REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Radio Daze
Liberal talk-show hosts? Bring 'em on!
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110004561
Friday, January 16, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Rush wasn't built in a day. That's Michael Harrison's take on this week's announcement by Progress Radio that it had signed comedian/author Al Franken for a daily show intended to provide a liberal challenge to the medium's 600-station gorilla, Rush Limbaugh. The founder and editor of Talkers magazine, the industry's lead trade journal, says that if Progress Radio fails it will be because of the impossibly high expectations it has set for itself.
"The physics of the market tells us it takes years to build up radio programs, much less a network," says Mr. Harrison. And it's not an accident that America's two top talk-show hosts--Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity--are longtime radio guys. "It's a maddening process if you don't have that in your blood."
In most quarters the Franken news is being billed as one of the great matchups--Ali vs. Frazier, Fischer vs. Spassky or even (dare we say it) Bush vs. Gore. And plainly Progress Media CEO Mark Walsh, a former AOL exec who served as a technical adviser to the Democratic National Committee, is banking that he can pull off in radio a liberal version of what FoxNews did in TV.
But Mr. Harrison inclines to the view that the medium really is the message--and in the case of radio, he says, that's not well-understood. It took Mr. Limbaugh many years to get from his station in Sacramento to the dominance he enjoys today, and his program was only one of two that its company was marketing. In sharp contrast, Progress Media is proposing a 24/7 network, and there's no guarantee Mr. Franken will actually get stations to put him up against Mr. Limbaugh in all these markets. And the network's other big announcement this week--a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. show called "Champions of Justice," about the corporate world--looks less like an answer to Rush or Sean than fodder for some future "Saturday Night Live" sketch.
According to Mr. Harrison, politics is a bad prism for measuring the prospects of radio success. Many of those who listen to radio conservatives, he says, listen because they hate the host. He notes that while Michael Savage would never be elected mayor of San Francisco, not least because of his views on homosexuality, it didn't stop him from getting the top rating there.
Don't get us wrong. For years the liberal response to talk radio has ranged from blaming it for the Oklahoma City bombings to dismissing its listeners as uneducated boobs. We think that there is great merit in having Robert Kennedy Jr. go through the work of attracting an audience and some advertising. And we suspect that Mr. Franken is likely to find the daily grind of direct competition--a three-hour radio show--a tad more strenuous than writing "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot."
In short, Messrs. Walsh and Franken have set a high bar for themselves. We wish them well in the rough-and-tumble of the market. And if they do beat the odds, maybe we could finally get Congress to stop using taxpayer dollars to subsidize NPR. |
