The Talent Bubble

Brian Maloney has four questions for Rush Limbaugh:

1) When is the guest-host pool going to finally improve, Rush? You've no doubt heard the complaints, so why must the show's quality drop so much at times while you're away? [Great question. While I never get to listen to midday radio, I reflexively flip the dial when I hear Roger Hedgecock.]

2) For years, your program has anchored the schedules of many talk stations, with local hosts built around your timeslot. Now, many outlets have been so badly mismanaged with infomercials, horrible syndicated shows and more that the entire medium is threatened. When are you going to address the situation's severity? [See below.]

3) Some conservative bloggers are frustrated that you rarely mention their sites by name, yet always seem to give full credit to referenced lefty sites. Do you see right-leaning blogs as friends, or competitors? [I wrote about this a while ago; I stand by my answer.]

4) Conservatives are terribly frustrated by this Republican Congress. What's going to get them back on track?

They're all good ones (read Maloney's post for the whole thing). [It's time for a RINO hunt.]I'm going to run with #2 for a bit.

Back in 1987, when I (and about a dozen other people) got whacked at KSTP-AM during the Peter May purges, I stepped out into a talk radio market that hadn't changed much in twenty years - and would be unrecognizable within 12 months.

Traditionally, smaller and medium-market talk radio stations used to hire younger air talent to work some of their off-drive shifts - mid-days, evenings. The pay stank, but it was experience. I interviewed for jobs in a dizzying array of cities; Orlando, New Bedford, Santa Rosa, Fall River, Cleveland, Hammond, the Quad Cities, and in one whirlwind week, three jobs in and around New York City. Orlando and, for about a month, WMCA in New York were all very interested (format changes nicked 'em both). For the rest...?

Well, there was a new wave of programming becoming available. It came via satellite. It was free - the hosts got paid from their ad revenue, so the station didn't have to pay for the shows. And unlike the tepid syndicated shows available to that point - dross like Owen Span and Michael "Not the singer, not the beer expert" Jackson, Harvey Ruben, Bruce Williams and the like - it kicked butt and took names. Rush Limbaugh was like a hun with a blood-soaked battleaxe sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner.

Did I mention he was free? Stations didn't need to pay a 25 year old kid $25k to do a show when they could get Rush from New York for free. Suddenly, dozens, probably hundreds, of the mid-day jobs that had launched a bunch of talk radio careers disappeared overnight.

Limbaugh's accomplishments are well-known; he rescued the AM band (in the eighties, there was discussion about abolishing AM radio!) and even turned it into a cash cow; he was the godfather of alternative media; he gave conservatism a voice in the post-Reagan era.

He also made a lot of mediocre executives look a lot smarter than they were. Quite a few program directors, with the happy, economically-driven accident of Limbaugh boosting their numbers and especially revenues, went from mediocre also-rans to instant genius, almost overnight. A few got their comeuppance; occasionally,Limbaugh would switch stations, and one "genius" would watch his/her numbers crater as their competition's ratings (and egos) boomed.

So after nearly twenty years of Limbaugh, we have a talk radio business that is very top-heavy; talents like Limbaugh, Beck, Ingraham, Savage, Bennett and a few others rake in huge money running on hundreds of stations - which, in turn, see their solidly-performing (and profitable) freebie shows as an excuse to get lazy; their AM stations turn into cash cows; little new talent is coming up through the ranks in the sense it would have 20 or 30 years ago. There are exceptions, of course; KSTP has launched some new talents, from the sublime (Mischke) to the ridiculous (Kris Krok). I'll give the Patriot credit for taking (inexpensive) chances on the NARN and Patriot Insider; most stations in the Patriot's weight class run either nonstop syndies or "brokered" talk - read "Infomercials", paid shows that dominate the weekend lineups at a lot of smaller AM stations (as they not only do at the Patriot, but at KTLK as well). Did I say the Patriot's weight class? WOR in New York - once one of America's great stations - is mostly brokered talk these days!

So the problem is this: you have a medium where the talent pool has been artificially constricted for 20 years (how else do you explain Roger Hedgecock having a job?), and where the management pool - even assuming some talent, which in any type of radio is always a dodgy assumption - has grown fat and happy and very, very lazy as their superstar syndies do the heavy lifting for them. Limbaugh is going to be sixty before too long; not old by radio standards, but let's face it, the guy has nothing to prove, and could retire today if he wanted to. Bennett and Savage and Oliver North are, I think, in their sixties; Prager and Medved (and I think Hewitt), their fifties. Each (except Savage) has other options in life, as does the fortysomething Laura Ingraham.

Without Limbaugh, the conservative talk medium is going to have to start working for its pay again.

It'll be interesting watching KSTP-AM over the next year or so, after losing Limbaugh; one of these years, the whole industry is going to do the same thing.

Posted by Mitch at January 25, 2006 05:41 AM | TrackBack