Why talk radio is conservative

In non-technical terms, media owners will publish or broadcast anything that attracts an audience and increases their subscription or advertising revenue, regardless of its ideological content. And that, in fact, seems to be much closer to the truth than Cohen's claim. For more than 30 years, local television stations around the country have eagerly broadcast the CBS show "60 Minutes," even though that program takes a relentlessly critical view of corporate and business behavior. Why? Because the program has traditionally had very good ratings and thus increases the prices that stations can charge their advertisers. From the perspective of a station owner, ideological purity is an unaffordable luxury.

The same thing seems to be true of talk radio. Stations broadcast conservative programs because those programs attract an audience; liberal ones generally don't. Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, provides an interesting example:

   Colin McEnroe lost his talk show gig with WTIC in Hartford
   [Connecticut] a few years ago, dumped in favor of Laura Schlessinger.
   (He has since been rehired.) McEnroe is vaguely liberal and assumed
   he was being ditched as part of the rightward drift in radio. "It
   turned out my bosses' politics weren't that different from mine,"
   McEnroe says. "All they cared about was the ratings. If Noam Chomsky
   playing the kazoo on air got them an 11 share, they would put him
   on."

For those who believe that corporations and the very rich are actively seeking to suppress liberal voices on talk radio, one of the few concrete cases they cite is that of Jim Hightower. But the facts surrounding Hightower's short-lived career in talk radio make even this example questionable. In May 1994, a few years after losing his bid for a third term as the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, Hightower began doing a three-hour weekly radio show that was broadcast on stations across the country. And though Hightower would later complain about how corporations opposed his left-of-center message, what is striking is how many major corporations supported his venture.

Unlike Limbaugh, who started doing his show on a single station in Sacramento and went national only as it became clear that he was attracting a following, "Hightower Radio," as it was called, was from the very beginning syndicated by the ABC Radio Network. As Hightower himself would later admit, "It's very unusual for someone who's never had radio experience to be able to launch a national show." Nevertheless, "ABC did a terrific job of getting me an initial stable of stations." As a 1995 article in Dissent further noted, "Hightower has one additional crucial accomplishment: he has shown that a voice from the left can win commercial sponsors. His include Anacin, Goodyear tires, Ovaltine, and AT & T telephones."

The show ran for about a year and a half before being shut down in September 1995. And therein lies the controversy. Hightower and his supporters claim that his show was canceled because the host had been sharply critical of the Walt Disney Company, which had bought ABC the month before. ABC Radio claimed that it was "strictly a business decision." As one ABC executive put it, "This show was canceled for one reason and one reason only. Radio stations stayed away in droves." At a minimum, one can say there is substantial evidence the show was having problems finding an audience. At the time it was canceled, "Hightower Radio" was being carried by about 150 stations, but mostly in smaller markets. It was on the air in only two of the ten largest markets in the country and had recently been dropped by stations in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Tampa, Minneapolis, and San Diego. It had also added stations in Oklahoma City and Denver. Though Hightower immediately announced that he would try to get back on the air with a different syndicator, there is no evidence that anyone else was particularly eager to pick up the program.