Posted on 12/26/2013 8:27:51 AM PST by raccoonradio
Next week, when WWRL 1600 AM flips its format from progressive talk to Spanish-language music and talk, New York will have no left-leaning commercial talk station for the first time in decades — an ironic development just as an unabashedly liberal mayor and City Council are set to take office.
It’s not as if liberal voices will vanish — noncommercial stations like WBAI and WNYC are still alive and kicking — but they can’t replace the local flavor and crackling energy of commercial radio, where shows move more quickly to accommodate the ads.
The changeover at WWRL comes as a personal blow: I was the morning drivetime host at the station from June 2008 through October 2010. Sad to say, the steady elimination of progressive radio from the airwaves is part of a nationwide crisis facing commercial radio.
In Los Angeles, the last remaining all-liberal talk station, KTLK, will do an about-face and start airing only conservative talkers on Jan. 1. Ditto for KNEW in San Francisco. Last November, progressive stations in Portland, Ore., and Seattle switched to all-sports formats.
The biggest pressures squeezing liberal talk radio are commercial ones. Deregulation of the airwaves allowed conglomerates like Clear Channel to borrow billions from Wall Street and begin buying up stations by the hundreds. Saddled with debt, Clear Channel has ruthlessly standardized its 840 stations and squeezed each for maximum profit. That meant eliminating progressive talk from its stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland.
Angry progressives claim such moves could also have a political motivation: Clear Channel is owned in part by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once run by Mitt Romney . That’s possible, but it wouldn’t explain the problems besetting stations like WWRL, which is owned by Access 1, a family-owned media company.
A more likely culprit is the hard economics of persuading businesses to advertise on local radio. “National advertisers have pulled away from progressive stations, and not just in New York,” says Mark Riley, a New York radio veteran who just ended a great stint as WWRL’s morning man. “Stations aren’t worth what the people who bought them thought they were worth,” he says.
That has left a cutthroat competition for local advertising dollars, with low-cost options like Craigslist and Yelp and services like Groupon competing with radio, cable television, billboards and other so-called old media.
Another theory behind the collapse of commercial liberal talk radio is that it has gone mainstream. Some of the most popular personalities from the now-defunct liberal Air America radio network — Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz — now command much larger audiences on MSNBC every night, as does the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is syndicated on dozens of black talk radio stations. Air America’s biggest star, Al Franken, is now a U.S. senator.
Conservative radio hosts point to the struggles of their liberal rivals with great glee, but that is whistling past the graveyard. The reality is that conservative talkers are serving an aging, shrinking audience, while listeners who want a liberal take on the news can find it on hundreds of National Public Radio stations. The most reliable estimates of the most popular radio shows gives the top two slots to right-wingers Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — followed by “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “Marketplace,” three public radio staples with a total audience that exceeds Limbaugh and Hannity combined.
Millions of listeners who want left-wing talk can still find it. But that won’t replace stalwarts like WWRL, where I used to love spending three hours each day interviewing guests, arguing with callers and ranting about snarled traffic, late trains, warped politics and the state of the world. May the next crew at WWRL find fun and profit bringing the magic of radio to a Spanish-language audience. I, for one, will be listening.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.
Conservative talk radio succeed, and still succeeds because it is an outlet for voices that are not heard in the lame stream media. Why do you need a “liberal talk radio”, when you have ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBCPBSNPR?
Esecially NPR, it is the liberals main radio station, pretty much the same all over the country, so they can get their talking points straight while they are on the way to work if the missed the alphabet network TV shows in the morning.....
All the “liberal radio stars” are on television. That’s what killed the liberal radio star.
To quote Rush, “I _AM_ equal time”.
Nobody listened to them then, nobody watches them now.
If it wasn’t for tax funded stations like NPR subsidizing left wing talk station failure, there probably wouldn’t be many libs on the radio.
Even in blue New England commercial prog talk is rare. Not on in Boston, but in Bangor ME (horrors! Stephen King’s WZON),
western MA, and Brattleboro VT (WKVT, running a local show plus Steph. Miller, Thom Hartmann, Bill Press, Alan Colmes)
you have it...otherwise, nope.
NPR
Stephanie Miller has given me the willies ever since she spent the final hour of her short-lived TV show angrily trashing her bosses for canceling her. Thoroughly unprofessional.
Despite it slapping him in the face, this clown doesn’t notice that publicly funded NPR has driven the commercial market for liberal talkers off a cliff.
Yeah for us! Press three for English...
I was in Argosy Books last week (looking at prints) and NPR was droning on in the background providing the reassurances their progressive staff needs to feel their feelings are the correct ones.
“the steady elimination of progressive radio from the airwaves is part of a nationwide crisis “
Crisis?!?!?!
It is a nationwide BLESSING.
....,,,Liberals can find their bile on hundreds of Public Radio stations but conservatives are all dying off and conservative talk radio is an aging and dying media......
Mr. Error (I meant Errol), come on,!................these hundreds of Public Radio Stations you so merrily alude to are just a handful of votes in the senate away from summary execution!
If 2014 goes the way it very well could, Senate and house super majorities will cancel Obama’s veto and your darling NPR’s execution date will be guaranteed as this government is BROKE!
Your point on advertisers being a “hard sell” on buying time on a station that a is only listened to by perpetually unemployed people is a good one!
+1.
In radio, you can’t fake the numbers.
If you don’t get an audience, you will fail. And there are just not that many true believer liberals out there, so it is hard to build a large audience.
The same thing is happening in TV news, but in slow motion.
Modern liberalism is built on lies, but you can’t lie about the numbers. Math wins in the end, especially on the radio.
The only lib talk that can stay on the air is NPR and that’s cause it’s taxpayer supported.
Even then, according to Arbitron, NPR stations typically have among the lowest market shares in any market.
One time I called into an NPR talk program and when I mentioned the Arbitron data the host hung up on me.
Au contraire.
* "How to Live in Mom's Basement until You're 40"
* "How to survive an Occupy encampment without getting raped or OD'ing"
* "How to 'Stick It To The Man' in 3 Easy Steps"
* "Are You Eligible for an ObamaFone?"
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* "How to Sell Your EBT Cards for Fun and Profit"
* "Keg Stands: Not as Hard as it Looks"
* "With Free Contraceptives, Is 10 Times per Day Too Much?"
* "Freedom and Liberty: Way Overrated? Why the Evil White Patriarchal Founders Constructed Such an Evil System"
* "The Joys of Communism and Gulags"
They committed suicide..............
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