“I will tell you that a very senior talk radio executive, somebody with responsibility for a large number of talk radio stations, expressed to me just this week his concern that talk radio as we know it could be largely gone in five years….”
So spoke Randall Bloomquist, “a long-time radio executive and president of Talk Frontier Media ” as identified here in a Daily Beast article from back in 2011 - almost, yes, five years ago. (And Bloomquist wasn't alone in expressing the "talk radio is dying" sentiment, either.) As of this moment, with only another six months to run, talk radio is not only not “largely gone” - it is the subject of another story line altogether.
Over here at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes has written a considerable paper with this title:
“They Don’t Give a Damn About Governing”:
Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party.
The paper says, among other things, that talk radio is now so powerful it is setting a competing agenda to that of the Republican Establishment - a competing agenda that in fact keeps the GOP from that beloved Establishment goal - “governing.” Ohhhhhhhh nooooooooooooo!
Here’s a quote:
“….. it is conservative media – not just talk-show celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, but also lesser-known talkers like Steve Deace, and an expanding web of “news” sites and social media outlets with financial and ideological alliances with far-right anti-government, anti-establishment groups like Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks.
Once allied with but now increasingly hostile to the Republican hierarchy, conservative media is shaping the party’s agenda in ways that are impeding Republicans’ ability to govern and to win presidential elections. “These people, practically speaking, are preventing the Republican Party from governing, which means they’re really preventing it from becoming a presidential party as well,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, and himself a Republican. ”
While I haven’t read Mr. Kabaservice’s book, the title alone seems to indicate that “the downfall of moderation” is a terrible thing for the GOP. Conservatives -- and yes, those rascally conservatives in talk radio -- beg to differ. And, as this Jackie Calmes paper says directly, talk radio is, in fact, “shaping the party’s agenda.” Suffice to say, in the fashion of the famous words of Mark Twain, the reports of talk radio's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Well aside from saying “bravo” there is an obvious point here. Contrary to all those stories back in 2011 symbolized by that quote from Randall Bloomquist, talk radio is on a roll, about as far from extinction as it is possible to be.
If talk radio -- Rush, Sean, Mark, Laura, Steve Deace and all the rest -- were the radio equivalent of the dodo bird hovering close to extinction, the Calmes paper would never have been written. Not to mention it would never have been featured in The New York Times. To illustrate the power of talk radio, Calmes wrote this in her Times piece:
For congressional Republicans, following the leader down a pragmatic path of compromise can get the followers in trouble back home, or worse, attract a more conservative opponent in the next primary election.
Conversely, attacking the leader wins points with the conservative base, as Mr. Cruz is counting on to catch up with Donald J. Trump, who has taken a lead in some polls by positioning himself as the most antiestablishment contender of all. Soon after attacking Mr. McConnell on Friday, Mr. Cruz dialed into the radio shows of the conservative celebrities Rush Limbaugh and Mark R. Levin. Mr. Limbaugh called the Cruz attack “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-type stuff.” Mr. Levin posted on Twitter, “Let’s see how many others in the Senate have a backbone & call out McConnell.”
In other words? In other words, immediately after his attack on Senator McConnell from the power base that is the Senate floor, Ted Cruz knew to immediately repair to the precincts of talk radio to make his case. Cruz “dialed into” Rush’s show and then again to Mark’s show - where he was given free rein to make his case to the millions of conservative listeners. And that would be a minimum of over twenty millions between both the Limbaugh and Levin shows.
Calmes asked “another Republican, who has worked in the top ranks of congressional and presidential politics” about “whether he could offer examples of legislative outcomes affected by conservative media, (and) this Republican all but snapped, “Sure. All of ‘em.” Amusingly, Calmes noted of this unidentified Republican that he “asked to remain unidentified lest he provoke the far-right messengers against his current boss….”
To wax Internetish? LOL!!!!!!
In its own way the Calmes paper is a testimony to exactly what conservatives have believed all along. Namely, that conservative talk radio is exactly the venue for lengthy discussions of the issues of the day as seen through a conservative lens. For three hours a day during the week, with some shows re-run or encapsulated over a weekend, the issues that conservatives believe are given short shrift or are ignored altogether by the larger media - a frequently liberal and hostile media - are examined.
And to be sure, the Calmes paper all by itself is testimony to just what conservatives see as the problem with the GOP Establishment. Listen to these quotes from the paper by way of exasperated Republican leaders or moderate GOP observers.
* “…the chorus is loudest in opposition to those actions that are fundamental to governing: meeting basic fiscal deadlines for funding the government and allowing it to borrow. “Those are the things that leaders have to get done as part of governing,” the Republican (leadership aide) said, “as much as conservative media may hate it.”
* “I would say there is a serious question of whether or not it’s a governing party.” This from former GOP Congressman Vin Weber who, take note, is now a DC lobbyist.
* “The problem, as they (the GOP Establishment types) see it: Conservative media, having helped push the party so far to the anti-government, anti-compromise ideological right, attacks Republican leaders for taking the smallest step toward the moderate middle.”
The paper is filled with this kind of sentiment. It is exactly the American version of what former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - a heroine to the conservative base that follows talk radio - called the “socialist ratchet.” Thatcher describe how the ratchet worked in British politics, saying:
“At the level of principle, rhetorically and in opposition, it opposed these doctrines and preached the gospel of free enterprise with very little qualification….But in the fine print of policy, and especially in government, the Tory Party merely pitched camp in the long march to the left. It never tried seriously to reverse it. …..The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it.”
In their fashion, a version of this Thatcher-style complaint (Ronald Reagan’s version of this was to complain about “fraternal order” Republicans) is at play in the shows of Rush, Sean, Mark and Laura and certainly Steve Deace as well. It is exactly what upsets the GOP Establishment in Washington.
Not to be missed either is that the audience for conservative talk radio understands in their gut that far too many Establishment Republicans have in essence sold out. Departing public office at either the elected or staff level for lucrative Washington lobbying jobs that depend on the survival and expansion of the federal leviathan plays a considerable personal role in the demands to “step toward the moderate middle.”
This is exactly what Senator Ted Cruz calls the “Washington Cartel.” Said Cruz in a speech at the Heritage Foundation:
“What’s happening in Washington is no accident. It is a concerted effort by corporate lobbyists and establishment politicians. Lobbyists and career politicians make up the Washington Cartel. Let me explain to you how it works: A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other, although you give the other a chance to outbid them. Or even worse, a very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers."
Talk radio audiences get this. When Mark Levin tells his audience that the US Chamber of Commerce is "not about capitalism, they're about cronyism” heads nod.
They are nodding - by the millions - all over America these days. And those millions are not happy campers, as the response to the candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to name but two testifies.
Back there in 2011 the predictions were that talk radio would be “largely gone” five years later. They were wrong. Utterly, completely wrong. With a mere six months to run until that five year deadline runs out, Jackie Calmes is effectively saying - at length - that not only is talk radio not dead it exerts “significant influence over listeners and politicians.”
Exactly. And thank God for that.
