News/talk radio has a Donald Trump problem — and it’s not the one most programmers think it is.
Across the format, many stations and hosts have narrowed their programming focus to a single subject, riding the national political wave as if it’s a sustainable strategy.
It isn’t.
Here’s the irony that nobody in the industry wants to acknowledge. Many news/talk hosts will tell you, with a straight face, that someone like Jimmy Kimmel is bad for late-night television because his liberal politics alienate half the audience.
They’ll say he’s too one-sided, too partisan, too focused on a narrow worldview that doesn’t speak to a broad audience. Then they’ll turn around and talk for three or four hours about Donald Trump. Without a hint of self-awareness that they’re doing the exact same thing from the other direction.
The audience isn’t waiting around for someone to notice. According to a Media Insight Project survey, 63% of U.S. adults say they either often or sometimes actively avoid news stories about Trump. That number climbs to 68% among Democrats. But here’s what should alarm news/talk radio hosts, programmers, and producers most: 69% of independents say they work to avoid Trump stories. Even 40% of self-identified Republicans report the same behavior!
That isn’t subtle data. A significant portion of the country is actively tuning out the content that dominates news/talk radio right now. It doesn’t matter about party lines, either.
There’s another fallacy baked into the format’s current approach, and it’s worth naming directly. The industry tends to operate as if politics is a clean 50/50 split — half conservative, half liberal, always engaged. That’s not the country we actually live in. A more honest breakdown looks something like 30% Republican, 30% Democrat, 20% independent, and roughly 20% who probably should be in the loony bin.
By programming exclusively to conservative politics and building around Donald Trump, stations are voluntarily surrendering half the available audience. Listeners are like money — you can never have enough of them. Giving half away for ideological purity is a strange business model.
And here’s what makes it stranger still: there’s a whole wide world of content sitting untouched. Sports. Business. Crime. Health. Technology. Local government decisions that actually affect what people pay for groceries or how long it takes to get to work. Human interest stories with genuine emotional resonance. Entertainment and culture. The format that built its identity on being indispensable to a community has largely abandoned that mission in favor of chasing the same national outrage cycle that cable news, political podcasts, and social media are already flooding.
News/talk radio still has something those platforms can’t replicate — a local voice, a live presence, and an immediacy that no podcast can match. But that advantage disappears fast when the local station sounds like a syndicated feed from Washington D.C. Hosts who’ve spent years telling audiences they’re different from the coastal media elite have quietly become a mirror image of it. They’re just pointed in a different direction.
Broadening the content horizon isn’t a liberal idea or a conservative one. It’s a business idea. “Republicans buy sneakers, too”, right? Same thing with talk radio. Stations that find ways to serve the Democrat, the Republican, the independent, and the disengaged — without making every segment a political litmus test — are stations that build habitual listeners rather than occasional ones. Habitual listeners become ratings. Ratings become revenue.
The format’s got the talent, the infrastructure, and the trust to do this well. What it needs is the willingness to look up from the Donald Trump news cycle long enough to see how much audience is sitting there, waiting to be served. Broaden the horizons. See what happens. The data already knows the answer.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
I agree with you, Garrett. I write as someone who’s spent a good number of years in radio, and still listens to a couple of stations. Punditry to me is a turn-off, and I don’t care whether the voice is from the left or the right. When it comes to news, I just want straight “news you can use” content. For talk shows, I prefer a conversation among participants – and listeners. I don’t want to be preached to, yelled at or intellectually mugged by politically-oriented radio entertainers.