Building The Beast: Mitch Builds a Liberal Talk Station That Doesn't Suck

Commenter and longtime friend Bill Haverberg left me a great question on Sunday in my ongoing retrospective on my situation twenty years ago:

Has the market changed, or would liberal talk radio be successful nowadays as well if it were done right? (FrankenNet notwithstanding - Franken and Kennedy are the only ones I can stand right now).

How would you design a successful (by market standards) liberal talk radio format?

Good question.

Let me take a shot at it.

Let's get rid of a few preconceptions, first: let us duly note in advance that National Public Radio already largely serves the "mainstream liberal" demographic as thoroughly as Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt serve the conservative audience.

And let me acknowledge Bill's key, apt codecil; how would I make this station succeed in the market?

Also, let's differentiate between building a successful talk station - a studio and a transmitter in a city somewhere - and a network an operation that syndicates programming to other stations. The strategies are different, although many of the challenges are the same. I'll try to cover both areas.

So it's a tall order. Fortunately, I'm a tall guy.

Here's what I'd do:

• Know my audience, and cater to it - National Public Radio knows its audience: White, upper-middle-class, middle-aged, college-educated (frequently but far-from-exclusively in soft sciences and liberal arts - and I say that as a proud holder of a BA in English with minors in History and German), socially left-of-center, affluent. To refer to my stereotype, the Volvo-driving, Alpaca-wearing, Wellstone-voting set. They serve that audience - its tastes, it sense of entitlement, its prejudices - very, very well. Rush Limbaugh does the same: middle-class, frequently but not always college-educated, middle-aged, Chevrolet-driving, family-heading social and fiscal conservatives. There's one of Air America's downfalls; who is it aiming at? Judging by the programming, the answer in a word is "Kossacks", overheated angry youngish white people from upmarket homes (and downmarket outlooks, given that they've escewed their generally-bourgeouis upbringings for a life of political frothing), who are given to conspiracy theory and spittle-flecked vituperation. Which, outside of DFL leadership, is not really a big audience. I'd aim for that swath of "liberals" that are neither overweening Keillor-slurping babyboomer caricatures nor the frothing cartoons of the Kos left - the "Regular guys 'n gals" who vote center-left, who don't live and breathe politics, and who like to be entertained as much as inflamed. The people who have concerns about worker's rights, wages, unions; the types who exert principled support for "reproductive rights" and "peace and justice" issues at home and abroad, but don't live and breathe them. A station aimed, in short, at people like Randy Kelly, at Flash, at my Dad, Bruce Berg, longtime public school teacher; JFK liberals, Truman Democrats, people whom Hubert Humphrey could behold and not puke from terror at what had befallen his party. I firmly believe there are enough of those people out there to make a go of a station.
• Entertain them - Here's where conservatives have it all over the left; they don't assume that "political talk radio" means yammering about politics all the damn time. Rush Limbaugh pokes as much fun as he expounds; he talks sports as fluently as anyone on ESPN (not that I care). Other conservative hosts - Hewitt, Medved, Prager, Ingraham, even Savage - remember that "all politics and no play makes Jack a dull boy", and mix in other elements, whether movie talk or essays on happiness or sports or anything but constant ire. For all the left's palaver about conservative talk's monochrome sound, it's left-wing talk that is a one-note chant. Oh, and when I refer to "humor" I don't mean the labored, snarky "comedy" produced by the staffs of "writers" working for FrankenNet; if your radio host needs a "writer" to entertain, then fire the host and put the writer on the air.
• Expunge the following terms from the air - "The Truth", "Wingnut", "Bush Stole the Election". Conservative talk - at least, most good conservative hosts - can engage the left without name-calling. I know, I can hear you right now, Angryclown and RickDFL - kindly give me examples more recent than "Feminazi" (1988), if you don't mind. Conservative talk (when it's good) is inviting; NPR is exclusive, but it's exclusive to an audience that is more than happy to pay the freight (or has enough clout to make their congresspeople do it for them); Frankennet combines a sort of rabid exclusivity (you really have to live and breathe that stuff to tolerate it) with an audience that scrambles for bus change. It's no way to run a radio network.
• Find some hosts that can carry on a coherent argument - That'll be tough, since liberalism itself is light on those, these days.

Now, who does that leave?

Of the entire A-list of liberal commercial talkers, only Ed Schulz comes remotely - and I do mean remotely - close to the model I'd shoot for. He is more of a self-styled populist than an ideological kossack, he's had to survive in ur-conservative Fargo for a long, long time, and he's got decent radio chops - for a liberal from Fargo. He was, in fact, a cut-rate Limbaugh clone before he switched suits and became an instaliberal a few years ago (launching him from Fargo to the bigs overnight. Almost literally. I mean, he got on the Today show when he still had only six affiliates, only one in a major market. So hungry is the left for a voice!).

Could the left in America generate someone like a Schulz, only...I dunno, good? Sure. The airwaves used to be full of 'em. Don Vogel was probably close, except that politics bored him silly except as a target for satire...

...which, come to think of it, would be a very good thing for this fledgeling station/network of mine.

So there you have it; start a station (or syndie service) that'd treat people like people rather than Move-On volunteers awaiting marching orders; play to the center left that are still the majority of Democrats (and are ever-more disenfrancised by the current party); laugh as much as you yell.

Seems simple to me...

Posted by Mitch at June 26, 2006 05:49 AM | TrackBack