He’s developed congressional, gubernatorial, and presidential candidates. He’s also worked on several campaigns and now is hitting the airwaves breaking down the day’s biggest topics which matter most to his listeners. “I love what I do,” said 1210 WPHT host Rich Zeoli to Barrett Media. “I mean, I’m blessed. I’m living my dream job. I’m so happy to do what I do every day.”
“I used to work in politics, and I’ve always loved talk radio, and I wanted to do that. That was kind of my dream job. I didn’t know how to break into radio, but I was fortunate in the fact that I had a very good friend who was a talk show host on my station. He was a doctor and now he’s the CEO of a hospital, and he didn’t want to do [radio] full time, but he helped get me in the door. You need an angel to get you into the industry I think sometimes.”
Zeoli’s four-hour show takes a lot of prep, but the self-declared ‘News Junkie’ doesn’t view it as work. “I’m always paying attention to what’s going on in the news. I try to decompress when I go on vacation and the weekends, and I try to not talk about current events at dinner or anything like that. But, I mean, I’m always just paying attention. I love politics, I love current events, I love the news. So that’s pretty much how I prepare for it. I have a producer. He sends me a lot of stories. I’m always searching for crazy audio clips of insane things people say. There’s no shortage of content, in this day and age, which is nice. Makes show prep a lot easier, that’s for sure.”
The former political operative noted one major difference between politics and radio, less repercussions about what he says. “I like it better because I’m behind a microphone,” he said. “I can say whatever I want. I don’t have to worry about any political blowback, necessarily. But I also don’t have to go to a lot of political events so I can spend more time with my family, because when you’re in politics, you have to go to events all the time. You’re constantly going to some fundraiser or something like that, but when you’re in radio and you’re behind the microphone, you get to enjoy your life a little bit more.”
While politics is keeping the news cycle full, Zeoli does miss those slow summer Fridays “where we would talk about stuff to do on the boardwalk and people who are rude on the beach. Those topics are great, it’s just hard to fit them in now because you’re talking about presidential assassination attempts and a president in the middle of summer deciding he’s not running for reelection. So, trying to fit in the fun lifestyle topics becomes a little bit more challenging in the current news cycle, that’s for sure.”
This election cycle, Zeoli has taken his show on the road. He attended the RNC in Milwaukee and he plans on being at the DNC in Chicago in just a few weeks. While the energy at the DNC remains to be seen, Zeoli said the feeling at the RNC was “crazy.” He said, “There was a lot of good energy.”
He noted the feelings and connection President Trump’s supporters have are unlike any other politician he’s ever seen. “I’ve never seen in all my years in politics the kind of connection that he has with his supporters,” he said. “It’s just a once in a century kind of a thing. I’ve never seen it before. I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again. He just has such a strong connection with people. And you saw that at the RNC, too. I mean, people just love the guy.”
Having worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, Zeoli focused on debate prep, an essential part of the political game. “Debate prep has to do, really, with figuring out what your opponent is going to attack you with, and then to be able to prepare for that and handle and respond in a way that conveys your message and staying on message. [It’s also about] just being able to anticipate the kind of questions you’re going to get asked, and to be able to know what you want to get across. Even if you’re asked a question you don’t really want to answer.”
As the news cycle may have many Americans asking to shorten the election cycle (and in turn the election craziness), Zeoli does not foresee that happening because, “ratings and the way advertisements are making money. There’s so much money in politics that I don’t think it’s realistic to say it would ever be shortened because people just are making too much money.”
For those looking to follow in his media footsteps, he believes if you want to cover politics you should first be in politics. “If they want to get into talk radio versus, say, music radio or sports radio, it would be really good to do something in the political realm,” he said “It’ll give you a good perspective and a different way of looking at things, because you’ll actually be in the real world. I mean, that’s why I think athletes wind up becoming sports talkers, because they play the game versus just analyzing it. And I think that there’s something to that in politics, too, where if you were actually in the game yourself, you can look at it from a different point of view and you can think about how the players do. So, I look at it very much like sports in that sense. The politicians are the players of a team. The game is the November election.”
But if you do want to get into politics, Zeoli warns, “You should have your head examined because it’s a terrible life and it’s certainly not something I’d want for my children, that’s for sure. I mean, it’s pretty brutal in this day and age. You’re just attacked constantly. I don’t know if I would want to necessarily be the person on the ballot. But I think being the person behind the person on the ballot is a lot of fun, being the king or queen maker because you can then help drive strategy without having to always be the one that’s the focus of the attacks.”
Zeoli believe the key to his success in radio is simple. “When I’m behind that microphone, I’m imagining one person listening to me, either with their AirPods in or driving in their car,” he said. “But I’m talking directly to one person at a time, and I like that approach. I think I have a very close connection with my audience as a result of that, because of that level of intimacy and that’s why I love talk radio so much.”
Krystina Alarcon Carroll is a news media columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. She has experience in almost every facet of the industry including: digital and print news; live, streamed, and syndicated TV; documentary and film productions. Her prior employers have included NY1 and Fox News Digital and the Law & Crime Network. You can find Krystina on X (formerly twitter) @KrystinaAlaCarr.
