"Left in the Air?"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CLXIV

Out of the depths of the backlog — an article at the Boston Globe, Jan. 5.

Do you fail to find the compassion in George W. Bush's conservatism? Do you worry that neo-cons have hijacked foreign policy? Do you think Al Gore won the 2000 election? Do you wish someone would say these things on talk radio?

Then Mark Walsh may have good news for you.

Walsh, a Harvard MBA who worked as an AOL executive and a technology adviser to the Democratic National Committee, hopes to break the conservative chokehold on talk radio with a new network of liberal talkers -- led perhaps by comedians Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo -- slated to debut in the spring. While conservatives have long complained that there is a liberal tilt in the mainstream media, many liberals are frustrated with a talk radio culture in which Rush Limbaugh is king and "left" is a four-letter word. "America has for long enough been polluted with conservative right-wing bile," Walsh says.

He plans to buy radio stations in five major American cities, including Boston, and program up to 18 hours of liberal talk a day on them. It's too soon to say whether his concept will work, but there is a growing hunger on the left to do battle on the airwaves.

"There is a very effective right-wing echo chamber," says Ralph Neas, president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, citing such hosts as Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. "It's a very effective way of getting their message out." "I know the Democrats have been stewing about this for a long time," says Ed Schultz, a Democratic talk-show host in Fargo, N.D. "The Democrats, as a party, have underestimated the power of talk radio. It's absolutely a three-hour bashing session against the liberals."

However great the desire to launch a liberal counterattack on talk radio, a number of factors -- ranging from a grim track record to doubts about Walsh's strategy -- make the effort look like a long shot, if not a pipe dream.

"Any kind of a new broadcast endeavor is a difficult business to say the least," says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine. "So the idea of doing a 24/7 liberal network, a whole constellation of stars, is very difficult."

The radio landscape is littered with the short careers of liberal talkers such as Mario Cuomo and Alan Dershowitz. Still, says former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, who had two stints as a syndicated host in the past decade: "It's absurd to say that liberal, progressive populist radio won't work. It does work. The problem is the networks aren't marketers."

Liberals seem like an endangered species in talk radio. According to Talkers magazine, four of the five biggest audiences in radio belong to conservatives: Limbaugh, Hannity, Michael Savage, and moralizing advice guru Laura Schlessinger. (Shock jock Howard Stern is the one nonconservative interloper.) Tom Athans, who runs Democracy Radio, an organization aimed at finding and syndicating liberal talkers, says 300 of the 340 political shows he surveyed featured conservative hosts; 40 were hosted by liberals. And only two of those liberals -- Schultz and Randi Rhodes in West Palm Beach, Fla. -- are getting what he calls "killer ratings."

Locally, major talk stations WRKO-AM and WTKK-FM offer lopsidedly conservative lineups that include Pat Whitley, Howie Carr, Limbaugh, and Savage on WRKO, and Hannity, O'Reilly, Jay Severin, and Laura Ingraham on WTKK.

Athans, a former congressional staffer who is married to Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, acknowledges: "Rush Limbaugh deserves the credit for stumbling into a market of listeners in America that nobody knew existed. Market forces created the situation as it exists today."

Walsh, the CEO of Progress Media Inc., is trying to create his own market force with a highly publicized -- if largely undisclosed -- plan to create a liberal network. Officials at his Central Air radio network are talking to Franken and Garofalo and have made several executive hires, including "Daily Show" cocreator Lizz Winstead, former CNN producer Shelly Lewis, and ex-Chicago radio executive Dave Logan. One on-air personality officially locked in is Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, who will host a daily hourlong show on media issues. Published reports also indicate that comedian Barry Crimmins is coming aboard to deliver commentaries.

The plan calls for programming a 14-to-18-hour broadcast day on stations that Walsh says Progress is close to buying in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. Walsh insists that "in every case, these are significant or full-service stations that service the entire market," but no purchases have been announced. Walsh wants to deliver a full slate of "live talk, entertainment, and comedy programming" that will emulate the ensemble-style structure of Don Imus's show, using a well-known host, a news provider, and a "more antic-style person. . . . We're not just putting up an Al Franken and Janeane standing there alone in front of the microphone."

But if Walsh is trying an ambitious and expensive network model, Athans is working on the more traditional syndication model, looking for talkers like Schultz. A self-described "middle-of-the-road Democrat who used to be a conservative," Schultz has toiled in the broadcasting business for a quarter-century and hosts a popular morning show on KFGO-AM in Fargo. Athans connected Schultz to a syndicator, and starting today he will begin an afternoon program that has thus far been picked up in about a dozen markets in the upper Midwest. An official at the syndication company, Jones Radio Networks, says Schultz is close to lining up a few major market stations on the East Coast.

Athans says his year-old group is "looking for talent that will translate into something that's commercially viable," and he offers a cautionary note about the Progress Media plan. "The bottom line is these people aren't broadcasters," he says. "From our perspective, the best talent to use are people experienced in broadcasting."

One reason often cited in explaining the failure of liberal talk radio is that programmers have chosen professional liberals rather than professional broadcasters. "First of all, I'm a radio guy," Schultz says. "One of the reasons these types of efforts have failed in the past is they haven't tried the right people."

Another popular theory is that the left is too humorless to succeed in an entertainment medium. "Most attempts at progressive talk radio have been focused on conversion for the audience," Kaplan says, "rather than focused on giving the audience a good time." Walsh is a proponent of the "sandwich theory," which holds that the occasional liberal talker stuck in the middle of a conservative format is doomed to failure.

Talkers magazine's Harrison subscribes to the view that conservative talk dominates because it shrewdly cultivated a niche that liberals ignored. "The conservatives have been working at it for a very long time," he says. "You've had about 15 years of development of this form of political talk that identified a market and super-served that audience."

At least for now, the principals in the liberal talk brigade are saying the right things, keenly aware of Kaplan's admonition that "this is not a presidential campaign or a political party. It's a business." Walsh himself acknowledges that he needs to create "shareholder value."

But some analysts wonder whether an enterprise driven in part by frustration and ideology will have the patience and staying power to survive in a grinding business that rarely bestows overnight stardom. Limbaugh, for example, kicked around for years, starting out in radio during high school, working as a music DJ, and toiling in promotions for the Kansas City Royals organization before finally hitting it big in political talk.

Harrison thinks these liberal entrepreneurs may not understand radio culture. "It's a daily, lonely business with everybody tugging at you," he says. "I don't know anyone who is currently a celebrity who is going to make it in radio. They've got to be radio guys. You put up with day after day after day of not knowing if it's connecting."

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 07:40:12 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.