Fox News -- chaired by former Republican strategist Roger Ailes -- averages 1.7 million viewers a night compared to 30 million who watch the three network newscasts.
Yet Jason Zengerle’s cover article in the 2/16/04 issue of The New Republic -- “Talking Back: The Coming Rise of Liberal Talk Radio” -- claims that Fox’s “meteoric rise…and pugnaciously conservative slant…casts a disproportionately large shadow on the media landscape…. [causing] competing media outlets, perhaps unwittingly, to tilt to the right -- particularly in their coverage of Bush and the war in Iraq.”
Wait a minute….!
“More and more progressives and liberals are feeling as though the Roger Ailes school of news is the only one that's out there,” notes Marty Kaplan, an associate dean at the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, according to Zengerle.
The ONLY one out there…!?
“This growing liberal anger at and alienation from mainstream media is just one reason why the latest liberal talk radio efforts are far more likely to succeed than past ones,” Zengerle notes.
Wha…?!
A perfect syllogism:
A: The Fox News audience is small compared to the whole market.
B: Fox News is conservative.
C: Therefore: Fox News dominates -- even alienates!
(Well, this is The New Republic for you.)
More likely, of course, Fox News is providing balance for the national news mix -- wouldn’t you say? But let me add: the article is good because it nails the head on exactly WHY talk radio has been overtly conservative for so long.
Listen to this….
“Talk radio is not inherently conservative. But it is inherently anti-establishment.”
Zengerle continues: “‘Anything that flies in the face of the establishment works on talk radio,’ says Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of the industry trade magazine Talkers. ‘That's true for talk radio about business and talk radio about medicine. It's even true for talk radio about gardening. [You hear things like], “People say you're supposed to water the lawn in the spring, but that's bullshit!”'”
Zengerle understands that talk radio is an alternative to the rest of the mainstream media. It’s impossible to imagine alone. The larger context is the perception by the audience that the mainstream TV and print world is -- biased.
People turn to radio for relief.
“After all, when [Rush] Limbaugh started his show in Sacramento in 1984 and then took it national in 1988, Ronald Reagan was president….But it was nonetheless conservatives, not liberals, who felt more angry and marginalized. And their greatest grievance was against the media, which they perceived as overtly hostile to their views….Limbaugh happily reinforced that perception, telling his listeners that the mainstream media constituted ‘a daily assault on what you and I believe’ and that ‘the dominant media culture’ was complicit in an effort ‘to impugn ... the things that most people in this country hold dear.’ While liberals trusted the newspapers and Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather to give them the news, conservatives, by and large, did not.”
Zengerle points out that non-conservative audiences have also used radio for this purpose: for example, black urban talk radio in places like New York and Washington, DC.
More importantly, Zengerle claims that today many liberals are becoming alienated from the media because they find themselves to the left of the media. As hard as this is to believe, just remember the phenomena of the Howard Dean Presidential campaign: and then -- the screams of Dean enjoined with the recent anti-establishment ranting of Al Gore.
There is a passionate leftist radicalism arising -- loopy and full of conspiratorial fantasies -- but affecting many of the more radical liberals. This explains why the Democratic Party is leaning leftward these days. There's an out-of-control quality about it.
If this is correct -- liberal talk radio will have a future. It may be smaller than conservative talk radio -- for the simple reason that there are fewer people who think the mainstream media is too conservative as opposed to the people who think the mainstream media is too liberal.
But this new talk radio will happen. I predict it will have two effects:
1)) It will draw conservative talk radio hosts into arguing against it on the air -- bringing even more attention to liberal talk radio. And it will further radicalize many “normal” liberals over time into true leftists.
2)) But it will also horrify moderates in the mainstream audience; that is, many for the first time will be confronted with the intensity and extremism that exists on the left.
In summary: more polarization is in the works.