The latest effort to stifle political speech

Published on June 21, 2007 05:09 PM
by Sean Parnell

File Under: Press

The authors go to great lengths to show that consolidation of the radio industry is responsible for the enormous disparity between conservative and liberal talk radio, and that audiences really don’t want to listen to all this conservative talk radio but they have no other choice.

Completely ignored, of course, is that there are more than 10,500 commercial radio stations in the country, only 1,700 of which are the news-talk format. One would think that if someone didn’t want to listen to conservative radio, they could change the station to, say, sports radio, or classic rock, or some other format. Apparently in the world of CAP, however, millions of Americans are not capable of changing radio stations if they don’t like what’s on.

The authors also make much of the fact that, according to a Pew study, the talk radio audience is generally similar ideologically to the nation as a whole: 43% of listeners are conservative, 23% liberal, and 30% moderate. They then assume that liberals should be equally willing to listen to liberal talk show hosts, but provide no evidence supporting this. In fact, the clear failure of Air America to generate much of an audience (other than in a few markets like Portland, Oregon) would seem to indicate that liberals, in fact, not particularly interested in listening to liberal talk radio (or at least, not the talk radio hosts offered by Air America).

Perhaps most notably, if the authors are right in saying that the conservative hosts that dominate talk radio are, in their words, “… far out of step with their local audiences,” then why has talk radio’s audience grown from 400 million to 1,400 million between 1990 and 2006?

Traditionally, businesses that don’t offer what their customers want tend to lose customers, not experience 350% growth rates over 16 years. It’s also worth noting that this growth in audience has come at the same time as the rise of the internet, which one would think would diminish talk radio’s audience if in fact they were “far out of step” with the interests and needs of their audiences.

Needless to say, the problem that doesn’t exist does have a solution, and that solution not surprisingly involves putting government bureaucrats back in charge of who gets heard on talk radio. Under the guise of “greater local accountability” (as if audiences don’t hold stations accountable by choosing to listen or not listen), radio stations would be required to keep records on and regularly show “…how the station serves the public interest…” From the tone of the report, it’s pretty clear that “serving the public interest” is synonymous with “broadcast just as many liberals as conservatives, regardless of whether anyone wants to listen to them...”

Radio stations that don’t “serve the public interest” to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats and political appointees at the Federal Communications Commission would be fined (cleverly called a “fee,” of course), and presumably the matter would be considered when it comes time to renew the station’s license to broadcast. 

I guess “Congress shall make no law…” doesn’t apply when one is using the public airwaves. Of course, magazines generally rely on the public postal system, and newspapers are typically delivered by use of public roads, and there’s a pretty significant group of people that look at the internet as a public utility…