Even in a far-left city such as San Francisco no one listens to progressive talk radio. Green 960 will be replaced by a conservative talker KNEW, and KNEW’s old spot on the dial 910 AM will be relaunched as KKSF AM, another conservative talker. Both stations are owned by Clear Channel, which was obviously tired of bleeding money on the previous failed enterprise.

Predictably, progressives immediately developed the vapors. Comments via JWF:

“Obama should have fixed this mess by nationalizing radio. Then the good stations like KGO could re-hire all the people they let go. Green 960 could stay on the air.”

“Dec 1st and near 70f here in the eastbay…and conservative radio will never even accept global warming..so Neanderthal talk will thrive.”

“Conservatives have time to listen to these cranks because they are sitting around in dead-end jobs, if they work at all, blaming their failures on liberals instead of their own stupidity. Liberals are too busy. ”

“Why don’t we liberals listen to talk radio? Because we don’t need the constant reinforcement that perpetually insecure, professionally paranoid conservatives do to valid our political ideas. Conservatives desperately need their “bubble.” But I recall seeing an article forecasting the end of conservative talk blather in the next 5-10 years, as its 55-dead demographic is both dying off and unattractive to sponsors. “

The first reaction is to blame the FCC over a private entity’s legal decision; secondly, to call for Obama to “nationalize” radio a la Mother Russia; and third, to claim that progressives are “too busy.” Really? Then why all the free time to “occupy” Wall Street?

Gren 960 makes its money from its advertisers, who are sold on ratings. For the picture book crowd: the number of listeners makes up your ratings. Clear Channel exists to make money, not to do progressives’ bidding. If operating Green 960 made money for Clear Channel, the company would keep it on the dial. All progressives had to do was listen and support the advertisers.

(more…)

You might think because of the First Amendment that the press will always be free. Think again.

There are those at work today who would like the government to nationalize the news media much like they did the banks and auto industry. They base their ideas on the oft referred to “crisis in journalism” happening with the demise of many great newspapers, the closing of many national magazines, and the decrease of advertising revenue to support the same.

A few politicians and many socialistic leaning activists in places of power in Washington DC are suggesting the government subsidize journalism with tax credits and cash grants because the “capitalist media” has failed. They want to enslave journalists to the state so they can maintain a free press. That’s kind of like cutting down the trees to save the forest; doesn’t make any sense.

Take a look at what the government has done with the banks and the auto industry after giving them some bailout money. They now tell the banks who to make loans to and how to structure the wages of their CEOs. After handing a few billion dollars to the auto industry, a couple of faceless government appointed bureaucrats arbitrarily shut down certain automobile dealerships – many of which were well managed and profitable. Now they are dictating union wages and what kind of cars the auto companies are to build. It’s a simple principle: The government controls whatever it subsidizes.

If you don’t like what The New York Times prints or what you hear on the nightly news or what is broadcast on talk radio – imagine how much you’ll enjoy the Big Government News Service giving you all the news THEY decide that’s fit to print.

(more…)

The fact that Roger Ailes is a powerful force in media comes as no surprise to anyone, but what might shock you is just how powerful he is. Not only does he head up the Fox News Channel, he also programs a second news network and directs the content of several non-profit organizations. Well, not exactly, or at least directly. See, without the programming on Fox News at least half of MSNBC’s primetime lineup wouldn’t have any content, and basement bloggers at Media Matters might spend less time transcribing the thoughts of others and venture outside every once in a while. But Fox News does exist, so those “fellows” at Media Matters will still have to get their vitamin D through supplements and MSNBC will have content.

Do you watch MSNBC? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is no. You may have come across it while flipping around, and if you flipped fast enough you may have thought your television provider put Fox News on two channels. Considering the ratings, that would almost make sense. Fox routinely more than doubles the ratings of MSNBC, and there’s good reason for that.

MSNBC spends the majority of its time defending Democrats, but when not justifying left-wing actions, their hosts (I don’t call them anchors because that implies a news component to their actions) are running clips of Fox News shows. Why would any network devote such a significant portion of their precious air time to showing and commenting on the content of their main ratings competitor? That’s a good question and one that, at least from journalistic and business perspectives, makes no sense. But once you realize MSNBC has no interest in either of those perspectives, nor do they seem to care about broadening their audience, you’re left with one plausible alternative – it’s the agenda, stupid.

But MSNBC didn’t just come up with this Fox obsessed programming out of thin air, there’s been a movement on the American Left to silence Fox News and anyone who may watch it for years now.

The “non-partisan think tank” known as Media Matters for America was founded in 2004 for the purpose of “correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” Yes, you read that correctly, the media, in their delusional mind, has a conservative bent and they’ve taken it upon themselves to “correct” it. It’s a bit like forming the Society to Ensure the Sun Rises in the East – pretend a problem exists, set about to solve it and claim victory when what was going to happen anyway happens.

Founded by David Brock, a former “journalist” who was once a conservative, but somehow, one day, switch every single one of his views 180 degrees to become a devoted leftists, Media Matters, to boil it down to what it really is, employs people to stalk blogs and watch TV or listen to radio they hate all day, transcribe it, take quotes out of context, spin them and send them out to nearly every media outlet in the country. You’d think something so blatantly boring, not to mention pathetic, would be laughed at for the joke it is, and for the most part it is, but when MSNBC was looking for a niche for itself to try and attract an audience, the Media Matters parasite found its host.

(more…)

I like when non-broadcast people try to understand the broadcasting industry and present grandiose assumptions as fact. I like it even better when it’s done within the Tupperware-fresh confines of the progressive echo chamber as a way to smear conservatives.

Lefty Tablet magazine ran an article alleging that one of the biggest radio syndicates out there, Premiere Radio, also offers a fake call service to clients, wherein professional voice actors are paid to call into talk shows.

“Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.”

[...]

Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world’s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of “creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks.”

This is where progressives’ inability to use logic and reason together in order to come to a rational deduction eludes them. Instead of thinking how many talkers may use a service like that to pull off pranks and skits, which most people, unless you have the mental aptitude of a moose, instantly recognize as a facetious endeavor, Tablet leaps across the Grand Canyon of logical gaps and runs with the opposite narrative:

It is time to question this notion as well. The next caller you hear, the next personal story that makes you sniffle or shout with rage, may be the doing of someone at some faceless casting agency, hiring actors and writing scripts designed to titillate. The point is, without something like the hoshen, an object capable of channeling the celestial spirit and telling truth from lie, we’ll never know.

This sentence was just dropped in as fact:

But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.

Actually, no. A great show depends upon the strength of its driver, the host’s personality, its timely content, and a great producer. Callers are fun, can enliven a show, and they drive certain formats, but I disagree that calls alone serve as a marker of a talk radio show’s popularity. There is a difference between a call-in show and a call-driven show.

As a talk radio host, I’ve had my share of fake callers.

(more…)

I’ve been critical of Glenn Beck in the past. Several commenters at my personal blog who are fans of his can attest to that. But what I have never advocated is trying to silence him. so, it’s interesting that in a New York Times article containing this quote, the item reads like just another hit in a currently on going effort to get him off the air at Fox.

He still has numbers that just about any cable news host would envy and, with about two million viewers a night, outdraws all his competition combined.

It seems his numbers have dropped a bit. Okay. But in general, political energy is certainly down since last year’s elections, including the run-up, and perhaps some of the the initial buzz from Beck’s joining Fox has faded. But  he’s still winning his time slot.

The intelligentsia adds all that together and gets, he’s headed for the door! Really? Competitor CNN got its digs in this weekend, with the help of some establishment Republicans. Keep in mind, this is all coming from the same media outlets that front-paged, or featured Beck consistently right after he joined Fox.

Frankly, they may have been trying to take him out right from the start, though what they probably ended up doing was add to his early larger numbers. Imagine that.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources, conservatives Jennifer Rubin and David Frum discussed the declining television ratings of Glenn Beck and the recent conservative attacks on him. Rubin said Beck was creating a bad image for the Republican party, whereas Frum, a longtime Beck critic, suggested audiences are just tired of hearing ludicrous conspiracy theories.

And then there’s this item via the Blaze, taking on another attack from the Columbia Journalism Review.  And who might be helping to prop up that outfit? Hmmm.

(more…)

I’m not sure how to take this piece from Roll Call about the power of talk radio.

Welcome to Congress in the echo-chamber age, where outside influencers have an increasing sway on how Members shape their agenda.

At a time when Rush Limbaugh reaches as many people as vote in Florida and California combined, and when Jon Stewart can draw several hundred thousand people to the nation’s capital, these outsized personalities based far outside the Beltway have become as much a part of Washington’s political ecosystem as the lawmakers themselves.

This phenomenon was most prominent during the long health care debate but has been seen again vividly in the weeks following the Tucson, Ariz., shootings, during the Republican transfer of power and as President Barack Obama prepares his budget.

[...]

If Limbaugh or Beck pushes an issue, his audience picks up the phone and taps out e-mails, asking lawmakers to take action. “These Members understand that their constituents are listening to this, and the consequence will elicit action that will place pressure on them,” the strategist said.

We really often forget of the phrase “deriving their powers from the consent of the governed,” don’t we? The same is applicable to talk radio.

I have a couple of minor issues with this piece.

The focus is misplaced on the favor of the hosts who are nothing more than methods through which news is delivered to conservatives. These hosts rely so much upon blogosphere sources and I think eliminating that crucial step in how we process and deliver information today follows the same path as the MSM in ignoring new media. Because of new media, many traditional sources of information no longer hold the monopoly over information distribution. Granted, some can instantly hit a larger audience, but considering the viability of viral potential with large stories such as ACORN or Van Jones – which blew up online way before making it to the microphones – the story will win out at some point.

(more…)

I’m committing the unforgivable sin with my media friends here. I’m saying government should not be in the media business.

I have worked for 30 years in the activist old media and I’ve always found it odd that we had to compete with government doing public radio and TV in our market. It’s the same in virtually every market across the country. Now, granted, NPR and its affiliates don’t really compete because their ratings are so low (which is also a point that needs to be made), but it just made no sense to me that government would take a single listener away from those trying to build an audience through giving them what they want (BTW, local news feels it gives people what they need instead of what they want, which is part of another problem.)

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets $400 million annually, of which $4 million goes to NPR. Not a lot of cash, considering the size of the budget, but their tax exempt status is extremely valuable, plus, we’re talking about the principle here. Let’s begin the much bigger discussion on what government should and should not be funding, and perhaps this is a great place to start.

I’ve been on NPR shows before, I’ve been offered shows on NPR. I’ve always found the format stiff and restrictive. Oh, they like to say they are free-form and offering shows that could not make commercial media, but there is a reason they don’t make commercial media: nobody listens. With the advent of more media outlets through the internet, NPR has outlived its purpose. If you want to do a radio show about 15^th century Renaissance Italian art and how it relates to the Medici architecture that you think may be seen in your local barrio, then go to blogspotradio.com and do it. Knock yourself out and build an audience with your money, not mine. Get a web site, promote it and put it up there as well. I’d like to do a show on Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and how it changed modern sports journalism by being the first book to look critically at athletes. I wouldn’t expect the public to be forced to pay for it, but I guarantee you I could get more listeners than most of the shows on NPR. (more…)

Over the past couple of months, a lot of readers of my website, AtlasShrugs, have been asking me why I go on these consistently belligerent TV shows to discuss Islam, knowing that:

• It is going to be a hostile environment;
• I will be debating liars, deceivers and Islamic supremacists;
• I will be defamed, smeared and slandered;
• The playing field will be grossly unfair;
• I will be interrupted, cut off, and rebuked;
• I will be given much less time than my opponent.

I will tell you why. It is an opportunity, however compromised. Voices like mine, Robert Spencer’s, Wafa Sultan’s and Ibn Warraq’s are never heard in the mainstream media. The truth is hidden from the masses, and the media’s criminal negligence is cloaked in good intentions. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is guerrilla warfare in the information battlespace, in the war of ideas. These media opportunities were hardly perfect, but they were something. Why make perfect the enemy of the good? They were better than the traditional blackout on our freedom- defense initiatives. It was a shot, and I was taking it and running with it, no matter how disgusting it all was.

From the media’s perspective, the Ground Zero mosque was an historical phenomenon. For the first time, a major news story became the most important national and international news story without the media. Think about that. Unlike the fringe pastor in Florida, who tweeted a Qur’an threat and the media descended like locusts to a Florida backwater to create a news story, a narrative, the Ground Zero mosque was not shaped by the media, not covered by the media — not at first anyway. (more…)

From the Los Angeles Times:

Larry Elder, the self-proclaimed “Sage from South Central,” has heard you missed him. Now he’s back.

Elder, the African American talk-show host who frequently provoked black listeners with his conservative views during his 15-year stint on KABC-AM (790), is returning Monday to the station he abruptly left almost two years ago. He will take over the 9 a.m. to noon weekday slot vacated Friday by the more lighthearted “Frosty, Heidi and Frank” show.

“I’m tanned, rested and ready,” Elder quipped last week in a phone interview, echoing the oft-told one-liner about former President Richard Nixon on his political availability after his impeachment. Elder added in a more serious tone, “[KABC] approached me, and I was ready to get back in the game. I think I have been missed, and I believe I will be welcomed and embraced.”

His return to KABC, where he formerly occupied the afternoon drive-time slot, will bring a more unified conservative tone to the station, which is also home to commentators Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, said program director Jack Silver, who took charge of programming two months ago. (more…)

The patriotic immigration reform movement lost one of its most creative warriors last week.

Terry Anderson, the self-described “prisoner of South Central,” an African-American Los Angeles talk show host, succumbed to pancreatic cancer and died on July 7.

Anderson was the loud voice of the Sunday evening The Terry Anderson Show. The show, built around the single issue of immigration, was known for “articulating the popular rage.” It aired on KRLA radio and the internet.

And rage he did. Articulately. Against La Raza, John McCain, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Janet Napolitano, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Lindsey Graham, Antonio Villaraigosa, and the Obama Administration. In short, any sanctimonious phony who had allowed the country he loved – especially his corner of southern California – to be invaded by illegals.

For an auto mechanic, whose idea of a fashion statement was donning overalls, he was a natural communicator with a commanding presence. (more…)

Ed Schultz from MSNBC’s The Ed Show has a bright idea: Congress should use the Fairness Doctrine to regulate talk radio.

In a laughable attempt to control ratings through government manipulation of the radio airwaves, Schultz says that conservatives are “low- information voters,” and therefore, the government has a responsibility to break up the free market supply and demand system used by radio station owners. Mr. Ed claims that because the five largest commercial talk radio station owners run a majority of conservative shows on their stations, the government should step in to balance the numbers out – a kind of liberal affirmative action program for talk radio.

But this was no April fool’s joke – it was March 31.  Schultz was serious. (more…)

Last week, Air America announced its official closure and intention to file Chapter 7.  For those who had been following news surrounding the weeping willow of talk radio, this was no surprise.  While making a thin-kid splash with pseudo-celebrities back in 2004, the liberal network had a rocky history, replete with scandal, two bankruptcies and acquisitions.

Last week, Big Journalism’s James Hudnall reminded readers that Air America’s problems are not new.  According to Hudnall, “After a scandal involving misappropriated funds from black school children it promptly filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy two years later. Franken, Rhodes and Garofalo abandoned ship.”  (Come to think of it, perhaps that last part wasn’t so bad after all).

While Air America’s demise is surely a sad day for the precious few  who enjoyed leftist radio programming, there’s no need for liberal lamentations.  The left still dominates Hollywood, the university system and mainstream media, where adherents can find ongoing solace and a sympathetic informational stream – a triangular dominance of sorts.

What is most interesting about Air America’s silence is the clamor coming from angry liberals, particularly those at the painstakingly partisan Media Matters for America.  As can be expected, Media Matters’ Jamison Foser issued a statement that attacks conservative critics entitled, “The Right might want to hold off on gloating over Air America’s demise.” (more…)

Starting Feb. 1, Michael Savage, host of The Savage Nation, returns to the air waves in the Bay Area on XTRA Sports 860 AM in San Francisco from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

fax000977187 –

Air America announced today, with little fanfare, that it is ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy, citing “tough economic times” as the reason. Quite honestly, I’m shocked that they didn’t blame Bush. Or global warming.

It’s not the economy, stupid.

Talk radio continues to thrive and do exceptionally well – in the conservative market. There is a reason for this, and it has nothing to do with unfairness but everything to do with the free market.

Mainstream media operates as little more than a mouthpiece for the current administration. Every nightly news anchor from Katie Couric to Brian Williams has an acknowledged bias — different from people like Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck who have admitted biases, whose programming operates not as news, but as op/ed.  Newspapers more often than not also have a slant — this according to a Pew Research Center poll:

Seventy-four percent said news organizations tend to favor one side in dealing with political and social issues. Eighteen percent said they deal fairly with all sides.

The accompanying headline for this poll? “Public Trust in US Media Eroding.” (more…)

Of the many, many qualities I have come to admire in my friend, Andrew Breitbart, none of them appeals to me more than the white-hot rage one can generate in him by bringing up the subject of press malfeasance.

Andrew understands, as do I and this site’s editor, Michael Walsh, that press bias and incompetence and outright fraud is more of a problem than global warming or the healthcare “crisis,” or the rank corruption in congress, or even the criminal activity on the part of ACORN.  Just ask Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and’30s, and also an apologist for the crimes of Joseph Stalin:

click image to play

The press is supposed to be the immune system of the body politic.  The press is supposed to be anywhere and everywhere, seeking out corruption the way a white blood cell targets pathogens. When the press no longer serves this function of protecting the political body against abuses of power – because it is too ideologically blinded to be able to either see or act upon these threats —  then our Republic has a virulent and highly lethal (historically, anyway) form of AIDS. (more…)