Kowabunga

I find it both disturbing and ironic that the liberal/progressive-left seem to believe that they must have control of the political conversation, and when they don't, they insist that there is unfairness. So it is with talk radio. Think Progress (must be an oxymoron) has put forth a piece in response to a report published by The Center for American Progress and Free Press (another oxymoronic name) on why Conservative Talk Radio needs to be stopped.

The new report - entitled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio" - raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

No entity, whether it is commercial broadcasting companies, print media, or taxpayer supported Public Broadcasting stations serve "the listening needs off all Americans." The reason is that not everyone wants to listen to the same thing.

For instance, I prefer to listen to classical music on the radio, yet it is darned difficult, short of NPR, to find a station that plays classical music. And the problem with NPR is that I have to either put up with their left-wing bias, their frequent pledge drives (they get enough of my money through taxation) or, worse still, Garrison Keiler. Thus I end up changing stations.

I don't like most of the rock stations for some similar reasons: most of the "on air personalities," what used to be called disc jockeys, are crude, rude, and obnoxious. There are some exceptions, but not enough to make me want to stay tuned for more than a couple of tunes before switching stations. The same is true with country stations, but their DJs are actually not as obnoxious as those on many rock stations or Garrison Keiler.

I've listened to Air America on a number of occasions and found the discourse to be rude, crude, ignorant and one-sided. This is probably why it hasn't even made a dent into the realm of talk radio.

Conservative Talk Radio, with few exceptions, is intelligent, concise and, unlike Air America, kid friendly (no crude language). It is also a sharp counter-point to the leftist controlled, taxpayer supported, NPR and public broadcasting in general.

They produced some fancy statistics;

While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America's airwaves. Some key findings:

- In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.

- Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk - 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

- 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.

Gotta wonder, what is the source of their data, and did include the hundreds (or is it thousands) of ours of leftist broadcasting that takes place on NPR and the "public" broadcasting system.

The next part is the meat of their argument:

Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.

What they are claiming is that the FACT that the free market economics has worked in favor of conservative talk radio and the resulting failure of Air America, they would rather blame it on bad regulatory controls. In other words, since they can't win in a free market and get their ideas out, they want to take control of the airwaves in order to squash opposing views.

The bottom line is: since they can't compete in the free market based on their ideas, they need to come up with a new strategy to short-circuit free choice.

Tags:

NPR Talk Radio Free Press