99% Invisible - 517- The Divided Dial

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed something. Right wing radio talk is everywhere.But the airwaves weren't always so dominated by such a narrow range of voices. Reporter and friend of the show Katie Thornton has the story of how talk radio has evolved (and perhaps devolved at times) over the past century, and what all of it means for the airwaves today.The Divided DialHear the rest of the the series from On the Media 

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've ever flipped through the radio dial, not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio, you may have noticed something. First of all, don't stop believing, it still gets a shocking amount of airtime. It's a great song, but maybe culture should evolve. But also, when it comes to talk radio, a lot of it sounds kind of the same. Can I just be on this highway for a while so it'll take a good time to see what's on the radio?

Oh yeah. That is Katie Thornton, reporter and friend of the show, and total radio nerd. She started working behind the scenes at radio stations when she was just a teenager. Whenever I go on road trips, like this one earlier this year from Minneapolis down to Memphis, or even just sitting around at home, I always let the radio be my companion. But for the years I've spent surfing the radio dial, it's always been clear that on talk radio, one style and one political perspective tends to dominate.

I'm going to keep surfing now. Right wing talk radio is everywhere across the US It's not uncommon for talk radio in cities and small towns alike to sound like this racial profiling is good for your health with the COVID pandemic gender confusion is being driven by societal Mania drill build the Keystone pipeline deport, build the wall, defy the federal government. As of this fall, 17 of the country's 20 biggest radio talk hosts were conservative. Only one was progressive. And that matters, because broadcast radio is still a really important medium.

It has a higher reach than television. It's nearly neck and neck with social media for how Americans get their news. And in studies, it often ranks as the media format that Americans trust the most. Katie has just released a new five-part podcast series with WNYC's on the media about how one side of political spectrum came to dominate broadcast radio

and how one company is using the airwaves to launch a right-wing media empire. Katie's series is called The Divided Dial, and it's out now. Today on our show, we wanted to talk with Katie about some of the little-known history behind how we got such lopsided airwaves. Okay, Katie, where do we start?

Well, to get into the meat of our story about how the radio dial once had more diverse perspectives and how that arrangement was undone, I want to start in a time when radio sounded pretty different than it does today. This part we're in from around the base, it all comes in to your goodwill station. This is it. WDIA presents the award-winning feature, Brown America Speaks. In the middle of the last century,

the US radio dial was a rare publicly accessible space that was integrated. I hadn't really thought of it as a place that could or couldn't be integrated, but it makes so much sense. I mean, you could go to the radio and hear thoughts and conversation and music of people that were from different places and different races and different backgrounds. Right. On some stations, a variety of voices could be heard. There was black

talk radio and music, some religious shows, some union stations, but it was far from perfect. In the mid-1900s, most radio stations were still white-owned. Largely because at first the government wouldn't even grant broadcast licenses to black or Jewish Americans. And in the middle of the century, there was one movement in particular that was finding it hard to get air time. Mark Lloyd, professor and former Associate General Counsel at the FCC, is going to tell us more. The folks who had money and made determinations

about what got on television or radio were interested in, they were not interested in the appeals of Martin Luther King. I can't say I'm surprised that the early soul rights movement was not getting much air time back then. Exactly. Unfortunately, it's not very surprising. Though I should say this was the golden age of Black radio, with really popular DJs across the country using their influence to promote civil rights and to spread the word about

demonstrations and marches, but there were a lot of white-owned stations who were determined not to air Black voices. And this was especially true in the South, but in the North as well. They weren't interested in what it was that Thurgood Marshall had to say about the Brown V Board of Education and how he was being implemented in schools. That's not what they wanted to hear. Mark isn't mentioning Thurgood Marshall out of nowhere. In 1955, an incident involving Marshall actually kicked off a legal saga that would prove to be a revolution for radio. Future Supreme Court Justice Marshall

had successfully argued Brown View Board, which desegregated schools. And that fall, in 1955, he was interviewed on NBC. The program was sent out to NBC affiliate stations, but one of those stations, a joint radio and TV station called WLBT in Mississippi, decided they didn't want to run it, and they cut the feed. Wow. And so this was this ideologically motivated interruption. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was. The manager of the station was an avowed white supremacist,

and this was not the only time WLBT refused to cover the civil rights movement, or even just air the voices of black Americans. Black folks in Mississippi and in the Jackson-Mississippi area, which were roughly 40% of the population, were not allowed even by time on the station. And so the folks in the local area were hearing one particular perspective about the civil rights movement. They weren't hearing both sides.

This continued into the 1960s at WLBT. In 1963, they cut the NBC feed during coverage of a lunch counter sin in, and repeatedly refused to let civil rights leaders appear on the station. W-A-L-B-T was just one station, but there were many stations in the south that did the same thing, and there were stations in the north that did pretty much the same thing. In the 1960s, the lack of media coverage was so pervasive that civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King started explicitly calling out the lack of media attention and asking allies to help get coverage. And after this call goes out, a liberal-minded church group, the United Church of Christ,

ends up working with activists, many of whom had long fought for coverage themselves, often unsuccessfully, to try to get more airtime. And to do this, they decided to use some tools that the government themselves had created. All right, so what are those tools and when were they created? Okay, so flashback to the 1920s and the emergence of something called the public interest mandate. Basically, when radio was new, a ton of people wanted to broadcast, the demand for space on the dial outstripped supply. So to narrow the field, the federal government says that any station using the public airwaves

needs to serve the public interest. What do they mean by the public interest? Yeah, right. It's like super vague, right? But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War 2. They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they did But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War II. They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they didn't want US radio stations to become propaganda outlets.

And so, in 1949, the FCC basically says to stations, in order to serve the public, you need to give airtime to coverage of current events. And you have to include multiple perspectives in your coverage. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the fairness doctrine. So it's the 50s and 60s, the stations. They're cutting the NBC coverage of the civil rights movement.

And it's not just morally dubious. It's actually against the policies of the FCC. Exactly, right. So civil rights activists decided to put that to the test, and they ended up challenging WLBT's license for repeatedly denying them air time. At first, the FCC dismissed the case, but then the activists sued the FCC, and they won. And eventually, years later, a federal court decided that WLBT could stay on the air, but their license would be transferred to a nonprofit, multi-racial group of broadcasters.

Wow, that's huge. Yeah. So this case ended up having impact beyond this station, right? Like obviously, the problem of racist one-sided coverage went beyond just WLBT. Right. And this case actually had enormous repercussions for the radio and TV industries. They were both overseen by the FCC. And there were a few really big things that this case did over the course of its many

year back and forth. First of all, just by accepting the case, the court set a really important precedent. The ruling gave local communities the power to challenge licenses, radio and television licenses across the country. So for the first time, people, common citizens could legally and successfully challenge licenses if they thought a broadcaster wasn't following the FCC's rules, like serving the public interest and being fair. So it wasn't just the FCC like looking for violators

and then therefore like challenging licenses. People actually took the power in their own hands to challenge licenses around the country. Yeah, yes, exactly. People could write to stations, saying they weren't being balanced in their coverage and asking for air time for certain issues. And now all of a sudden, the station actually felt pressure

to listen to them. Huh, and I'm assuming this makes broadcasters really nervous, especially the gross ones that are antisoable rights. Yes, it does, and that brings us to some of the other industry changing things that the WLBT case did, as it was going through the courts, and especially after it was decided that the license would be transferred, broadcasters were worried about their licenses getting called in the question. So the FCC starts giving broadcasters recommendations

of how they can avoid that same fate, how they can satisfy that longstanding vague requirement to serve the public interest. And they really start pushing this thing called ascertainment. Asher attainments were when people in local communities were interviewed by station officials, people who were never asked before,

what do you think ought to be on radio? What do you think ought to be on TV? Now they were being asked these questions. This was done by radio stations and television stations, commercial stations, public stations across the country. You know, this seems so simple and so revolutionary at the same time. Like, just ask people they want to hear about and maybe that would shape the broadcasting accordingly. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty revolutionary. Like, people who worked in radio and TV, which we're

both overseen by the FCC, were literally going into church basements and women shelters and asking about the issues that people wanted to be covered. But in a handful of years, the FCC would actually come to require this process. And they would also come to more or less require that all stations, even stations that played mostly music, which was a lot of stations,

run some small amount of educational programming. So as all of this was shaping up in the late 60s and the early 70s, the radio was changing because people had a say now. The stations began to understand that if they did not begin to follow these guidelines, if they didn't follow the Theronis doctrine, if they didn't do these ascertainment reports,

then local communities would challenge their licenses. People did challenge broadcast licenses, but often the threat alone was enough to get stations to pay attention. As the 1960s bore on, the civil rights movement started getting more on air coverage on radio and TV. And when people started hearing

and seeing civil rights activists getting attacked by police dogs and brutally harassed by white residents, it helped increase support for the movement. Right. I mean, the fairness doctrine works when you hear perspectives, multiple perspectives. You actually burn and change. Yeah, like media exposure.

That's a good thing to know. It's helpful. And coming into the 1970s now, people continue to use the airwaves to talk about all sorts of political and cultural issues that were important to them. So my black brothers in the United States of America, I say it's in place, as you are dilemma, as a historically sensitive people is the same as mine. You could turn on the radio and hear a broadcast about black history or indigenous solidarity.

This is John Ferdellan inviting you to Indian land radio, Indian land alcatraz island. Realizing that I was gay and funny. There were gay and lesbian shows, shows about agriculture. I raised about 88 years of porn. Whatever potential listeners said was important to them. This was the time when we really began to see news and public affairs programs become really important in the American culture. This is getting through radio I really like. And it really represents a really big shift. Oh yeah, I mean, this is a really big moment. All of these changes result in what Mark calls broadcastings public interest moment where he says there was an explosion

of news shows and Sunday morning public affairs shows on radio and TV. This is the era that public broadcasting first got serious federal support between the late 60s and the late 70s shows like 60 minutes start up. Good evening. This is 60 minutes. It's a kind of a magazine for television, which means it has the flexibility

and diversity of a magazine adapted to broadcast journalism. I mean, this sounds so much like somebody trying to describe their podcast, you know, like it's so different. Things aren't so different. Totally. But, you know, this was really like a different moment, a changing moment for broadcasters, because newsrooms start to become ever so slightly more integrated. In just a few years, the radio dial and TV band had become much more representative

of all that America was. And I wanna say, conservative voices had long found a pretty solid platform on radio. They were ultimately part of the status quo that many civil rights leaders were pushing against when they took on media reform. But conservative voices are part of this public interest moment too. You saw right wing watchdogs using the fairness doctrine to get a bunch of air time to respond

to critical news coverage with pro-Nixon content. So this legal battle that started with civil rights leaders ends up providing all sorts of people with tools to increase speech on the air, even folks who might have previously fought against civil rights. Yeah, even folks who might have previously fought against civil rights. Yeah, even them. So conservative voices were definitely on the air, but it was far from the one-sidedness you're liable to hear today. And so why is it the way it is today?

You know, like if it was this mess of, you know, conservative voices and new liberal voices and civil rights and even anti-civil rights, Like, how do we get to the point where one person can talk for two hours with just sort of misinformation and, you know, right wings, not time. Right, right, and two hours like every day across the state of the coastal country. Right, well, before we get there, and which we will get there,

let me tell you about one other thing that was turning the radio world on its head in the 1970s. And here's a brand new Deluxe AMFM model, thing that was turning the radio world on its head in the 1970s. And here's a brand new Deluxe AMFM model, the XF4 Emissary. The difference in reception will leap to the ear. So all of these legal changes coincided with the explosion of FM radio, which overtook AM and listenership in the late 1970s. And what is the significance of FM,

for the purposes of this conversation? Basically with AM or amplitude modulation radio, the signal was super buzzy. There's always a sort of ambient hum, like you know what I mean? It's like, hmm, constantly. Yeah, totally. It's a little annoying.

It's kind of like looking through a dirty window, but then with FM, sound was encoded into radio signals differently, and it was super clean. Like compared to the muck of AM, it was like freshly shined glass. So, if you really want high quality, which is like music, you move that over to FM. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what happened. Music stations rush over to FM. And so for a while, the AM band is kind of floundering. Like AM needs a unique selling point. Yeah, and that selling point is talk radio, you know? That's what they can do well.

Exactly, exactly. You don't need high fidelity sound. You just talk. So talk radio is pretty much AM salvation. And that's especially true once this new revolutionary high-tech format entered the scene and That's the Colin show Hello, yes, Bob have a problem. What should I do?

Okay, so talk to me about Colin chose because I mean these is just the foundation of radio broadcasting talk to me about Colin Chose because I mean, these are just the foundation of radio broadcasting. Talk to me about how those affected everything. Totally. I mean, now it's just like quintessential radio, basically, almost sort of kitschy, but at the time, like the seamless Colin show or more or less seamless, I should say, was pretty new. The idea that somebody can hear themselves on the radio by calling in

and talking to the host. And I sound so old school at this point, but it really was a revolution. This is Nicole Hemmer. She's an author and scholar of media and conservative movements. And she says this really was a big deal, like to be able to be part of the media. There had been some call-in shows in the past, like as early as the 1920s, but basically the host would answer the phone and either hold the receiver up to the microphone or they'd just take the call privately with a live mic and say, mm-hmm.

Oh, okay, okay, listeners. So what the caller said. It was. It was like, high art. I totally agree. So Nicole Hemmer says that live national Collins shows, as we know and love them today, became possible because of two technological advances.

One, satellite dishes were becoming more and more accessible and affordable, meaning more stations could run a show simultaneously in two different cities for cheaper. And around the same time, there were some changes in long distance telephone technology, and the cost of the calls went way down. And once you have those two things where I can make a toll-free call

to a show that is being aired around the nation all at the same time, so that people in Oregon and people in New York can listen to the same station, 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. Our phone lines are now open on the Larry King show. From all time zones, the number to call is 703-685-2177.

Thank you very much, Fred Larry, our special guest. And it changes the medium because it makes it more interactive. And 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. Yeah, I can see why this is just a huge change because before this, you know, people just consumed media. They did not partake in it. They didn't have the internet.

It was just this was the first time people could hear themselves. Totally. Yeah, the Colin model was kind of astonishingly democratic for the time. So there's FM and AM and Colin shows and there are these policies that are getting more diverse viewpoints on the air.

Yeah. So how does this slide us into all conservative all the time? Well, Roman. The Reagan administration came in and then began to eliminate all of those regulations. Reagan came in, all of it was gone. Yeah, it always starts with Reagan. Yep.

Go figure. As is often the case, Reagan is the plot's pivot point. So Reagan comes in in 1980, after a decade or so of pretty exciting changes in media. So what exactly did the Reagan administration do? Well, basically, not long after the president took office, Reagan's FCC started killing off all of the policies and guidelines that had been built up during the civil rights era. The FCC made some major changes in how radio stations are run.

No more requirements to go out and see what local residents want to hear. No more mandate to run some educational shows. There are no longer limits on the number of commercials a station may play. The FCC also made it harder for people to challenge broadcast licenses. The fairness doctrine was still alive, but without these other policies, it was losing its teeth. The free market will now determine what a station plays. During this era, the number of complaints to the FCC about racial stereotyping and a lack

of programming from minority groups both went up. But with public interest guidelines removed or defanged, people just didn't have much recourse. Hmm. So people, like every day people didn't have nearly as much say in what was on the radio anymore. Yeah, exactly. And coinciding with this decline of public influence, was the rise of a new breed of talk show host.

Early in the morning, when most of us are still sleeping, there's a madman loose on the bolder, more Washington airwaves, and anyone with a phone and a thick skin is invited to join in the madness. After the break, the dawn of the American Shock-Dock. The New York Times The New York Times All right, so after years of this public interest agenda being an animating principle within the FCC, Reagan got into office and basically deregulated the living hell out of broadcasting. And this coincided with the rise of a new

Loud provocative type of radio host. That's right. This was the era of the shock jock Basically, brash offensive high-energy disc jockey So this is Howard Stern yes So this is Howard Stern. Yes. The all-hale Howard Stern of serious activity. Yes, that is correct. So this is Howard Stern pioneering Shock Jack King. I mean, but Stern, especially when he started,

wasn't especially political. I mean, he's become politicized over the years, but he wasn't like a political talk show host. He was just trying to get people's attention. Right, exactly. Just shocking people. Shockjogs were rarely political, exactly. Just shocking people. Shockjogs were rarely political,

especially in the early days. They were mostly just kind of like, lute or gross, shocking, you know, as is in the name. But as that sort of brash-new style got popular, it became clear that political talk could bring that shock-jog energy to. My dear, anybody with program like you is per celebration.

I'm glad I'm going to Printer better. You are you are Committable. Goodbye. 7 6 1. This is Alan Berg. He was a Liberal Talk radio host out of Denver. He got started in the late 1970s and was really taking off in the early 80s. He was Jewish and was known for being pretty vitriolic and calling out racism and bigotry. Somebody can you are not see by your very own vision. That's so much. It's because that's right.

You heard it. Okay. 8-6-1-2-8-6-1-8-2-5. Given what we know about AM and FM talk radio, now this is very surprising to hear. I mean, it's got the in your face, confrontational talk show vibe, but it's from the opposite side

of the political spectrum. Totally. It is surprising. And to paint a picture of how he was received, at one point, there's this poll that goes out in Denver that asks residents to name the city's most beloved media personality and it's most despised. And Ellen Berg won both awards. That's a feat.

That's kind of incredible. And Ellen Berg was super well known. I mean, he was on a huge station. His show could be heard in about 30 different states. But obviously not everyone used their radio platform to call out racism and bigotry. That is true. And a heads up that this next section

is going to include some really hateful talk radio. Let me put it to you, this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the bloods and the crypts without any weapons. Okay, here he is. This is Rush Limbaugh. Yes. Before the uninitiated Rush Limbaugh is known for these racist diatrives and also for calling

feminists, feminazes and for some incredibly homophobic recurring segments for vilifying the poor, you name it, he probably said it. And not to say the obvious, but this is very different from what Alan Berg was doing. Yeah, a lot of people have referred to Alan Berg as a sort of limbaugh of the left. And it's true, you know, their styles were similar. I mean, their styles may have been similar, but Berg was calling out racism and limbaugh was literally just spreading racism. Yeah, exactly. It's actually really interesting to look at Limbaugh's trajectory

because I think it kind of tells a story in itself. Limbaugh had always been a radio guy, but not always the most successful one. Over almost two decades in radio, he was fired as a DJ from six stations. But during these years working on and off behind a mic, he noticed something. When he talked about politics, which wasn't something he really cared about in his early years,

the phones lit up. This was the 1970s and into the 1980s, right as America was experiencing the start of a conservative wave, fueled largely by backlash to the civil rights movement and the rise of the religious right, and Rush rode that wave all the way to the civil rights movement and the rise of the religious right. And Rush rode that wave all the way to the host chair. In 1984, a radio station in Sacramento took a chance on Rush and gave him his own show. And this is where he really found his sound. Yes, and well, I really don't feel like we need to give Limbaugh much airtime.

He had a lot of it in his life. I do think it's important to hear just a bit more of what this sounded like, because you can hear a lot of similarities to present-day talk radio in everything from the conversational if totally hostile tone down to the really biting and just a warrant and false commentary. How many of you guys, your own experience experience with women have learned that no means yes if you know how to spot it. This is hard to listen to. Yeah, it's really hard to listen to. But, you know, Russia's political and cultural rants made films ring off the hook, ratings soared, and that meant more advertisers. And Limba from the beginning was not shy to admit

that he was in it first and foremost for money. So he did more of what sold. So we've got Limbaugh from the beginning was not shy to admit that he was in it first and foremost for money, so he did more of what sold. So we've got Limbaugh and Berg as pretty much polar opposites using a similar style to reach listeners. Yeah, and you can imagine a world where these two fast-talking in your face hosts are duking it out and fighting about politics over the public airwaves, but in 1984, the same year, Limbaw got his start out West. 50-year-old Alan Berg was murdered in his driveway. And I'm going to play you some tape from Berg's home station, K-O-A, from the night of his murder.

It's from his friend and fellow K-O-A host, Ken Hamlin. It honestly still gets me really choked up, even though I've heard it now dozens of times. 1039 KOA time and we're still trying to piece information together. Off the air I'm finding out that someone passing in a vehicle using a semi-automatic weapon or an automatic weapon I'm not sure which fired upon Alan Berg when he was exiting his vehicle in front of his home. To describe how I feel right now, I've got a high-pitched ringing sound in my ears. My head is throbbing, and I can't believe it.

Berg was killed by members of a newly formed white supremacist group called the Order, founded by a man named David Lane, who drove the getaway car from the scene of Berg's murder. And remember that caller we heard earlier, the one who Alan Berg called a Nazi by his own admission? Yeah. That caller was David Lane. Oh my God. Oh my God. I, oh, so he was like a regular listener and called into the show. Yeah, yeah, he listened, called, talk to Alan Berg and proceeded to organize his murder. And Lane died in prison in 2007.

And he remains a really influential figure in the white supremacist movement of today. I tell you, we used to sit down at lunch. White supremacist movement of today. I tell you, we used to sit down at lunch. Now, Illinois was used to say they're out there, but you can't worry about them. They're out there. You can't worry about them, you.

You never know, you know? You never know where the nuts are going to come from is what he used to say. So you live from day to day. It's just so sad. Yeah, it's really hard to listen to. So at this time, this style of rash political talk, it's game steam, and the left just lost one of its most prominent, up-and- upcoming voices to White supremacist violence. That's right.

And just a few years after that, came a change in the national radio landscape that allowed provocative political talk to reach whole new heights. This week, the FCC voted down the fairness doctrine by a vote of 4-0. What do you think this is going to mean for the average consumer of news and information? Various pendants think that eventually it will cut off minority viewpoints that have been using the doctrine to get heard. The fairness doctrine was that piece of policy that required stations to present multiple perspectives on coverage of controversial issues. This is like the cornerstone of why

there were multiple voices on the air. Yeah, that's right. In practice, the fairness doctrine had already been weakened when other public interest guidelines went out the window. But this was its formal death blow. And so what was Reagan's and the FCC's basis for getting rid of the fairness doctrine, besides just, you know, a love affair with getting rid of all government regulations? Yeah, basically, the fairness doctrine was built in part on that idea that there weren't enough channels or radio frequencies for everyone who wanted to broadcast to get on

the airwaves. So having one of those stations was considered a privilege. And part of what you had to do in exchange for that privilege, they had said, was to present multiple perspectives. But Reagan's FCC points to a new thing called cable television to say that that scarcity argument isn't really relevant anymore. So the idea was that with cable, there are now tons and tons of channels. So if you don't get airtime on one station,

you can just go to a different one, or you can just make your own. Right, yeah, that's the idea, but there are some flaws with that argument. First, not everyone had cable. Also, you can't watch cable while you're a community to work or working on a job site. Plenty of people still relied on radio, not television

for their news, which is still the case today. Yeah. And also, the existence of cable TV doesn't mean there's suddenly more radio frequencies available. Right, exactly. Like, that's another huge flaw in the argument. So, describe to me what happens after the fairness doctrine dies. Yeah, well, highly political, often vitriolic talk radio without any counterpoints skyrocketed

and their breakout star was Rush Limbaugh. He talked about the fairness doctrine a lot on his show. He went into national syndication for the first time in 1988, which was the year after the fairness doctrine was eliminated. When lawmakers would try to reinstate the doctrine in the years that followed, a bunch of people on the right would call it the hush rush bill.

So for Limbaugh, the end of the fairness doctrine was a permission slip to kind of say whatever he wanted. And there was certainly an appetite for what he was saying. Rush gave voice to the grievances of a lot of people who were resistant to changes in culture and power. And Republican politicians understood that getting in good with Rush meant getting in good with his listeners.

Yeah, yeah. I think I remember President George H. W. Bush literally carrying Rush's bags into the White House when he came for a visit. Right, right. That is the perfect image. Limbaugh had so much power over elected officials, and he inspired a lot of them, too, including this guy.

In the 1990s, Russia inspired me to start a radio broadcast of my own. I used to say I was Russia Limbaugh on D-Calf. And for three hours a day on the airwaves of small town Indiana, I proceeded. And so that is Mike Pence. That is Mike Pence. Yep. D-Calf Limbaugh Mike Pence.

He was among the many talk hosts inspired by Limbaugh. And by 1995, about two thirdsthirds of political talk leaned right. I mean, two-thirds is a lot. It's already really significant, but like you mentioned earlier, now it's almost completely right wing talk radio and an often pretty far right too. Right, and there are a few other steps

that helped us get there, including in 1996, something that really tightened the conservative grasp on the airwaves, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law. Among the many things the 96 Telecom acted was completely restructured the radio industry. There's a provision that goes into the bill that removes national ownership caps. So Roman, this is Brian Rosenwald, a media scholar who wrote a book about the limbaugh era of conservative talk radio.

He says that basically since the 1940s, the government had limited the total number of radio stations that a single company could own, both in a single city and nationwide. Those ownership caps had been increasing for years under Reagan, but in 96, that national limit was completely removed. And that ends up triggering massive, 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. This led people who were already at an advantage in the market compound their power. For some perspective, the number of black owned stations was cut by more than half in the years between 1995 and 2012. The numbers have gone up a bit since then, but black Americans still own less than 2% of commercial radio stations in the country. And it wreaked havoc on local ownership too. Here's Mark Lloyd again.

We ended up with an operation called Clear Channel that owned over 1200 radio stations, which was just unheard of during the public interest moment. The idea that any one entity could own 1200 stations. For reference, before 96, clear channel, now I Heart Media, own 43 stations. It took them less than a decade to get to over 1200. Oh my goodness. The 43 to 1200 stations, that's wild.

I mean, you said this helped rush limba. How did this help Rush Limbaugh, in particular? Well, it helps a lot of big hosts and big radio companies, but I'll let Mark explain what it did for Limbaugh specifically. Well, Clear Channel owned Premiere Radio Networks, and guess who Premiere 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. Of course they did. Yeah, and I should say Clear Channel bought premier

in 1998. So Limbaugh found a lot of success before this, but this is an easy way to stay on top. And for other radio companies to point to his success and say, see, that's where we should be. So there was this burst of conservative talk host who took off in the early 2000s, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and consolidation was already pushing conservative talk radio to the right. So tell me about that, because deregulation

consolidation, these are economic processes. They don't explicitly have to do with programming or programming tastes and what is popular. Yeah, so basically these big radio companies, like Clear Channel, vertically integrate. They own sometimes hundreds of stations, and rather than finding and paying hundreds of local hosts for time slots on those local stations,

they can pump a bunch of money into one high profile host who show they can air everywhere. That still ends up being cheaper and easier than cultivating and hiring and getting advertisers to back a ton of individual local hosts all over the country. 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. At the same time, a concept called format purity was trickling into talk radio from the music radio world. Basically, program directors started to think that one station should stick with one genre. That way, us Fussy listeners would know what to expect, and we tune in for longer, more TSL, time spent listening. And that would mean more advertising dollars. Radio executives think that there needs to be predictability.

That if you turn on the conservative talk station, and there's a liberal guy on, you're like, well, did I turn the wrong station on? So most talk stations see what is working in many of their areas, and then they control more stations, and then they just very conservatively put that on there, and therefore the whole system is taken over just almost by force to represent one voice. Yeah, I mean, the limba model was seen as a good, safe business move.

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, okay, all conservative, all political, all nationally syndicated, or mostly nationally syndicated, that's how we make our money. So conservative talk, it comes to dominate. But does anyone on the left have to counter strike? Like, there's no reason why they couldn't work on the left have to sort of counter strike? Like, there's just, you know, there's no reason why they couldn't work on the left.

Yeah, you know, kind of. The big attempt to counter the rights hold on talk radio came when George W. Bush was running for re-election in 2004. Was a project called Air America? I remember as well. I was already in radio when Air America started. And this is like where, you know, Rachel Maddo really took off and in like, Chuck D from public Enemy was the host.

And one of the hosts that I actually worked with at KLW in San Francisco left public radio to go work at Air America. So yeah, it was a big deal in that moment. Wow, yeah. But Air America had some problems from the start. A lot of hosts just didn't really have backgrounds in radio and like they didn't have great chemistry on their shows. And they also just didn't really have backgrounds in radio and like they didn't have great chemistry on their shows.

And they also just didn't really do like a great job of speaking to listeners across the country. Just wasn't really great radio, I guess. But importantly, beyond just the content, Air America also suffered from the exact same system that was giving Rush Limba a boost. Remember, by this point, clear channel with over a thousand stations owned the company that owned the Rush Limba a boost. Remember, by this point, Clear Channel, with over a thousand stations, owned the company

that owned the Rush Limba show? Air America didn't own any stations, so they had to convince existing stations to run their progressive talk shows. Which I imagine wasn't easy, with a lot of stations already airing conservative talk program from morning till night. Right. Air America went bankrupt in 2006 and we're totally off the air by 2010.

It's worth noting that there were other individual cases where liberal talk show hosts had success in some markets, but in general, the big companies just didn't really run them. They could afford not to. And I can imagine, like as a liberal listener, you know, just hitting a wall of conservative talk when you try to AM radio, you just begin to not look for it anymore. And then there's this refuge inside of public radio, which gives you some nuanced and complex views and longer stories.

And therefore then things just stay the way they are because why would any liberal upstart, you know, find purchase in that landscape because I'm not looking for it. And I've given up so long ago that it doesn't really matter. Yeah, definitely. I think that's a huge part of it. But a lot of people still rely on talk radio for their news and information and entertainment. And so those folks are getting pretty much one viewpoint. This is also interesting because throughout the history of radio in America, there have

been decisions that have helped increase the diversity of viewpoints and the voices and airwaves and decisions that have lessened that diversity. And that wasn't always stated as the goal of the decision, I'm sure it was just like free markets and whatever kind of nonsense they said. But that was the impact. It lessened diversity. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it was a decision to put policies in place that could help increase perspectives on the airwaves, and it was a decision to do away with them.

Like the market is not neutral or natural, like leaving things to the market is also a design choice. The erasure of those civil rights era broadcast victories that gave some local input and local control. The end of the fairness doctrine, allowing massive consolidation with India industry, those decisions helped make it so that the farthest reaching voices didn't need to be the most representative ones. And a voice like Rush Limba, whose rhetoric was extreme,

didn't have to speak to everybody, or even a majority. But with behind the scene structure is working in your favor, you can bring the extreme into the mainstream and make it look organic. But it's not organic. Like you said, it's totally designed. I mean, these are decisions that people make, and you could make different decisions if you wanted a different outcome. All this stuff is so fascinating to me. I love radio. I got into this business because I love radio so much, and I live through much of this history. What are some of the other things you're talking about on your series for on the media? Yeah, so the series, The Divided Dial, takes an even deeper dive

into how the right captured American talk radio, and how one company is quietly launching a conservative media empire from the airwaves. We talk about everything from the religious rights role and shaping what we hear on the radio to whether or not repeatedly broadcasting falsehoods is legal. As we said at the beginning, radio is still an incredibly influential format. But you know, it's you and I maybe know this because we both sort of got into this work because we love radio I started working in radio as well, but radio is not particularly glamorous medium and especially for mainstream media outlets

They don't often report on what happens on the radio dial mm-hmm and just logistically like as you mentioned hours and hours a day 24-7 so many talkers. It's to call through it's hard to fact check it's hard to parse hard to analyze and it ends up getting overlooked despite it's still having a ton of power. Thank you Katie for bringing us this story and for the rest of the series I can't wait to listen to it. Yeah thank you so much Roman it was great to talk with you about this. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Thornton, with help from Emmett Fitzgerald and Abigail Keel, edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Amida Kanatra, music by a director of Sound, Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is a senior editor, Kirk Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team is Vivian Leigh, Christopher Johnson, Martin Gonzales, Chris Baroupe, Lashemadon, Jason Dillion,

Jacob Multanada Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Social banks this week to catch a Roger's executive producer of On the Media and tireless editor of Kati's series. Kati Thornton's series The Divided Dial is produced by WNYC's On the Media with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

You can find on the media at onthemedia.org. Four of the series' five episodes are out now. The finale is out soon. It's available in the On the media feed wherever you get your podcasts. And you can follow along with Katie's other work on her website. It's Katie Thornton.com or on Instagram. It's Katie Thornton. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence like 13 years ago and has never changed. It's that good. We are a part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM Podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building.

And beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.