…that Rush Limbaugh’s nationally-syndicated radio program debuted.<\/p>\n
To me, in 1988, it wasn’t a good thing; Limbaugh (and the contemporaneous euthanasia of the “Fairness” Doctrine) not only changed the content and tenor of talk radio (and saved the AM band in the process) but changed the business model as well. Up until 1988, talk radio was an expensive format; instead of hiring a couple of disc jockeys and sitting them down with a stack of records (on tape cartridge, in those days), you had to hire people who could <\/em>talk about whatever the subject was, and put ’em in a studio; the audience before Limbaugh, lulled by the enforced mediocrity of “Fairness”-doctrine-era radio, was either smallish or, in the case of middle-of-the-road talk giants like WCCO, interested mainly in farm markets, temperatures and scores. And to staff those shows, smaller talk stations had to hire someone<\/em>; sometimes, it was a 25 year old kid who’d had a graveyard shift show in Saint Paul who’d come to Santa Rosa or Columbus or New Bedford and work mid-days or evenings for $20,000 a year.<\/p>\n But Limbaugh changed that. His program was free<\/em>; it cost the stations nothing. Limbaugh paid his salary, his tiny staff, the uplink fees, and covered it with advertising. Suddenly, stations had access to a big-budget, major-market air talent, and he was not only free, but his controversial, entertaining, funny<\/em> program brought in gargantuan ratings. Which, for a smaller station, literally<\/em> meant money for nothing.<\/p>\n Which didn’t do a lot of good for the career prospects of that 25 year old kid from Saint Paul. But it did <\/em>turn talk radio into something nobody had dreamed about before then.<\/p>\n Any <\/em>station could now be a talk station – which, for AM stations, was the life ring they n eeded. When I worked in radio in the eighties, there was serious talk about decommissioning the entire AM band; when I worked at KSTP-AM, it was the poor cousin of the Hubbard Broadcasting machine (including Channel 5 and KS95). The station was on the block, for a ludicrous price, and couldn’t get a taker.<\/p>\n Suddenly, Limbaugh made these underpowered, undervalued stations into money machines; hundreds of AM stations that had been ekeing out a terrible income playing country or oldies or polkas started carrying Limbaugh, sometimes several times a day via tape delay. And the money poured in – to the stations and to Limbaugh. When I went back to KSTP for my one-night fill-in gig for Bob Davis, I talked with my old friend, the late Joe Hansen, who was producing Jason Lewis at the time. The station, the former poor cousin, was “carrying <\/em>the rest of Hubbard”, said Hansen.<\/p>\n A month or so ago, Zev Chafets did perhaps the essential profile<\/a> on Limbaugh, in the NYTimes Magazine.<\/p>\n At 57, he is an American icon, although his fans and critics don\u2019t agree on precisely what he is iconic for. I\u2019ve heard him compared to Mark Twain<\/font><\/a> and Jackie Gleason<\/font><\/a>, the Founding Fathers and Father Coughlin. Serious people have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a public intellectual, nothing more than a radio windbag and nothing less than the heart of the Republican Party.<\/p>\n One thing is certain: Limbaugh has been a partisan force for two decades. In 1994, he was so influential in the Republican Congressional landslide that the grateful winners made him an honorary member of the G.O.P. freshman class. He moved not only voters, but the party itself. \u201cRush talked about the \u2018Contract With America\u2019 before there was a \u2018Contract With America,\u2019 \u201d Karl Rove<\/font><\/a> told me. \u201cHe helped set the agenda.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Rush was<\/em> was a voice to people who’d not had one; the masses of Middle Americans who consumed<\/em> American media culture, but really weren’t part of it. TV, newspapers, NPR and traditional talk radio, all of them based on the coast, driven by the dominant, Northeastern culture, had very little to do with the lives of most of Middle America, and cared even less.<\/p>\n And then, along came Limbaugh. He gave that huge mass of people something that resonated.<\/p>\n “Yeah”, say the detractors, “racist sexist lies!”<\/p>\n Well, no. He gave them a voice in New York, who didn’t so much shout back at the lumpen masses of the media establishment, but cut their knees out from under them with humor, biting satire, and something that they just weren’t used to; articulate opposition.<\/p>\n His success has vexed his detractors for a solid generation, now; they’ve tried many times to meet and beat him in the free market, with Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower and Air America and Nova M. And all failed, to the point where the American left is next going to try to resort to government bullying to shut up conservative talk radio.<\/p>\n They missed the point, of course:<\/p>\n When we met he was on the verge of signing a new eight-year contract with his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks. He estimated that it would bring in about $38 million a year. To sweeten the deal, he said he was also getting a nine-figure signing bonus. (A representative from Premiere would not confirm the deal.) \u201cDo you know what bought me all this?\u201d he asked, waving his hand in the general direction of his prosperity. \u201cNot my political ideas. Conservatism didn\u2019t buy this house. First and foremost I\u2019m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And for all that, the part that most inspires me is this:<\/p>\n Limbaugh was a failure almost as long as he has been a success. And although he is now an apostle of sunshine (\u201chaving more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,\u201d he crows on his show), he spent many years trying to convince his family \u2014 and himself \u2014 that he wasn\u2019t wasting his life…Limbaugh drifted from job to job…In the mid-\u201980s he took a job in the front office of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. He was making $12,000 a year, and he almost quit to take a more lucrative job as a potato-chip distributor. \u201cThey were offering $35,000,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat sounded like a lot of money.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “But what”, ask his detractors, “does this say about our society? That all the dumb people are listening to Limbaugh?”<\/p>\n Well, the simple answer is, they’re not. As most multi-issue movement conservatives can tell you, conservatism takes more thought than liberalism. And Limbaugh’s audience bears this out (emphasis added):<\/p>\n Limbaugh\u2019s audience is often underestimated by critics who don\u2019t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as \u201cliberal,\u201d according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of \u201cnews knowledge questions,\u201d Limbaugh\u2019s \u201cDittoheads\u201d \u2014 the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience \u2014 scored higher than NPR listeners<\/strong>. The study found that \u201creaders of newsmagazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR and viewers of the Daily Show and C-SPAN are also much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read the whole (nine-online-page!) article, perhaps the best thing I’ve ever seen in writing about Rush.<\/p>\n And happy anniversary, Rush! Your new contract means the NARN has eight years to get its act really humming!<\/p>\n (Brad Carlson<\/a> also writes on the anniversary, and Jen O’Hara<\/a> not only gathers scads of great tributes from others, but writes a wonderful one of her own).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …that Rush Limbaugh’s nationally-syndicated radio program debuted. To me, in 1988, it wasn’t a good thing; Limbaugh (and the contemporaneous euthanasia of the “Fairness” Doctrine) not only changed the content and tenor of talk radio (and saved the AM band in the process) but changed the business model as well. Up until 1988, talk radio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,24,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-culture-war","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}