Why talk radio is conservative

On March 31, 2004, the latest venture in liberal talk radio was officially launched. A left-wing radio network called Air America began broadcasting a full day's worth of programming on radio stations in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. Its on-air hosts included comedians Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, rapper Chuck D, and former Walter Mondale speechwriter Marty Kaplan, as well as a sprinkling of more experienced radio performers such as Randi Rhodes and Katherine Lanpher.

Air America is the creation of a group of wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who, contrary to the usual stereotype, are using their resources to promote a left-wing agenda. As of this writing, it is still a work in progress. The owners, Mark Walsh and Evan Cohen, say that they hope the liberal network will eventually turn a profit, but in the short term they are willing to spend as much as $30 million to get the venture going. As proof of that commitment, the fledgling enterprise already has almost a hundred people working for it, even though its programs are being broadcast on only four stations (Franken's show is being aired on two others). The new network has also had the benefit of receiving a great deal of highly sympathetic coverage from other news media, particularly newspapers and television.

This is not the first attempt that liberals have made to establish a greater presence in talk radio, though it is certainly the most ambitious. In the mid 1990s, Hillary Clinton was reportedly looking for "someone to promote as a counterweight to Rush Limbaugh." Many on the Left thought they had finally found their man in Jim Hightower, an economic populist and former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture who launched a nationally syndicated radio talk show in 1994--only to have it canceled just a year and a half later. Mario Cuomo, Gary Hart, and Alan Dershowitz also had their own talk radio programs, each of which proved to be low-rated and short-lived.

All of these initiatives are a recognition of two important realities in contemporary American politics. The first is the stubborn persistence of radio as a significant source of political information for many Americans. When asked where they get most of their news, most Americans today say television; second place has long belonged to newspapers. But a substantial minority--15 to 20 percent in most polls--say that radio is one of their principal sources of news, (the questions generally allow respondents to name more than one medium).

Talk radio, in particular, is bigger than ever. Aided by the growth of satellite technology and some favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission, the number of stations devoted exclusively to news and talk shows has grown from about 75 in 1980 to about 1,400 today. In 1993, according to a widely cited study by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, 17 percent of Americans said they "regularly" listened to call-in radio shows that discussed politics and current events, while another 25 percent said they listened "sometimes." In a 2002 Gallup survey, 22 percent of the sample said they listened to "radio talk shows" every day, 10 percent listened several times a week, and 29 percent tuned in "occasionally."

The second and more striking reality is the complete dominance of talk radio by conservatives. Though there is a long-standing dispute about the ideological leanings, if any, of network television and local newspapers, there is scarcely any disagreement about the predominant ideology of talk radio. The most popular radio talk-show hosts in America are either openly and zealously conservative or almost entirely apolitical. There is nary a liberal in the bunch.

Will Air America succeed? The answer to that question almost certainly depends on the answer to another question: Why is talk radio currently so dominated by conservatives?

Conservative dominance

Do conservatives really dominate talk radio? And if so, by what sort of margin? Though observers and commentators from both parties and all sides of the political spectrum seem to agree that talk radio tilts in a conservative direction, no one, so far as I know, has actually tried to measure the relative volume of liberal and conservative voices on talk radio. Since the conventional wisdom can be mistaken, it is worth examining more closely and systematically the ideology of talk radio.

Twice each year, Talkers magazine, a trade publication that serves the talk radio industry, uses Arbitron numbers from a national sample of media markets to compile a list of the top talk radio programs in the United States and their estimated cumulative weekly audience. The magazine's latest figures, based on data from Spring 2003, are shown in Table 1. The final column in the table is my own attempt to describe each program's political ideology, if it has one. (In some cases, I actually listened to the program; more frequently, I visited the host's website.)

In many cases, identifying: A considerable number openly embrace labels like "conservative," "libertarian," or "militant moderate." There are also a sizable number of shows that I have classified as "non-political" because they deal with topics like computers, sports, relationships, and UFOs and the paranormal that are not overtly political, and the host makes no discernable attempt to inject a political spin into the discussion. (Clark Howard, for example, does not appear to use his consumer affairs show as a platform for urging increased governmental regulation.) Finally, there are a handful of shows that are labeled "non-ideological" because, while they sometimes discuss political topics, they do so in ways not easily categorized as liberal or conservative.

Obviously, there are grounds for disputing at least a few of the ideological classifications in Table 1; I will consider one such objection later in this article. That conceded, there is nothing at all tentative or ambiguous about the major conclusion that emerges from these data. Simply put, conservatives dominate talk radio to an overwhelming, remarkable degree. Of the top twenty-eight talk radio programs in Spring 2003, eleven--including four of the top five--were hosted by outspoken, undisguised conservatives. By contrast, not one was hosted by someone who could be described as clearly and unambiguously liberal. Though adding the figures in Table 1 is not a good way to measure the talk radio audience (in the sense that many of the people who listen to one conservative talk show probably listen to other conservative shows as well), it probably does provide a reasonable indicator of the content of talk radio. On that basis, Table 1 suggests that conservative voices currently outnumber liberal ones on talk radio by a factor of 54.25 million to zero.

The situation confronting liberals is not quite that grim, however. To make the list provided here, a program must be nationally syndicated and thus carried on a large number of stations. But there are still a lot of talk radio shows that have a more local orientation: They do very well in one particular city or region, even if they do not have the interest or capacity to establish a national following. And in this more localized market, some liberal talk show hosts appear to do quite well.

To come up with a reasonable list of major local talk show hosts, I rely once again on Talkers magazine. In addition to its list of the top talk radio programs in the country, the magazine also puts together an annual list of the "100 Most Important Radio Talk Show Hosts in America" (the most recent list actually contains 108 shows). This second list is based partly on ratings and therefore includes most of the names in Table 1. But it also takes into account such factors as longevity, "uniqueness," "social impact," and recognition by other media, and thereby includes a sizable number of programs that have a strong local following. Of the 83 programs that made this second list but were not on the list in Table 1, six had hosts who were specifically identified by the magazine as liberal--but 17 were explicitly described as conservative. (There was also one program in which a liberal and a conservative were paired off against each other as co-hosts.) One might have expected local talk radio to have a slightly liberal tilt, just because so much of the conservative audience would be listening to national programs like Rush Limbaugh's or Sean Hannity's, yet even here, conservatives apparently outnumber liberals by a three-to-one margin.

The Arbitron numbers that provide the basis for Table 1 do not include noncommercial stations such as those of National Public Radio (NPR), which, according to its critics, already provides a liberal voice on the airwaves. The two top-rated NPR programs are "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," which have a cumulative weekly audience of 13 and 12 million listeners, respectively. This places them just behind Limbaugh and slightly ahead of Hannity. But both of these programs are news programs, and are not what most people have in mind when they speak of "talk radio." The most listened-to talk show on NPR is "Fresh Air," which has a weekly audience of 4.4 million. "Talk of the Nation," which airs at approximately the same time as Limbaugh in most markets, has an audience of 2.9 million.

Explaining the ideology gap

Much discussion of the talk radio phenomenon in newspapers and magazines has sought to explain why conservative voices are so dominant. It is also plainly of interest to many on the Left, who recognize that they are decisively outgunned in this medium and, as we have seen, would clearly like to find a liberal counterpart to Rush Limbaugh. Yet most attempts to explain the conservative advantage are unconvincing.

One argument, for example, claims that Rush Limbaugh's popularity is due to his skills as an entertainer, not to any of the policy positions he defends. If the Left could only find someone of comparable ability, some observers claim, he would also rack up huge ratings. As a recent marketing study of the talk radio industry put it,

   The driving factor for listeners is talent, not ideology. Rush
   Limbaugh works because he is a talented entertainer who puts a great
   deal of effort into preparation so that he hosts a good show. He just
   happens to be a conservative.

This argument contains one valid insight. Even most of Limbaugh's critics concede that he is an enormously talented radio performer who seems to have loved radio from a very early age and honed his skills at a long succession of radio jobs before hitting it big. In a real sense, one can say that he created the art form and has been its star performer for more than a decade. At least part of Limbaugh's audience, according to several surveys, consists of people who disagree with what he says but simply find him entertaining.

But however influential Limbaugh was in making talk radio a political phenomenon, the conservative dominance of the medium, as the numbers in Table 1 make clear, extends well beyond his program. Sean Hannity, for example, has an audience only slightly smaller than Limbaugh's, yet whatever Hannity's other talents, no one has ever called him a "master showman." And is creative talent really so scarce among liberals that after at least a decade of searching, they have been unable to find a single left-leaning talk show host with enough pizzazz to establish a modest national following?

Another widely proffered explanation for the conservative character of talk radio is that the medium demands broad slogans and uncomplicated, simple-minded discussion of the issues, a task at which conservatives, it is argued, are particularly good. Liberals, by contrast, have a more nuanced view of the world not easily reducible to simple catch-phrases and quick solutions. As Victor Navasky, the longtime editor of the Nation, puts it, "Radio is a sound bite medium, and the Left does not have a sound bite program." Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, who had a talk show for a few years in the 1990s, has made the same point:

   Progressive politics in this country has failed to compress the
   message, and I'm not sure that it can. Because by definition, the
   reformer, the progressive, the liberal, whatever you want to call it,
   doesn't see the world in blacks and whites, but in plaids and grays.
   There never is a single simple answer. It is always a set of
   interrelated policies.

However appealing this theory might be to the liberal ego, as an explanation for the ideological complexion of talk radio it is, not to mince words, preposterous. Let me grant, without hesitation, one major premise of this theory: A good deal of what passes for argument and analysis on conservative talk radio deals with complicated issues in a highly simplistic, sometimes misleading manner (though there are more exceptions to this generalization than is usually recognized). But would any fair-minded observer of American politics really claim that this is a uniquely conservative vice? For every simple-minded conservative slogan there is an equally vacuous catch-phrase on the Left. For every Republican who has ever claimed that "big government" is the cause of all our problems there is a Democrat who thinks that all Republican policies are "tax cuts for the rich" and sweetheart deals for big business. If the collected works of Rush Limbaugh are unlikely to be published in an academic policy journal, neither would the writings of Jesse Jackson, Al Franken, Jim Hightower, or Michael Moore.

Another explanation for the apparent conservative dominance of talk radio is that there are, in fact, liberal voices on radio--but they come from a generally overlooked source: the so-called "shock jocks" like Howard Stern, who talk a great deal about sex, in very explicit, foulmouthed terms to a younger, largely male audience. As Marc Fisher argued in a February, 2003 article in Slate, "Shock jocks are this country's progressive talkers, ranting for hours on end on behalf of civil liberties, sexual freedom, the rights of the little guy against the nation's big corporations and institutions (and--sorry, Dems--against affirmative action)."

As Table 1 affirms, many shock jocks do have a sizable national following. Three-Stern, Don Imus, and Tom Leykis--made Talkers' list of the top talk radio shows in the nation, though the total audience for all three shows combined (even assuming there is no overlap) is not as large as Rush Limbaugh's. But the real problem with this theory is its claim that shock jocks are closet liberals.

No one, of course, will ever claim that Howard Stern is a defender of traditional moral values, especially with regard to sex (though, by the same token, feminists who believe our culture treats women solely as sex objects can't be very pleased with him either). Stern also advocates liberal positions on most policy issues connected with sex, such as pornography and abortion. But that is pretty much the limit of Stern's liberalism. Howard Kurtz, the media reporter for the Washington Post, has provided the following summary of Stern's political views:

   He talked about how Social Security was a "big scam," being ripped
   off by retirees who were secretly working, and how his generation was
   "never gonna see it anyway." He denounced George Bush for being
   anti-abortion, saying any woman who voted for him might as well mail
   her vagina to the White House. He chatted with Gennifer Flowers. He
   said the L.A. police were right to beat Rodney King. He played the
   taped messages of a Ku Klux Klan organizer, ridiculing him at every
   turn. He pronounced O.J. Simpson guilty and wondered if a black jury
   would let him off the hook. He was anti-government, anti-drugs,
   anti-welfare, anti-immigrant. He made fun of blacks, Jews,
   homosexuals, and the handicapped.

More recently, it is true, Stern has adopted a more explicitly partisan tone, heaping abuse on George W. Bush and saying at least a few positive things about John Kerry. The circumstances surrounding Stern's new posture, however, make it unlikely that this represents any fundamental conversion on his part. His real gripe against the current administration stems not from its policies about taxes or terrorism, but from the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to fine his program for indecent content. In all likelihood, Stern will remain a Democrat only until he gets bored with it--or until Kerry announces that he, too, would have fined Stern's program.

Even more implausible than calling Stern a "progressive talker" is the fact that Fisher puts Chicago's "Mancow" Muller in this category. Muller actually writes occasional columns that are archived at the conservative website Newsmax.com. One such column was entitled "Bunko Billy Rides Again" (the reference is to former President Clinton). another was called "Political Wizard Streisand Speaks."

The economics of talk radio

Finally, liberals blame their poor talk radio showing on the machinations of big corporations and the very wealthy. As Jeff Cohen, executive director of the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told a reporter for the New York Times, "There are a lot of phony excuses for why the right wing dominates [talk radio], but the most obvious, true explanation is that the management at these stations is conservative."

Cohen's argument is one that liberals frequently invoke to explain media bias--not only in talk radio but in television, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing. The American media, they argue, are owned by large, profit-hungry corporations or wealthy, profit-driven individuals, who use their companies to push a conservative, pro-capitalist agenda. What seems not to be generally noticed, however, is that a major contradiction lies at the very core of this argument. From the perspective of an individual corporation or station owner, the promulgation of a conservative ideology is what economists would call a public good, much like clean air or an educated workforce. Having a conservative public might help media owners generally, but the determined efforts of one corporation would probably have only a very small impact on what the public thinks, while the benefits of that conservatism would go to all corporations, regardless of whether they themselves had done anything to help bring it about. In short, if media owners are half as profit-driven as this argument claims, the same standard economic theory that explains why air and water pollution occur would predict that these owners will substantially "underinvest" in conservatism.

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.

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.

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.

In terms of the audience for talk radio, however, actual bias is probably less important than public perceptions of bias. And on this score, conservatives have clearly had the better of the argument. Quite consistently over the last two decades, public opinion surveys have shown that a lot more Americans believe the media have a liberal bias than believe they are biased in the other direction. In 1993, for example, 65 percent of the respondents in a Barna Research Group poll agreed with the statement, "Overall, the mass media seem to favor liberal views on politics and issues"; 28 percent disagreed. A November 1996 Harris Survey asked respondents to "describe the views of the news media on most matters having to do with politics." Forty-three percent said the media were very or somewhat liberal, while only 18 percent said the media were very or somewhat conservative. In July 2003, Princeton Survey Research Associates asked whether "news organizations generally" were better described as liberal or conservative: 51 percent said liberal, 26 percent said conservative. The Gallup Poll asked a particularly straightforward question: "In general, do you think the news media is too liberal, just about right, or too conservative?" In September 2003, 45 percent of the Gallup sample said the media were too liberal, only 14 percent thought they were too conservative.

All of the results cited in the last paragraph were based on all respondents in a national sample. But a particularly striking divergence appears when one breaks these results down by ideology or partisan affiliation. Whatever liberal elites may say, most rank-and-file liberals are not convinced that the media are the enemy. In fact, many polls indicate that self-identified liberals are about as likely to see a liberal bias in the media as a conservative bias. By contrast, conservatives strongly believe the media are aligned against them.

In a survey conducted by two scholars at the University of Connecticut, for example, a national sample of American adults was asked immediately after the 1996 presidential election whether they thought that reporting about the campaign had been biased in favor of the Democrats or the Republicans. Republicans were scarcely in doubt about the question: 68 percent said the media had a pro-Democratic bias and just 1 percent thought the media leaned in a Republican direction. Among Democrats, only 7 percent felt the media had a pro-Republican bias, while 10 percent said the media favored the Democrats (78 percent of Democrats said the media treated the two parties about equally). Similarly, in a Pew Center survey conducted during the 2000 presidential campaign, 67 percent of Republicans believed that most journalists were "pulling" for Gore, as against 12 percent who thought journalists were pulling for Bush. Among Democratic identifiers, 30 percent said journalists were pulling for Bush, but an even larger number, 36 percent, said most journalists were hoping for a Gore victory. In the Gallup Poll, to take a final example, 60 percent of conservatives believed that the media were too liberal, versus 9 percent who said they were too conservative. Among liberals, by contrast, just 30 percent claimed the media were too conservative, while 18 percent said the media were too liberal. Fifty percent of liberals said the media got things "just about right."

Liberals, in short, do not need talk radio: They have Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw--not to mention NPR. A quite large number of conservatives, however, see network television and their local newspapers as promoting a perspective on national and world affairs that is fundamentally at odds with their own. Talk radio is a way of redressing the imbalance.

Multicultural radio?

There is a final reason liberals have fared so poorly on talk radio, a reason that is less significant than the two discussed in the previous section but that may turn out to be particularly important in determining the fate of a liberal radio network. The potential audience for liberal talk shows, already smaller than the audience for conservative programs, is further fractionalized by all of the demographic and identity-based divisions that have long posed problems for American liberalism. Given all the disparate groups and interests that constitute the Left in this country, it is an open question whether they will all be willing to listen to the same radio program.

Take blacks as an example. On paper at least, blacks ought to be a key constituency for liberal talk radio. On most issues, they are perhaps the most consistently liberal group in America. In every recent presidential election, blacks have accounted for about one-fifth of the votes cast for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates. But will blacks actually listen to a liberal talk station on a regular basis?

Some will, of course. But many others will probably spend most of their radio time listening to a more explicitly black-oriented station on another part of the dial--a station that will probably have its own, black-hosted talk show, along with music, sports, and religious programming. Some will make this latter choice because they believe that a station run largely by white liberals doesn't deal enough with specifically racial issues and is insufficiently sensitive to the unique problems confronting blacks in America. Others will simply feel that the black station is more comfortable, more congenial to their tastes and more interesting to them. Whatever the precise mix of motivations, the effect is to substantially reduce the listening audience for a liberal network.

A similar story can be told about a lot of other groups on the Left. Many Hispanics will probably take a pass on a liberal radio network in order to listen to a Spanish-speaking station. Feminists will surely object (or at least not listen) if the network does not include a certain amount of programming that is specifically oriented around women's issue. Blue-collar union members and farmers probably have a limited tolerance for political testaments from the Hollywood Left.

As it happens, race-related issues have already become a problem for Air America. To get on the air in New York, the new network had to take over the programming of a station that had previously aired talk and music aimed at a black audience. By the second week in April, a local group was already complaining that Air America needed to show more "sensitivity to the communities that had been served" by the station and demanding that Air America include more blacks among its on-air performers.

Conservative radio has largely been spared these sorts of problems, simply because identity politics plays much less of a central role on the Right than on the Left. The only thing conservatives appear to demand from their talk show hosts is that they be conservative: Their gender or race generally don't matter. As one demonstration of this last point, it is striking how many well-rated conservative talk shows are hosted by blacks. Examples include Larry Elder, Alan Keyes, Armstrong Williams, and Ken Hamblin.

Demand and supply

The most intriguing thing about talk radio is the way conservatives have managed to use it to establish an alternative to the mainstream media. The reporters and editors for America's three major television networks, its most prestigious newspapers, and its largest-circulation weekly newsmagazines have long insisted that they do their work in a fair, balanced, and objective manner--that their reports do not systematically favor one political party or ideology over another. Over the last several decades, however, it has become increasingly clear that lots of Americans, particularly on the right, simply don't believe them. As this conviction has grown, conservatives have tried to find ways to communicate an alternative understanding of the news. Though magazines, cable television, and the Internet also play some part in this endeavor, it is talk radio that has emerged as the principal vehicle.

As for Air America, its prospects do not seem terribly bright. Its potential audience is small, fragmented, and probably not dissatisfied enough with the mainstream media to spend several hours a day seeking out a different view of the world on the radio dial. It would be wrong, however, to say that there is no audience for liberal talk shows. Enough liberals have done well in local markets to demonstrate that some people want to hear what they have to say. Unlike newspapers or network television, moreover, radio is not dominated by one or a very small number of outlets. In most local markets, even the best-rated station rarely gets more than 10 percent of the audience. Against that background, a liberal network may be able to carve out enough of a niche in enough markets to keep hosts, advertisers, and station owners from jumping ship. What the liberal network will almost certainly not do, however, is create a program whose audience will rival that of Rush Limbaugh (or Hannity or Schlessinger). By all the evidence now available, the demand for it simply isn't there.

TABLE 1 Top Talk Radio Shows by Audience Size and Ideology

        Show                        Audience size   Political Ideology
                                      (millions)

 1. Rush Limbaugh                       14.50          Conservative
 2. Sean Hannity                        11.75          Conservative
 3. Dr. Laura Schlessinger               8.50          Conservative
    Howard Stern                         8.50          Non-ideological
 5. Michael Savage                       7.00          Conservative
 6. Jim Bohannon                         4.00          Moderate
    Dr. Joy Browne                       4.00          Non-political
    Don Imus                             4.00          Non-ideological
    George Noory                         4.00          Non-political
10. Neal Boortz                          2.50          Libertarian
    Mike Gallagher                       2.50          Conservative
    Clark Howard                         2.50          Non-political
13. Glenn Beck                           2.00          Conservative
    Ken and Daria Dolan                  2.00          Non-political
    G. Gordon Liddy                      2.00          Conservative
    Doug Stephan and Nancy Skinner       2.00          Non-ideological
17. Kim Komando                          1.75          Non-political
    Bill O'Reilly                        1.75          Conservative
    Jim Rome                             1.75          Non-political
20. Bob Brinker                          1.50          Non-political
    Rusty Humphries                      1.50          Conservative
    Michael Medved                       1.50          Conservative
    Dave Ramsey                          1.50          Non-political
24. Dr. Dean Edell                       1.25          Non-political
    Phil Hendrie                         1.25          Non-ideological
    Laura Ingraham                       1.25          Conservative
    Tom Leykis                           1.25          Non-ideological
    Bruce Williams                       1.25          Non-political

Source: Audience size figures are estimates made by Talkers magazine,
based on an analysis of a national sample of markets for Spring 2003.

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