I've been working professionally in radio since 1979, mostly in the Boston market. Radio is the great love of my life. It is immediate, portable, inexpensive to run, and free to the listener. It can inform, entertain, connect, and build community. I have worked with virtually every format imaginable: rock, country, classical music, foreign language, news, sports, and talk; I have engineered everything from turkey drops to Harvard-Yale games to Boston Pops Fourth of July celebrations. I've fallen asleep on the air, pressed wrong buttons, and broken into uncontrollable laughter in front of a live mic. I've been at top rated stations and seen others go bankrupt. I've seen my industry gobbled up by speculators and spit out by Wall Street. I've had a lot of fun and endured some ugliness along the way.
One of the ugliest things I've seen in my career has been the takeover of the AM band (and even some FM stations) by rabid right-wing talk. While Rush Limbaugh did not invent the format, he is certainly its greatest success, and has spawned innumerable wannabee emulators. So completely has the perspective of the far right come to dominate talk radio that even formerly neutral news networks such as ABC and CBS News have been infected by it. It is poisoning the airwaves to the point that casual radio listeners cannot help but come away from it convinced that "socialists" and "liberals" lurking behind every tree are plotting in myriad ways to destroy America. I can't help but applaud any development that might serve to discredit the liars and distortion artists who promote this national disgrace from behind their microphones.
The problem is that radio thrives on scandal. Nothing builds ratings faster than a good scandal, especially when it doesn't actually offend one's target audience. Limbaugh's audience consists of angry white men, mostly aging baby boomers. These people are unlikely to be offended by his remarks concerning Ms. Fluke, and by attracting the attention of the media in general, Limbaugh is getting a lot of free publicity that is only likely to make both his cumulative and average-quarter-hour numbers go up. I personally saw something like this happen at a Boston classical music station in the late 1990's.
From 1985 to 2009, I worked either full or part time at WCRB, in those days a commercial station catering to classical music lovers. It adopted an all-classical format as an AM station in 1951 in response to the rise of television and with the realization that as a 5,000-watt suburban station in a 50,000-watt world it was unlikely to succeed with a mainstream mass-appeal format. Over the years it moved from AM to FM and increased its power and coverage radius until by 1990 it had one of the best signals in town. What it lacked, as an independent locally-owned station, was the big marketing and promotions budget of a major group owner like CBS or Clear Channel. The station's average quarter-hour share languished between 2% and 3% of all Boston radio listening, and WCRB ranked typically between #15 and #20. That's not a good position from which to compete for ad agency dollars, especially with an audience primarily composed of people over 50; these are not the people most mainstream advertisers want to reach.
Then in 1995, WCRB hired a new program director, Mario Mazza. Mario came from WNCN in New York, where he had done some things to appeal to younger and more casual listeners that offended some more musically sophisticated listeners, such as playing single movements of longer works and presenting them in a "top 40" style. Mario's reputation preceded him to Boston and the music critics at the local newspapers had their knives sharpened for him. When a couple years later he unveiled what we called the "Baby A" format, all single movements in popular styles with a tight rotation and a presentation style reminiscent of "beautiful music" or "easy listening", they pounced. Suddenly we were the devil incarnate, evil money-grubbing New Yorkers out to rob Boston of a unique cultural institution; we were trashing the music, dragging Beethoven's good name in the gutter, "dumbing down" the entire radio dial. The firestorm of angry phone calls and letters was so intense that "Baby A" was gone in a week, replaced by "Baby B", still with some single movements and still with the "easy listening" look and feel, but with enough whole pieces of music to satisfy all but our most inveterate critics. And the ratings took off like a rocket. The station rarely had less than a 4% share from then until it was sold in 2006, and usually ranked in the top ten among all Boston stations. We were so successful that stations across the country called and asked for their own satellite-delivered version of our format, which they could custom tailor to their local audiences.
Now it's 2012, and Rush Limbaugh is under fire. Advertisers are dropping him in droves. Lots of people are angry at him. Conveniently, however, they happen to fall outside his target demographic, which is men aged 35+. As long as he retains his appeal to that group, he remains viable, and if his numbers go up, the same advertisers that are dropping him with great fanfare today will be tempted to sneak back onto his bandwagon tomorrow. And even if things get so hot for Clear Channel, the parent company of his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, that they feel compelled to fire him, he will very likely just move to another syndicator. A local Boston talker, Jay Severin, stepped over the line a year or so ago by boasting about sleeping with his interns, whereupon his employer, Greater Media, fired him. Yet he is still on the air today, having been hired almost immediately by rival Clear Channel.
Rush is going to be a tough nut to flush. The only way I believe it will happen is when his target audience tires of him, and for that we need to change the cultural temperature of the radio dial by significantly broadening the spectrum of opinions that get airplay. For every voice on the air that blames the poor, or illegals, or some or another supposedly lazy or disloyal minority, we need a voice to speak about income inequality, corporate domination of the media and the political process, and the need for all working people, whether blue or white collar, to come together and assert their rights against the super-rich and powerful who seek to divide, rule, and ultimately dispossess them. Only then, I believe, will Rush and his ilk be well and truly flushed.