This being the season of “peace on Earth, goodwill towards men”– let’s make that more inclusive and say “towards people,” okay? – it’s striking how, in 2023, we have neither peace on Earth nor anything approaching civility, let alone goodwill. Peacemaking is way above my pay grade, but when it’s about how we got to the point where people don’t even want to hear anything on news/talk radio that doesn’t confirm their preset worldview, well, we need to talk.
This didn’t start in the past couple of years. Ever since Gutenberg (and maybe before that, when everything was hand-written in quill pen, or pecked out on stone tablets by birds for Fred and Barney), there have been news media serving up information with a bias one way or another. In the twentieth century, every big city had its conservative daily newspaper and its liberal (or less conservative) daily newspaper.
Some kept their opinions out of the news coverage, others didn’t. The Citizen Kane era of newspapering lasted well beyond “Citizen Kane” itself; there remain vestiges of those days in places like New York, where you know what you’re getting when you pick up the Post or the Times. Most of the dwindling number of newspapers left are owned by Gannett or Alden Global Capital and you’re lucky to find any actual news in them. Newspapers’ impact, save a handful like The Washington Post, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, is not what it used to be.
But you know that, and you know that people are more likely to get their news through social media filters, word-of-mouth filters, and, if they’re, shall we say, older, cable news and talk radio. It is very possible, in fact likely, that you can get through each day hearing only news that’s been filtered through the political and social worldview of your choice. You’re in a bubble even if you’re trying not to be. Your social media accounts are being flooded with one side or another. If a stray dissenting opinion slips through, you tune it out or mute/block it.
Talk radio has been like this for decades. It wasn’t always the case. Talk radio stations in the Jurassic Age of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s were not a steady stream of one ideology or another. Most had primarily conservative lineups, but featured liberals and libertarians or we-don’t-know-what-they-are hosts as well.
You listened not because you wanted a confirmation of your political beliefs or for educational purposes. You listened to be entertained, period. A conservative listening in New York to Bob Grant, a rabid, shouty conservative host, could and did listen to liberal WBAI-exile Lynn Samuels on the same station. Conservative Barry Farber shared WMCA with liberal John Sterling – yes, that John Sterling, the “thuh-uh-uh Yankees win!”, John Sterling. The common denominator for good talk radio was an acknowledgment that the goal was to entertain, not gain converts for a political party.
By the way, contrary to what you’ll see from some folks on social media today, the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine did not lead to what came next. The Fairness Doctrine never dictated that equal time be given to both sides of an issue. In fact, it was vague enough that the occasional editorial or Sunday morning public affairs show was enough to ward off any trouble. There were plenty of angry conservative hosts during the Fairness Doctrine years.
I’m not going to go into a lecture about Mayflower and Red Lion, but you can look ‘em up. Anyway, the moment anyone on Xitter or Threads or BlueSky starts calling for a return of the Fairness Doctrine, you can feel free to ignore or mute them, because it’s certain they don’t know what they’re talking about.
The change in talk radio was that stations decided that the road to profit was paved with giving listeners “more of what you came for,” namely lots of hosts who parroted Rush Limbaugh’s politics, not necessarily his style. I don’t know if it was based on research, fear of the audience, or gut instinct, but suddenly talk radio schedules had a lot of angry conservative guys, with the occasional angry conservative woman for variety. Entertainment was no longer the guiding principle. The industry went with the idea that it was the politics, not the entertainment, that the audience wanted.
They were right, to a point. Doing that guaranteed that the audience they would reach would be loyal, smaller but spending more time listening. It would also get older, and older, and older, until they’d die out, but by then, the management would be retired on a beach somewhere around, um, here. (I bet I can find a healthy number of former radio executives within a 5-mile radius of my home, grabbing an early dinner at Flakowitz deli down the street.)
That’s how it played out, and that’s how talk radio ended up all sounding the same, with hard-to-sell demographics, feeding into seniors’ fear and paranoia. Cable news went down the same path, and you know all about how Fox News watchers and MSNBC watchers have completely different perceptions of reality, but you hear about ratings and revenue more than you hear about the primary source of revenue, which involves carriage fees from cable system operators, not advertising. If talk radio could charge radio manufacturers for the right to retransmit their signals, we wouldn’t be talking about how dire things are for the industry… but they can’t and we are.
This brings us back to the holiday and whatever version of Luke 2:14 you prefer, peace and goodwill and all that. 2023 did not bring us enough of that. The media is too far gone to engender goodwill, at least politically, and not in the election year coming up. You might argue that, for some things, there aren’t two sides, that one side is so reprehensible that there shouldn’t be any debating. You might be right about that. That isn’t going to change.
Or maybe it can. If you’re a host or producer, you have a choice. You can do more of the same, or you can entertain. You can be relatable and worth a listen to people who don’t remotely agree with you. You can reach more people, grow your audience, and expand beyond the true believers. And you can make your show less aggravating and more fun.
The election year means you’re going to have an audience no matter what, and most of them have made their minds up anyway. You don’t have to convince them of anything they don’t think already. Might as well try something different. They could use the break.
