How Conservative Talk Radio Came to Dominate the Airwaves
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On this week's On the Media, 17 of the nation's top 20 most listened-to talk radio hosts are conservative. Only one is progressive. How did the public airwaves come to be so politically lopsided?

If you turn the country station on and you hear Beethoven's Fifth, you're going to be confused. Radio executives think that people feel the same way about talk. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Program, a program exclusively designed for rich conservatives and right-minded Republicans and those who want to be either or both. We sold it as news from a biblical worldview, but it was funny how that biblical worldview seemed to line up with Republican Party politics.

It's all coming up after this.

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Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Hey, it's Latif from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radiolab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. As of the end of last week, President-elect Donald Trump's roster for top cabinet positions is full.

Many of the nominees caused a stir when their names were announced, some more than others. But there was one announced last Friday evening that sort of slipped under the radar. The president-elect named far-right conspiracy theorist Sebastian Gorka to a key national security role. A close ally of Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka has doubted the threat of white nationalism in the country and pushed for pardons.

of January 6th rioters. Sebastian Gorka also served in the first Trump administration, but he didn't last long. What's he been up to in the intervening years? We put it on a t-shirt. He's back. Get yours today. SebGorkaStore.com. That's S-E-B-G-O-R-K-A. SebGorkaStore.com. That's a clip from Gorka's show America First, which airs on the Salem Radio Network.

If that name Salem rings a bell, it's because that media company was the subject of our podcast series, The Divided Dial. In the series, reporter Katie Thornton introduced us to the Salem Media Group, the largest Christian conservative multimedia company in the country. With the second Trump administration on its way, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the history of how the right team to dominate the airwaves. Here's Katie.

By the 1930s, most Americans had a radio in the house, and a network of long-distance phone lines brought a select few programs to stations across the country. The radio dial really was the sort of cafe culture of the 1930s. This is Nicole Hemmer. She's an author and historian who studies media and conservative movements. It was the place where...

Debates about politics, debates about the future of the United States were all taking place because remember, it's in the middle of the Great Depression and people are...

Pretty panicked. They don't know that the United States is coming out of this. From the left, Louisiana's Huey Long roasted Roosevelt for not going far enough with the New Deal. And coming at Roosevelt from the right, blasting Depression-era efforts like the Works Progress Administration, was one Father Charles Coughlin. You people living on the WPA envelopes, WPA envelopes filled, posthumous.

partly from the money confiscated from industry and commerce and from the envelopes of those who are working. The Catholic radio priest, once a supporter, became one of President Roosevelt's loudest critics. He hated the New Deal and considered Roosevelt a dictator. He was controversial. But controversy was allowed on the radio, at least for a while. ♪

The shadow of the goose step falls on Austrian soil. While in Vienna, Austria's Nazi leader watches a gigantic parade. Toward the end of the 1930s, the news focus shifted from the U.S. economy to the brewing conflict in Europe. At first, the idea of staying out of the war predominated. Even Roosevelt didn't want in. Popular sentiment shifted as news of German atrocities crossed the ocean.

But not everyone changed their mind. And many who didn't began lacing their anti-interventionism with vicious anti-Semitism. Here's Father Coughlin in a broadcast from 1938 after the violent events of Kristallnacht. "Cutens of history recognize that Nazism is only a defense mechanism against communism, and especially that prosecution of the Christian always begets prosecution of the Jew."

In the late 1930s, Coughlin had an estimated 15 million people listening each month, almost one in every nine Americans.

The FCC saw that in Italy and Germany, leaders were using radio to propagandize to their people, and they were really concerned about that happening in the United States. Fearing the spread of fascism, the FCC passed the Mayflower Doctrine, which prohibited broadcasters from sharing opinions over the airwaves. With this, anti-Semitic hate speech really was pushed off of radio.

And many on the right felt that the die was cast. The media was a tool of the U.S. government, and the government was silencing conservative voices. They understood their loss of platforms as a kind of censorship of their ideas. But Nicole Hemmer says that the effect wasn't just quieting anti-Semites.

Non-interventionist voices were finding it harder and harder to find a platform. And particularly once the U.S. goes to war, there is no space in media for people who are arguing that the U.S. should not be involved in the war.

It wasn't just non-interventionists on the right, like Father Coughlin, who were feeling the chill. There were socialists and pacifists who opposed the war. There were communists who were for the war because the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union, but who had other opinions about the United States and about the U.S. economy that were not welcome on air.

In truth, many on the left had found it hard to get on the radio long before the war. With the wartime restrictions on speech, it was the far right's turn to feel the sting of censorship. But it didn't last long. In 1949, the FCC did a complete 180.

The FCC says, actually, stations have an obligation to cover controversial issues. They have to. We give them a license. This is the public service that they provide. And here's the kicker. The on-air coverage had to be...

It's kind of a compromise that, all right, we're going to let you editorialize, but we still don't want you to turn into propaganda outlets. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the Fairness Doctrine. It required stations to present multiple perspectives on controversial issues. And if a group felt maligned or underrepresented, they could request airtime to refute the claims made about them. And that airtime had to be given for free.

When the Fairness Doctrine first got going, it wasn't a problem for conservatives. Conservative broadcasting really starts to take off after the Fairness Doctrine is implemented because they're considered to fulfill a public interest obligation or that they're introducing controversial ideas.

Newly appointed President John F. Kennedy was no fan of these broadcasters. And in 1961, he worked with two friends of his, labor leader brothers Walter and Victor Ruther.

Victor Ruther puts together this memo on how Kennedy can use the powers of the federal government that he's just acquired in order to battle back against this anti-labor radical right. There are things like the IRS, you can audit people, and there's the FCC. And he talks about conservative and anti-union broadcasters and says you can use the FCC to shut these voices down.

Kennedy's FCC liked the idea and sent notifications to stations highlighting conservative talking points with a reminder that under the Fairness Doctrine, such controversial opinions needed to be countered. And when the Reuters memo to Kennedy was leaked, conservatives used its existence to say, "Aha! We are victims of federal censorship. Give us money, support our programs. This is evidence of what we've been telling you all this time."

While conservatives lamented the effects of the Ruther memo, there was a movement that was unequivocally finding it very difficult to get airtime. The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation. The folks who had money and made determinations about what got on television or radio, they were not interested in the appeals of the civil rights movement.

Mark Lloyd is a lawyer and former associate general counsel at the FCC. He says leaders of the civil rights movement were not always welcomed on the mostly white-owned stations, which played primarily to white audiences and appealed to white advertisers. They weren't interested in what it was that Thurgood Marshall had to say about the Brown v. Board of Education and how it was being implemented in schools. That's not what they wanted to hear.

Those remarks about Brown v. Board of Education that Mark Lloyd referred to kicked up a long legal saga that would change the American radio landscape. That's coming up after the break. This is On the Media. On the Media is supported by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you keep on repeat and you have to share with your friends so they can validate just how great it is?

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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, host of On Point. At a time when the world is more complex than ever, On Point's daily deep dive conversation takes the time to make the world more intelligible. From the state of democracy to how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live and work to the wonders of the natural world. One topic each day, one rich and nuanced exploration. That's On Point from WBUR. Be sure to follow us right here in your podcast feed.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Before the break, we heard about the long legal saga that would change the American radio landscape. Reporter Katie Thornton picks up the story. In 1955, after future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had argued the case that desegregated the schools, he went on NBC to talk about it.

We do believe that this decision in itself will encourage the people to take further steps without litigation in many areas. And that's what I think is important for our economy. But that didn't go over well with the owner of an NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi.

at a combination TV and radio station called WLBT. Thurgood Marshall was on a national program and they cut the feed, you know, when he was on. This is Joseph Torres, who co-wrote a book titled News for All the People, the epic story of race and the American media. And he says that instead of playing the segment, WLBT's TV station showed a slide reading, Sorry, Cable Trouble from New York.

And it wouldn't be the only time WLBT cut the NBC feed during coverage of the civil rights movement. The general manager of the station was a member of the White Citizens Council, and he was a staunch segregationist. Black folks in the Jackson, Mississippi area, which were roughly 40 percent of the population, were not allowed to even buy time on the station.

Mark Lloyd. The editorials that would come out from the station manager all supported the position of the White Citizens Council, which was against

Throughout the civil rights era, a small number of very influential Black hosts were broadcasting on a handful of more progressive stations. But over the years, the KKK and other racist groups ransacked, bombed, and destroyed offices, transmitters, and towers of some stations that played so-called race-mixing rock and roll or that broadcast left-wing content. And intimidation was commonplace.

The Klan moved this year against radio station WBOX, whose owner invited former Arkansas Congressman Brooks Hayes to make a speech on race relations. Klansmen made hundreds of anonymous phone calls to the station's sponsors. The effect was immediate. 75% of the commercials were canceled.

On many mainstream stations, the lack of media coverage of the civil rights movement was so pervasive that leaders like Martin Luther King started explicitly calling it out in the 1960s and asking allies to help the movement get attention. And in the case of WLBT in Mississippi...

A liberal-minded church group, the United Church of Christ, answered the call. The United Church of Christ Office of Communication joined with a local Jackson, Mississippi chapter of the NAACP and sued the Federal Communications Commission and won.

The years-long legal battle eventually ended with a federal court ruling that under the direction of a dedicated white supremacist, WLBT was not serving their local community's public interest. WLBT could stay on the air, but their license would be transferred to a non-profit, a group made up of black and white broadcasters. But even before the WLBT case was settled, it was sending shockwaves through the media world.

Just by allowing the case to move forward, the court had set an important precedent. For the first time, members of the public could ask the FCC to investigate a broadcaster. If they didn't think their station was serving the public interest or being fair. Joseph Torres. It was monumental, right? The idea that U.S. citizens...

had legal standing to challenge a broadcast license. Across the country, listeners filed hundreds of license challenges. The broadcast industry considers this an assault on them. They don't use that language. They're being assaulted.

The stations began to understand that if they did not follow these guidelines, if they didn't follow the Fairness Doctrine, then local communities would challenge their licenses. Broadcasters were panicked. So the FCC started laying out some guidelines of how they could avoid the same fate, how they could better serve the public interest.

And they start pushing something they called ascertainment. Where the station had to go out and ascertain the needs of the community as part of its license renewal process. And this was done by radio stations and television stations, commercial stations, public stations across the country.

In fact, doing these ascertainments was part of Mark's job early on in his career. I had to go out into migrant fields and church basements and women's shelters and ask leaders in their places of power what they thought were the important issues facing the local communities.

Though the Fairness Doctrine had been on the books since 1949, it hadn't actually prevented stations from running racist, one-sided programming. But with the legal challenges of the 1960s, that started to change. Pro-segregation forces are right that they're in the losing end of that shift. The decline in segregationist broadcasts led many on the right to double down on an old trope.

as they're no longer seeing their viewpoints reflected in positive ways. They read that as liberal bias.

Although when some broadcasters asked the FCC to clarify the doctrine, the government made it clear that they didn't expect stations to give airtime to some leftists, like, say, communists or to atheists. But even so, all of the civil rights era changes kicked off what Mark Lloyd refers to as broadcasting's public interest moment. We had an explosion of not only news programs, we had an explosion of Sunday morning public affairs programs.

The FCC would come to require stations, even those that played mostly music, to run at least a little bit of educational programming. There were wellness shows. Guides to Good Living, a program designed to help you enjoy a fuller and healthier life. Shows about social justice. Indian Land Radio, Indian Land Alcatraz Island, on behalf of the Indians of all tribes. We understand the only thing that's held black people down this long is the rampant racism.

There were shows about farming and labor.

TV, also overseen by the FCC, had its own huge public interest moment. This is 60 Minutes. It's a kind of a magazine for television. And if this broadcast does what we hope it will do, it will report reality. This was the time when we really began to see news and public affairs programs become really important in the American culture.

Let's make something clear. This sea change in the media wasn't because the FCC was going around and punishing stations for not adhering to the Fairness Doctrine or not serving the public interest. They rarely actually enforce these policies.

The threat alone of citizens taking legal action was often enough to get stations to change their coverage. In fact, only one radio station ever lost its license for falling foul of the FCC's fairness and public interest guidelines.

It was WXUR, owned by fire-breathing radio reverend Carl McIntyre. McIntyre repeatedly broadcast scathing screeds against the civil rights movement. Then let the guilt lie squarely upon such philosophers as Martin Luther King and President Johnson. What did the Negro apologist of our time expect? He espoused paranoid ideas of communist penetration into the U.S. government. Slap at the white Americans. What the

And trumpeted anti-Semitic ideas. But all of that was legal. What did his station in was his lack of ideological balance. And when the license came up for renewal, the FCC denied it.

But while WXUR was deprived of air by the FCC, Christian broadcasting writ large was not in mortal danger. Just the opposite. Hello, Katie? Hi.

Terry Heaton is a TV guy, always has been. But a lot of the work he did on TV helped shape what was heard on Christian radio. Well, The 700 Club was, when I got there, it was just, it was a television talk show at the time. The 700 Club was a little more than that. It was a wildly popular early televangelist show.

Well, thank you and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this edition of The 700 Club. Launched in 1966, it went national in 1974. And at its heart was Minister Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson was the son of a U.S. senator in Virginia, so politics was in his blood.

Robertson was an early mover and shaker in the religious right, a close confidant of many conservative politicians. He was also an early leader of the Council for National Policy, that secretive group of conservative strategists, donors, and media personalities founded after Reagan's victory, which would come to welcome the Salem co-founders into its fold.

The 700 Club was a megaphone for the group's goals even before Salem was. I became the executive producer of that show during a time when it was transforming from what was a religious talk show into a propaganda sort of news organization with a conservative news bent.

Pat Robertson's show was savvy and smart, and his Christian conservative message broke through in a way no religious program had ever done before. Young people are bombarded by distorted visual images and twisted music messages that are saturating their minds and, yes, sabotaging their futures.

We sold it as news from a biblical worldview, but it was funny how that biblical worldview seemed to line up with Republican Party politics.

The show didn't just push conservative politics. It peddled in persecution. If you're a feminist, if you're a homosexual, if you're any of those things, you can say what you want to about your preconceptions. But if you are a Christian and you write in favor of the Christian point of view, then you are considered a right wing and you can't work any longer in a, quote, objective news orientation. Ladies and gentlemen... Pat Robertson pushed the idea that Christian producers needed to not just make media, but to

own the means of distribution. He founded the first Christian TV network, which eventually helped spread the 700 Club across the country. And he owned a small string of radio stations, too. That network model was a blueprint for other Christian communicators. All the leaders of all these organizations, they all look

Pat knew them all and all of these Christian radio stations and other TV networks. They all had the gospel at core, but they also had this Republican, God needs us to take over the world kind of mindset. By the start of the 1980s, one out of every seven radio stations in the country was Christian.

Though they pushed the idea that conservatives were being silenced, the religious right had established a comfortable place for themselves in the new media ecosystem. And yet, they didn't dominate. Thanks to the victories of the civil rights movement and that public interest moment, the radio dial was still a place that welcomed and protected a diversity of voices. But all of that was about to change.

Coming up, how we got from that public interest moment to today's conservative talk radio landscape. This is On the Media. On the Media is supported by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you keep on repeat and you have to share with your friends so they can validate just how great it is?

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Speeds above 40 GB on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, host of On Point. At a time when the world is more complex than ever, On Point's daily deep dive conversation takes the time to make the world more intelligible. From the state of democracy to how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live and work to the wonders of the natural world. One topic each day, one rich and nuanced exploration. That's On Point from WBUR. Be sure to follow us right here in your podcast feed.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. When we left off our story, Christian radio was ascendant, but it didn't yet dominate the airwaves. So how did we get from there to here? Reporter Katie Thornton explains. In the 1970s, talk and public affairs shows exploded, in part because of the FCC's public interest moment, but also because of a great technological leap.

No static at all. That was the promise of FM radio. The year this steely dance song came out, 1978, the FM band beat AM and listeners for the first time. The difference in reception will leap to the ear. With AM, or amplitude modulation radio, there was always a sort of ambient hum, lots of interference, like looking through a dirty window.

But with FM, or frequency modulation, sound was encoded into radio signals differently. And compared to AM's muck, it was freshly shined glass.

As the FM dial opens up, radio stations that play music are like, we're going to be an FM station now. Historian and author Nicole Hemmer. And that actually leads to some languishing in the AM dial and for AM stations. At first, low-quality AM radio struggled to find its competitive advantage. That is, until it landed...

Talk and more talk. Advice to the lovelorn, to the investor, to the shopper. Talk radio was AM's salvation, and the special sauce was the listeners themselves. But among the most popular of talk is the invitation to the audience to talk back. Hello, you're on the air is as familiar a phrase on radio these days as the station's call letters.

In radio's earlier days, it was awkward and clunky to get a listener on the air, with hosts either holding up the phone to the mic or holding it to their ear and saying, before reiterating to listeners what the caller said. But changes in broadcast regulations and improved telephone technology made it easier for listeners to get on the air. The idea that somebody can hear themselves on the radio...

by calling in and talking to the host. It sounds so old school at this point, but it really was a revolution. You could now be like a local celebrity because you're calling in and able to have your voice heard on a station. And it changes the medium because it makes people feel invested in shows. Because even if they don't call in, they hear people like themselves calling in and they feel like they're being represented on this new talk radio.

Around this time, in the late 70s and early 80s, satellite dishes were also becoming more accessible, allowing some larger networks to beam a select few shows across long distances in real time. Combine that with easier and cheaper long-distance calling. And once you have those two things, where I can make a toll-free call to a show that is being broadcast

around the nation all at the same time so that people in Oregon and people in New York can be listening to the same content at the same time, can be calling in at the same time. Now you can have a national conversation on radio. Network radio's most listened to coast-to-coast talk program.

Featuring guests from around the world and calls from all across the country. National slots for talk radio were prized, going to the rare host like Larry King. Thank you, Fred Laring. Good evening, everybody. But in local markets, call-in shows with local hosts and local listeners ruled. And these call-in shows, while very egalitarian, weren't always the most civil. You still got your teeth? The original teeth? Of course. Ha ha ha.

Imagine this woman being your grandmother. Oh, really? My three-and-a-half-year-old? Hey, honey. Love you. It's something about old people. When they get on the phone, they love to talk about their personal life. And I know it's real interesting to you, but we got to move along. The early 1980s saw the dawn of the shock jock era, with Baltimore's Howard Stern famously at the helm. Ma'am, when I get to your age, I hope they shoot me. Oh, I hope so, too.

Hosts like Stern and those who followed in his footsteps were usually confined to local markets early on. And their shows weren't always political, mostly just lewd and abrasive.

But by the early 1980s, some shock jocks were adding politics to their shows. I have been called by my program director, God, to bring the truth. Why would we want to have any Democrats on? They're losers. I'm never going to speak. I am a working mother. Yeah. And my kids are fine. They are not. Who's raising them? You don't have them. The babysitter's got them. You ain't no mama. Get off my program, you liberal.

And they weren't just conservatives. There were liberal shock jocks, too, like sharp-tongued former attorney Allen Berg, who broadcast out of Denver on an AM station called KOA.

Its powerful signal allowed Berg to reach listeners in about 30 surrounding states. If you don't like it, you can move to Moscow, correct? In other words, if you're not a Christian, you're un-American. Is that your point, sir? That's right. Good point, sir. You and your redneck, go to bed. Berg was Jewish, and he goaded the right-wingers, racists, and anti-Semites who flooded his phone lines. In a poll, Denver residents were asked to name the city's most beloved media personality and its most despised—

Allen Berg won both. And by early 1984, he was making a splash nationally. Here he is on 60 Minutes. "Isn't there something a little dangerous about this kind of broadcasting?"

There is a danger. I agree with you. I think that's the danger that we exhibit in all rights of free expression, be it columnists who write newspapers. Indeed, but you say yourself, you often go on there, you don't know quite what you're going to say. Hopefully my legal training will prevent me from saying the one thing that will kill me. And I've come awfully close.

It was less than six months after that segment aired that 50-year-old Allen Berg was gunned down in his driveway by members of the newly formed white supremacist group The Order.

The driver of the getaway car was identified as a man who had previously called in to Allenberg's show. I think the Jews are still firmly in control of the Soviet Union. I think they're responsible for the murder of 50 million white Christians. You think so, huh? Yes, I do. I think you're sick. I think you're pathetic. I think your ability to reason and use any logic is a drag. Why don't you put a Nazi on your program and then you'll have somebody to... Sir, you are a Nazi by your very own admission. Thanks so much. That's right, you heard it. Okay, 861...

It's 1042 on a very, very, very blue evening. There were other liberal talkers, but for Berg's colleagues and listeners, and for left-wing radio, this was a huge loss. You're on the air. Go ahead. I am so sorry for your grief. I find it so hard to believe that he's really gone. I could not believe what I heard. I can't believe...

At the time Berg was murdered, radio was undergoing another colossal change. This one from the halls of government. ♪

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he inherited a media ecosystem that was flourishing, buoyed by hard-won regulations. But... The Reagan administration came in and began to eliminate all of those regulations. Mark Lloyd says that not long after his inauguration, Reagan's FCC started killing off the policies and guidelines that had been built up during the civil rights era.

We had ascertainments. We had a set of guidelines about how to serve local communities. It was an entire regime.

that enforced local service. Then Reagan came in, all of it was gone. The FCC made some major changes in how radio stations are run. No more requirements to go and find out what local residents wanted to hear. No more mandate to run educational shows. The FCC also made it harder for people to challenge broadcast licenses, like civil rights groups had done by the hundreds to get fairer representation.

The longstanding fairness doctrine was still on the books, but without these other policies, it didn't have as much bite. You get rid of all that and the result is Rush Limbaugh. When broadcasting's public interest moment was in full swing in the 1970s, Rush Limbaugh wasn't really a part of it.

He was on the air, but he was a DJ, queuing up songs and reporting on weather and traffic in between. Limbaugh had been in love with the medium since he was a kid. His dad, who was once a part owner of a station in their hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, got Young Rush his first radio gig there in the 1960s, when Rush was only 16.

But after that, he found it hard to keep a job. By the early 1980s, after well over a decade in the industry, Limbaugh had been fired from five stations, mostly for interpersonal reasons. Limbaugh spent a few years working in sales for the Kansas City Royals, but he was back behind the mic in 1983, now in his 30s and trying his hand at news coverage.

He lasted less than a year before getting fired again. But the next year, in 1984, a station out of Sacramento took a gamble on Limbaugh and gave him his own show. And it was there that he really honed his pitch. Less weather and traffic, more politics and preenings.

And the phones lit up. Whether callers wanted to argue or agree with Limbaugh's right-wing hot takes, they all wanted to talk. Ratings soared. And advertising dollars poured in.

For Limbaugh, who had made it clear that he was an entertainer and moneymaker first, pundit second, it was a goldmine. The views expressed by the host on this show are not necessarily those of the staff, management, nor sponsors of this station, but they ought to be.

Limbaugh was, in many ways, representative of the new post-public interest radio dial of the mid-1980s. After deregulation began in earnest in 1981, the number of complaints to the FCC about racial stereotyping went up. So did complaints about a lack of programming for minority groups.

And then, of course, in 1987, Reagan's FCC dealt the death blow. This week, the FCC voted down the Fairness Doctrine by a vote of 4 to 0. The logic of doing over the Fairness Doctrine was, oh, well, now all of these towns have 100, 500, 1,000 channels on their cable systems. Ann Nelson is the author of Shadow Network, Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. So anybody can find any opinion they want...

And we don't need to have that requirement for individual broadcasters anymore. But she says there were a couple of issues with the FCC's argument. First of all, you know, you can't watch 100 channels.

In fact, this firehose of information is going to be so overwhelming that you'll probably just stick to one or two channels. Also, not everyone had cable. And even if you did, you can't watch cable while commuting to work or working on most job sites. Plenty of people still relied on radio, not television, for their news. And the existence of cable TV didn't suddenly mean there were more radio frequencies.

The fairness doctrine had not been perfect. Adhering to it was a big logistical headache. Station staff had to monitor hosts for controversial material and figure out how to make free airtime available to people who wanted to respond. Many scholars believe that it kept some broadcasters who didn't want to do their due diligence from broadcasting controversial material at all. But for many, including some conservatives, it had been an important means of getting ideas out.

By the time you have the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, you have a whole cohort of conservatives, people like Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, who want to see the Fairness Doctrine kept in place. The Democratic-led Congress, with the help of some of these conservative leaders, actually passed a law to codify the Fairness Doctrine, which had just been an FCC policy. But Reagan vetoed it. And as it turns out, it wasn't a loss for the right.

Without the Fairness Doctrine in place, highly political, often vitriolic talk radio skyrocketed. And Sacramento area's Rush Limbaugh was the breakout star of the moment. And a year after the doctrine was overturned... He's taking his act to New York City, where his radio show will be nationally syndicated. Limbaugh quickly made a name for himself from WABC in New York.

Limbaugh looked to get a rise out of listeners, including liberals who made up a quarter of his audience in the early days. But as time went on, he appealed more to those who felt that popular culture was edging toward greater representation of the marginalized. And consequently, they felt, leaving them out.

People start calling him and saying, thank God you're on the air rush. We finally have a voice. Brian Rosenwald is the author of Talk Radio's America, how an industry took over a political party that took over the United States. And it's ironic, right, because this is the 80s. Ronald Reagan is still in office. Like, they have the White House. They have the biggest platform in the world, but they don't feel that way. And in some sense, they're right, to be honest.

that the liberals are still winning the culture wars, even as the conservatives are gaining more political power. And over time, they start to lose the liberal audience. Eventually, even the skeptical conservatives came around on deregulation. Nicole Hemmer. It's not until Rush Limbaugh takes off

And they see the power of this deregulated medium that suddenly the conservative line is, yes, the Fairness Doctrine is bad. It only exists to shut up Rush Limbaugh. And we all oppose it.

But it wasn't just political conservatives fueling Limbaugh's growth. It was also his large following of evangelical Christians. I was in seminary. This would have been maybe 89, 90. And everybody on my floor, all these seminarians, were listening to this new guy, Rush Limbaugh.

This is John Fia, the professor of history at Messiah Christian University in Pennsylvania, who in last week's episode told us about the omnipresence of Christian radio in his childhood.

You know, you'd go into the lounge or you'd go into the bathroom or whatever, and they're talking, hey, do you hear what Rush said? Which is why I say this cat's talking more about women than anything my whole life. And I had no idea who this guy was. And I started listening to him. So I remember being quite taken, entertained by Limbaugh in seminary.

John eventually grew to be a Limbaugh critic, but in the early days, he was on board. And not unlike his dad, who evangelized with Christian radio blaring from his truck, John turned around and shared the word of Rush with his old man. I introduced my father to Rush Limbaugh.

I'll never forget this. My parents kind of convinced me to come home from Chicago for our annual trip to the Jersey Shore. And I remember saying, Dad, you got to hear this guy. I think you'll like him. And I remember turning him on and he was hooked. He listened to him every single day that vacation and then continued to listen to him. This replaced Christian radio in his truck.

Most listened to radio talk show in America. And that means the universe. Years of well-organized Christian media networking and socially conservative programming from the likes of the 700 Club's Pat Robertson or Salem's early teach and talk stations meant that in content, if not tone, Limbaugh wasn't a giant leap from what a lot of Christians were already listening to.

It was around this time that Salem, then just a Christian network, surveyed their listeners and found that when they turned the dial, they tended to stop at conservative talkers like Limbaugh.

Christian radio helped prime audiences for Limbaugh. And Limbaugh, appealing to anxieties around cultural change, helped shape Christian radio. This anxiety and fear turned Christian radio into a kind of political outlet to serve the culture wars.

Republican politicians soon realized that getting in good with Limbaugh meant getting in good with his listeners. President George H.W. Bush literally carried Limbaugh's bags into the White House when he came for a visit. Limbaugh imitators abounded. And by 1995, about two-thirds of talk radio leaned right. End of story, right? The story that's often told

Mark Lloyd. Is that the fairness doctrine ended and that made the way for Rush Limbaugh to come on the air and really reach an audience that had never been served before and provide conservative views. It's nonsensical. So if it wasn't Limbaugh's firebrand personality that drove his success...

What did? Syndicated shows, you know, starting with Limbaugh, come along and they offer programs by what they call the barter method, which essentially means that

you don't pay for the show. Brian Rosenwald says that with the barter method, Limbaugh's group offered the show to stations across the country for free, just in return for the ad time within the show, which they could sell to advertisers who wanted to reach a national audience. So essentially, you're not losing anything if you're at the station. You're not handing out money. You're

You're not paying a salary, you're not paying, you know, a flat fee or something. Barter-based syndication is common practice now. And Limbaugh eventually went on to charge stations to carry his show. But as a business model, it was pretty new back then. And then there were those satellites. As the cost of the technology went down, satellite transmission became more affordable. And going national wasn't as big a deal.

But perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the right's dominance of the radio dial was the 1996 Telecommunications Act and its elimination of national ownership caps. Those were the long-standing legal limits on the number of stations that a single company could own. That number had been increasing for years under Reagan, but in '96, the national limit for radio chains was eliminated.

And that ends up triggering massive, like, frenetic consolidation in the radio business.

in the late 90s, where companies are merging, companies are buying each other up. It basically becomes clear to most owners that you're not going to survive as like an individual owner. You either need to get big or get out. We ended up with an operation called Clear Channel that owned over 1,200 radio stations, which was just unheard of during the public interest moment. The idea that any one entity could own 1,200 stations.

Before the 96 Act, Clear Channel, now called iHeartMedia, had just 43 stations. And starting in 1998... Clear Channel owned Premier Radio Networks. And guess who Premier Radio Networks owned? They owned the Rush Limbaugh show. And guess what Clear Channel and the Premier Radio Networks promoted and put on every station they could? Well, they put on the show that they owned, Rush Limbaugh.

And while no other company got as big as Clear Channel, others like Salem and Entercom, which soon acquired Sinclair's radio stations, grew exponentially. Cumulus, a media giant, was formed in the wake of the act. And all of this economic consolidation changed what could be heard on the airwaves. Why does this affect programming? Well, it affects programming because you end up getting these companies that become vertically integrated.

For one set of talent and one set of production costs, you can program a show that you can then air on a huge chunk of your stations. It was cheaper for a company to invest in one big host who they could blast out across the country than it was to hire local hosts in every city.

And as the higher-ups were programming for their newly expanded networks, they stuck to tried and tested formats. Consolidation and these big corporate ownerships create risk-adverse companies, risk-adverse executives, executives who want to program something that they know will work, and conservative talk is it. In the 90s and early 2000s, more and more talk stations switched from showcasing a variety of opinions to airing one political perspective all day.

mirroring an approach called format purity in music radio. If you turn the country station on and you hear Beethoven's Fifth, you're going to be confused. Radio executives think that people feel the same way about talk. That if you turn on the conservative talk station and there's a liberal guy on, you're like, did I turn the wrong station on? That there needs to be predictability.

From a station manager's perspective, platforming talkers like Rush Limbaugh was predictable and also safe. What is dangerous is raunch. Stuff that's going to threaten your FCC license.

conservative talk for as harsh as it can be is largely safe. And it's one decision upon one decision upon one decision that makes this make more and more and more sense to the point that you get to the 2000s. And then they're like, OK, yeah, all conservative, all political, all nationally syndicated or mostly nationally syndicated. That's how we make our money.

There were no progressive or liberal talkers on commercial radio in Philadelphia. And certainly there are liberal and progressive people in Philadelphia. There were no progressive or liberal talkers on commercial radio in Houston. And certainly there are liberal and progressive folks who were interested in that programming, but none. They were not being served by commercial radio stations in those markets.

In 2007, Mark Lloyd worked on a study that looked at news talk radio stations owned by the country's five biggest commercial radio companies, including Salem. What we found was that conservative talk dominated liberal or progressive talk by 10 to 1. The study also noted that in some markets where left-leaning talk was aired, it could bring in money and ratings. But the big conglomerates hardly bothered. They could afford not to.

The only real attempt by liberals to give conservative radio a run for its money came in 2004. Air America Radio. Real facts in a filtered world. With even more intensity. Politics and culture. Air America had hosts like Al Franken. Today is both an ending and a beginning.

An end to the right-wing dominance of talk radio. Public Enemy's Chuck D. In the house, on the real. What's up, bruh? And Rachel Maddow. This is the Rachel Maddow Show here on Air America Radio. But from the get-go, there were some issues. A lot of the hosts were new to radio and just weren't that great.

But importantly, Air America lacked the structures that had benefited Limbaugh. Air America didn't own any stations, they just made shows. So they had to convince existing stations to run Air America programs. Not easy in this era of format purity and big chain ownership.

Air America was off the air by early 2010. Brian Rosenwald. What happens is a lot of people in the radio business take the Air America failure and say, "See, liberal radio won't work." The 1996 Telecommunications Act was an economic decision, not one that regulated content. But in practice, it hit both. It meant that the loudest voices didn't have to be the most representative ones.

Extreme rhetoric like Rush Limbaugh's might have remained on the fringes if his ideas and attitudes hadn't been echoed by host after host, on station after station. Because with the infrastructure working in your favor, you can bring the extreme into the mainstream and make it look organic.

Rush Limbaugh was not the first to do what he did, but he was the right guy at the right time, when years of deregulation were coming to a head. But because the narrative is that conservative talk radio started with Limbaugh and in many ways was Limbaugh, a lot of people predicted it would end with Limbaugh, too. I've heard this narrative now several times since Rush has passed. Salem's senior vice president, Phil Boyce. That

But as Phil Boyce knows well, radio still has an enormous reach. And today, without Limbaugh on the dial, it's still the case that 12 of the top 15 talk radio hosts are right-wing. This battle will continue.

Hey, this is Katie, and I have some news to share. We are working on a second season of The Divided Dial. It'll be ready for you in the new year, and we're really excited for you to hear it.

We'll still be talking about radio, its power, its promise, sometimes its failed promise. But this season is all about shortwave radio, the way less listened to but way farther reaching cousin of AM and FM. It reaches across vast distances, across continents and national borders. It was once painted as a utopian international mass communication tool, a sort of internet before the internet.

But like the internet, it also took a turn for the chaotic. And like AM and FM talk radio, it also went to the right, hard, with extremists and cults still finding a home on the short waves. So stay tuned, because this season, it's the untold story of shortwave radio. ♪