Liberal Talk Radio

I try to keep the self-serving meta-posts on the nature of liberal talk radio to a bare minimum. But I have to take a minute to comment on this:

If liberal talk radio is failing, then how come Clear Channel keeps adding liberal talk stations?

The truth is driven more by economics than ideology, it seems. What kind of person tends to have access to a radio all day at work and the kind of job that lets them listen to it? White working-class men? Yup. School teachers or ad execs? Not likely.

If efforts at liberal talk have been unsuccsessful, it is because they try to entice liberal activists, who are not necessarily radio enthusiasts (15 minutes of NPR on the way to work doesn’t count) to sit around listening to the radio. What they should be doing is what Clear Channel is doing, and programming for the kind of person who tends to listen to the radio all day.

All I’m saying is that you go into radio with the audience you have, not the audience you want. In a world of much more advanced media, radio exists because, as an audio-only medium, it can penetrate the periphery of our lives. For those of us in certain industries, anyway. You have to cater to those folks first. Can you frame a progressive political agenda into that format? Absolutely. Liberal talk radio will fully succeed by making progressivism pallatable for truck drivers and auto mechanics, not by convincing the latte set to squeeze three hours of Jeanine-Garafalo-background-noise into their already frenetic lives.

For a convenient little Q.E.D., i’ll point to Rhandi Rodes, a very successful old-school liberal talker, who, before she started a career in radio used to be — that’s right — a truck driver.