Republican talk radio just did to Christine Blasey Ford what it did to Anita Hill, with the same result. Limbaugh led the attack and intimidation this time the same way he did then.
As a 20-1 monopoly, Republican talk radio has influenced the free speech spectrum while hiding outside of it. It yells whatever its directors want while escaping direct competition from those who would challenge and correct it.
‘Artificial intelligence’ changes everything. AI recently made it exponentially easier, faster, and cheaper to transcribe/digitize spoken word.
It is now inevitable that talk radio will become a subject for monitoring and study by media and political organizations, as well as university political science and communications departments. It will be monitored for patterns and repetition on local, regional, and national levels. Its part in creating and pumping ‘fake news’ into the mainstream and establishing alternate realities can be studied. Coordination with Russian trolling may be expose. It will finally be forced into the free speech spectrum and exposed as a major factor in the decline of democracy and the corruption of the Republican Party. Like cigarettes were to cancer.
That could take a while if left alone but AI transcription also guarantees inevitable democratization of political talk radio by politicizing its advertising. The 30 year Limbaugh era is over as soon as the advertising industry gets the message that the future of radio advertising is at stake. No new Fairness Doctrine needed.
With a little help that could happen quickly. Greatly improved and cheaper transcription makes it very easy for individuals and organizations to list advertisers and their contact information and associate them with content. Very little listening required. The advertising industry needs to know.
The small scale StopRush and FlushRush activism in defense of Sandra Fluke after Limbaugh attacked her in 2012 showed how easy it was to get advertisers to go elsewhere. If the radio advertising industry doesn’t get in front of it, AI transcription could be used to amp up that event x 100. Anything could trigger it, like the recent attacks on Kavanaugh accusers. Ad agencies could lose a lot of customers very quickly.
There are 1000s of advertisers that will not want their customers to know they just sponsored 3 weeks of talk radio blowhards calling Dr Ford a ‘Democrat’ operative and paid actor/liar, who used a ‘baby’ voice to gain sympathy, like Limbaugh claimed. Many company employees, management, and owners would not like their companies to be associated with that.
1000s of advertisers will pay for the next 4 weeks of lies, racism, global warming denial, excuses for trump and separating immigrant families, and “deep state” anti-Mueller attacks. Those advertisers are funding daily attacks on Democratic candidates and selling Republican candidates and their agenda. Many of them don’t know what they’re sponsoring.
Anyone who has contacted Republican radio advertisers knows their support for it is soft. Many of them are not aware they were on those shows, had been told by their ad agency they wouldn’t be on those shows, didn’t know how bad the lies and hate were, it was part of a broader package deal they had no control over, they thought the talkers were just political entertainers, they didn’t think anyone felt so strongly about it, and so on. Very few will admit they like it.
Even without a major boycott action that threat to the radio advertising industry can’t be ignored. It needs to be notified. Can anyone write a press release?
Democrats and other Ford supporters can go on offense and speed up the process in time to impact the midterms. Those radio stations will do a lot of invisible dirty work, political correctness policing and intimidation, and media manipulation for Trump and the GOP. All of it basically free, paid for by those advertisers, and largely invisible to those it is used against. Republican politicians are very aware of that. Their leadership likes watching Democrats and the media chase each other in circles while they swing away with their invisible political 2x4. At $1000/hr 1200 stations x 15hrs/day is worth $18M/day, $90M/week, and about $5B/year.
Knowing they’re going to lose their talk radio advantage by 2020 will inhibit those who might want to go all the way supporting Trump and encourage those who might want to cross him. And there may be many Republican politicians who would enjoy not being pushed around by the talk radio gods, who increasingly might as well be serving foreign interests. And it sounds like more and more real conservatives might like the idea.
The advertising industry just needs to be informed.
FYI republiconradio.org