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Why talk radio is conservative
Public Interest, Summer, 2004 by William G. Mayer
The audience and media bias
A first reason that conservatives garner better ratings on talk radio is that they have a larger potential audience. There are simply more conservatives than liberals in this country. The closest thing in American politics to a complete collection of national survey results is the Public Opinion Location Library, or POLL, a remarkable on-line database maintained by the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut. Using POLL, I have been able to find 134 distinct surveys conducted between January 2002 and August 2003 that asked a national sample of American adults whether they would describe their own political philosophy as liberal, moderate, or conservative. These surveys were conducted by 10 different survey organizations and, as one might suspect, employed a wide variety of question wordings. Yet conservatives outnumbered liberals in every one of the surveys, by an average margin of 1.8 to 1.
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Ideological self-identification, it is important to say, is not a perfect predictor of a person's attitudes on specific policy issues. Many Americans simply do not have well-developed ideologies--indeed, many are not even sure what the terms liberal and conservative mean. Even those who do attach great significance to these labels can rarely be counted upon to toe the ideological line on every issue. But ideological identification is strongly correlated with attitudes on a wide variety of issues, and in that sense, these figures say something quite meaningful about the themes and symbols Americans are likely to find appealing or repulsive and thus about the potential audience for various types of talk radio. A self-described conservative may not support reduced spending on education and health care or oppose all forms of gun control, but he is unlikely to devote several hours per week to a program that regularly attacks corporate business practices, extols the virtues of government problem-solving, and defends affirmative action.
Not only are conservatives a larger audience than liberals, they are also in one major respect likely to be a much more receptive audience for talk radio. Of all the reasons that allow conservative shows to dominate the talk radio market, probably the most important is that conservatives think they have a greater need for these shows--that talk radio provides them with information and viewpoints that they simply cannot get from the "mainstream media." American liberals are, on the whole, much less aggrieved about the way the news gets reported on the three major television networks and in most major newspapers.
The questions of whether the American news media are biased and, if so, whether liberals or conservatives are the beneficiaries of that bias, have been the subject of an enormous amount of research over the last three and a half decades. As one might expect on such a politically charged issue, these studies reach no consensus. In general, liberals believe that the media have a conservative bias, while conservatives feel that the media favor liberals. And most journalists claim that both are wrong.
