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It’s an interesting time to be working in not just radio, but all traditional broadcast media. There is still an audience there, but we do openly wonder if a new generation of listeners and viewers is coming behind them. That reality has been on display in the 2024 Presidential Election.
Donald Trump cancelled his interview with 60 Minutes the same week that he sat down with comedian Andrew Schulz on his Flagrant podcast. It is a month after he joined Theo Von on his This Past Weekend podcast.
Kamala Harris did make time for 60 Minutes. She also has done several late night talk shows, another tradition for presidential candidates. But last week, the Vice President appeared on Call Her Daddy, the über-popular sex podcast on Spotify. The previous week, she was on the basketball podcast All the Smoke.
Democrats say their VP candidate, Tim Walz, will embark on a similar podcast tour soon. The current Minnesota Governor and former defensive coordinator is expected to make the rounds on some of the most popular sports podcasts. That really caught my eye, not for political reasons, but because of what it says about how the campaign sees broadcast media in 2024.
Sports conversations have always been the great equalizer. It’s where candidates from either party could go to talk to both parties at the same time. That usually happened on the radio.
In 2020, Clay Travis was still on FOX Sports Radio and welcomed President Trump to his show. In 2015, Trump, then just a candidate for the Republican nomination, called into FSR to talk to Colin Cowherd. Perhaps no presidential campaign knew the value of sports talk radio better than Barack Obama’s campaign. If it weren’t the President himself, surrogates were made available to every Fan, Game, Zone and Ticket in every swing state in America in 2008 and 2012.
But this isn’t something that started in our hyper-partisan era. I can remember being eleven in September 1992 and listening to Alabama’s 38-11 drubbing of Arkansas on the radio (95KSJ in Mobile I believe) and who popped into the booth with Eli Gold at halftime to talk about the Hogs’ recent move to the SEC? Why, it was Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who just happened to be running for President!
Are those days coming to an end? Sports will always be a valuable way for a candidate to get their message to the masses, but it seems like radio won’t be the way they go about it in the future.
Hell, sports TV shows may not be the way they do that. George W. Bush, during his two Presidential campaigns, knew and embraced the power of ESPN. The same is true of Obama and John McCain. You would think that by now, we would have seen Tim Walz pop up on College GameDay, Big Noon Kickoff or on CBS’s broadcast of Navy’s win over Air Force last month.
I think it’s worth asking why. The numbers say people still watch sports on TV and still listen to sports talk radio. But the campaigns aren’t going there. Has the devotion of podcast audiences weakened the influence of traditional media?
This is something I talked about in the most recent column in our Meet the Leaders series. I asked Beasley CRO Tina Murley if political advertising on radio had seen the same evaporation that candidates appearing on radio had.
She said no. In fact, political spending on radio has gone above and beyond her original forecast for the 2024 election. Where she sees a real impact is on the TV side.
“The biggest change is the introduction of OTT [over-the-top video services like Peacock, PrimeTV and Netflix],” she said. “There was basically no OTT spending in the 2020 election. Now, with people cutting the cord and TV ratings on the decline, we are seeing more of a shift toward OTT and really geo-targeting their video commercials.”
It’s the same story, right? More people watch the various NCIS spin-offs that seem to make up the entire CBS schedule, but more social media conversation is about The Penguin, Love is Blind and The Boys. Political campaigns are putting more value on influence than reach.
It is a problem that I have been thinking about a lot recently. It’s something we’ve been sounding the alarm on at Barrett Media for as long as I have written here. We take for granted that there is a new generation of radio listeners and broadcast and cable viewers coming. Why?
We can be cynical and dismissive of what is going on here. Trump is going to go on with bro comedians. Harris is going to go on with influencers. Neither of those groups will ask hard questions. But that isn’t always true. Kudos to Republican VP nominee JD Vance for going on The Daily despite knowing he was going to get hard questions and not win anyone over.
I’m as cynical as anyone when it comes to politics. I know that we live in a system that doesn’t demand candidates face scrutiny from the voters. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. If it were, local sports radio stations across America and national networks wouldn’t be cut out so easily.
The answer to why traditional radio and television are losing influence in elections is pretty simple. The median age of the average broadcast TV watcher is 64. That’s 30 years older than the median age of podcast listeners. The median age of radio’s audience is 46 – twelve years older than podcasts.
New and undecided voters will always be the most valuable audiences for political candidates. There are a whole lot more of them in the podcasting audience than the broadcast media audience. That’s why Tim Walz is likely more interested in sitting down with Bill Simmons, Pardon My Take and the Kelce Brothers than with Mike Greenberg or Dan Patrick.
I don’t have the answer for how to combat that. I just know that it’s a reality radio and television have to face.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
