaked. From liners to promos and station IDs, Donald Trump’s voice is probably heavily used across all of those items in some capacity. Wiping them all away after January 20th doesn’t necessarily make sense, as he’s still going to be a very public figure, but certainly re-evaluating the amount of imaging around Donald Trump, and possibly phasing some of it out, would be a wise move. And that wouldn’t be replacing it with Joe Biden, who the audience is, generally, not going to be a fan of. But possibly finding clips, audio elements, etc. from your local politicos or up-and-comers in the national scene (Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton) or just other big names still in office (Ted Cruz), who will still serve the audience, but also acknowledge that time is moving on.
It will be a fine line to walk as a station and for each individual host. But given the options in having to make these adjustments, I’d rather be dealing with it in the news talk world than the cable news world.
Pete Mundo is a weekly columnist for Barrett Media, and the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. Previously, he was a fill-in host nationally on FOX News Radio and CBS Sports Radio, while anchoring for WFAN, WCBS News Radio 880, and Bloomberg Radio. Pete was also the sports and news director for Omni Media Group at K-1O1/Z-92 in Woodward, Oklahoma. He’s also the owner of the Big 12-focused digital media outlet Heartland College Sports. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
