Why Rush Wins (Talk Radio Is A Business Stupid, Alert)

have a story in the current issue of National Review about the debate over re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine. Among the people I talked to for the piece was Rush Limbaugh, whose success is sometimes attributed, in part, to the abolition of the Doctrine in 1987. We talked about his years in radio before that time, when he, like other broadcasters, had to steer clear of controversial issues, lest he run afoul of the Doctrine.

“My first job was in 1967,” Limbaugh told me. “Every station I worked at from that point forward up until the Doctrine was repealed lived with the realization that there were to be no controversial remarks made, because they didn’t want to deal with nagging complaints from the community about equal time.”

That was then. Now, Democrats like Sens. Richard Durbin and John Kerry are trying to reinstate the Doctrine. After 20 years of conservative success on radio, they have apparently despaired of ever winning in the marketplace, so they hope to regulate their way to victory.

But the question that Durbin, Kerry, and other Democrats haven’t been able to answer is why Limbaugh rules the talk-radio airwaves. More specifically: Why has there never been a liberal Rush? That wasn’t the point of the NR story — instead, I wanted to give readers a sense of what broadcasting was like in the days of the Doctrine, and what it might be like if it were reinstated — but some things Limbaugh said during our interview offered an answer to the question.

There are plenty of theories to explain his success, along with that of other conservatives who have followed in his footsteps. Some on the right argue that conservative ideas are simply superior, so they attract a larger audience. Others explain that the liberal audience has more listening choices — NPR, urban radio — so they never rallied ‘round a liberal Rush. And now, the Center for American Progress — the liberal think tank run by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta — has come up with a new explanation: corporate ownership. Big companies like Clear Channel, the Center says, own too many stations, on which they broadcast too much conservative talk. If station ownership were more diverse, the theory goes, there would be more liberals on the air, so the Center wants the government to force Clear Channel and others to downsize themselves to give liberal talkers a chance.

But maybe it’s not that complicated. Maybe there is another, simpler, explanation of why there is no liberal Rush. Maybe the answer is this: Talk radio is radio, and Limbaugh knows more about radio than all his would-be replacements on the Left. He’s just better at it than they are.

What motivates him came through in our discussion of his years on the air before the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. When he told of being ordered by station management not to discuss controversial topics — pretty much standard procedure at the time — it was clear how frustrating he found the situation. But his frustration seemed to come not so much from being forbidden to discuss politics on the air as from being forbidden from discussing anything interesting on the air.

“The real practical effect of the Fairness Doctrine was to shut down all controversial programming, because management would not deal with complaints,” Limbaugh told me. “So when you did listen to talk shows on the radio, they were dull and boring and horrible.”

Of course, Limbaugh did occasionally have his troubles with the Doctrine and sometimes found himself forced to share the air with community leaders who objected to something he had said. That made him unhappy, but not because he was opposed to differing viewpoints. It was because he was opposed to bad radio. “The problem with that is that radio is a business,” he explained. “You bring in people who are not broadcast professionals and give them unchallenged time…You try to make it as stimulating as possible, but…” Well, it wasn’t very stimulating.

You could almost hear Limbaugh’s teeth grinding as he discussed putting on a program that was “dull and boring and horrible.” He just can’t do it. And that is why Rush is Rush. He is deeply, deeply offended by the prospect of boring his listeners. And he has worked for years to develop his rather remarkable talent of keeping them interested for three hours a day, five days a week — all by himself.

The bottom line isn’t really about politics. It’s about radio. If Limbaugh were a liberal, we’d probably be talking about why liberals dominate talk radio. So you can talk about ownership and diversity all you want. But the bottom line is that Limbaugh simply knows radio, and what works on radio, better than anyone else in the world. That’s why he wins.

But the question that Durbin, Kerry, and other Democrats haven’t been able to answer is why Limbaugh rules the talk-radio airwaves. More specifically: Why has there never been a liberal Rush?

It is a truism of Conservatism that government subsidies stifle competition, reward the incompetent, and lower quality by removing the disincentive of failure.

I would contend that there has never been a liberal Rush because subsidies available to liberal talk radio, governmental and otherwise, have made it possible for liberals to be on the radio without treating it like a business. NPR will remain on the air, no matter how boring it gets, because the taxpayer is footing the bill. AirAmerica can operate for years without being concerned about making a profit on advertising, because George Soros, Peter Lewis, and others are picking up the tab. So they do not have the daily pressure of maintaining listenership in order to sell advertising slots for the top dollar.

Rush, on the other hand, eats what he kills, as they say. If he gets another Million people to tune in, he makes another Million dollars. So he has gotten very adept at making sure people tune in and stay tuned in. And if Rush were not so good at it, one of the dozens of other conservative talk radio hosts toiling the same field would rise up to replace him, and would make the Million dollars.

But the same motivation is not present on the liberal side of the dial. Tune in your local NPR affiliate and listen for a few hours, if you can stand it. Not only are the politics wrong-headed, but the entire program, any program, is a crashing bore. If you do not pay attention or tune out, that is fine with them, because they don't need you. They can broadcast quite fine and keep all their nice cushy jobs whether you listen or not. Similarly with AirAmerica, which is privately subsidized. The fact that the quality of programming is so low does not matter as long as the host is ideologically pure. So ideology is rewarded and programming quality suffers. As always, people produce what they are paid to produce, and neglect that which does not effect their bottom line.

But the real pernicious effect of subsidies is the way they stifle competition. Suppose, for the sake of argument, some young hot-shot liberal talk radio phenom was to come upon the scene, a liberal Rush Limbaugh for the new millenium. He would have to share the liberal side of the radio listening audience with all the hacks on NPR and AirAmerica, so he would start out with a disadvantage, right out of the box. Furthermore, he would have to operate profitably, which would mean more entertainment, less ideological purity, and a whole lot more "Obscene Profit Center Interruptions". How can he compete in this environment? On the basis of airtime alone, when AirAmerica can ignore profit and run five commercials an hour and NPR runs no commercials at all, how can our liberal firebrand build an audience when he has to devote 25 minutes an hour to paying the bills? People who are driven to listen to liberal ideology will gravitate to the stations without all the annoying commercials, so his core audience is already served, and he does not have a base of listeners to build on.

The solution for liberal talk radio, of course, is to eliminate the subsidies so a native, organic liberal talk radio market can evolve over time. But to make that leap of faith requires a belief in the power of the free market to serve markets and produce the optimal result. Conservatives accept the magic of the marketplace as an given, but liberals suffer because they fundamentally do not trust the marketplace and the profit motive. They are compelled by their ideology to rely on the big-government solution of subsidies and regulation, and suffer the resulting inefficiency and stifling of creativity.

So, in a very real way, the reletive success of conservative talk radio and failure of liberal talk radio reflects the real-world effectiveness of their underlying ideology. Conservative talk radio is bound by the iron law of the marketplace, which requires them to provide the service the customer demands or perish. Those who serve the customer profit, even obscenely so. But those who fail to do so fail early and often. For every Rush Limbaugh, standing astride the AM spectrum like a modern-day Colosus, there are thousands of conservative talkers who did not have the talent and savvy of Rush who have fallen, forgotten, by the wayside.

Liberal talk radio, on the other hand, preserves these mediocrities, and prevents them from failing. They are allowed to florish in a protected environment. Liberal ideology demands an equality of results, regardless of talent, drive or hard work. So the liberal talk radio spectrum is choked with marginal talents who are not removed from the stage by the unrelenting hook of low ratings and failing ad revenues. They are like weeds in a garden, that choke out any desirable growth. But the gardener is not permitted a hoe to remove them. In fact the gardener is prevented by ideology from even admitting the weeds are a problem.

So, if you ever wanted a good, solid, real world example of why free market capitalism is the best system ever devised by man to deliver desired goods and services efficiently to the masses, look no further than your talk radio dial. The free market wins, every time. Even when faced with massive subsidies, the free market still wins, because the subsidized operator soon falls victim to his own inefficiency and perverse incentives.

Rush may not have started out on the radio in order to provide the ultimate proof of the ideology he proclaims on the radio on a daily basis, but his success, and the success of dozens like him, does that very thing more eloquently than a thousand Rush Limbaughs could in a thousand years.

You said: And I think sometimes that talk hosts, like congress critters, should have term limits. After so long a time, it becomes really more about their celebrity status, their golf, etc., than about the concerns of the people who “sent them there” or who “keep them there.”
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Ah, but there is an election every day, every hour, in talk radio. Those who find Rush unworthy of their time may simply change the station or turn off the radio. I have done so from time to time when the topic didn’t interest me. I agree that some of Rush’s schtick is less funny than it was when first introduced, and I lament that he had fewer “updates” than in years gone by, but there is no real dispute that Rush remains King of the Hill. Laura Ingraham is good, and Sean Hannity is loud, but they don’t really touch Rush. I like Levin, but he is a little too abrasive for many.

But the article dealt with why there is no liberal version of Rush, and the answer to that is simple. The liberal point of view cannot be intelligently discussed over a three hour time slot. There is just too little to it. Just as liberal callers to Rush and other conservative talk shows usually last less than a minute before insults and name calling take over, liberal talk shows cannot maintain substantive discussion for any meaningful length of time. They inevitably rely upon bashing the opposition rather than promoting their own agenda, which is government baby sitters for all but the powerful, and the butt of a gun for those who think they don’t need government help. Check out the Young Tur(d)ks on Air America sometime, or Randi Rhodes, if you can stomach her. Listen for the liberal point of view to be explained, and you will be listening a long time.

I share your contempt for liberals and certainly for their more abrasive spokesmen, which is most of them...all of AA. But I don't really agree that their problem is that their argument is so thin that it can't sustain itself for more than a minute or so. NPR is filled with long-form chat that spins out their opinions ad nauseum. Now I do agree that they attract a high percentage of nutjob callers when they open the phones. Actually, I think leftie talks fails in the free market mostly because they already have the entrenched, big budget, semi-public, NPR establishment which does not even have the disadvantage of having to put its listeners through lengthy commercials to pay the bills.

On the other conservative talkers, I completely agree with your comments. Completely.

But Rush has the big microphone -- which he earned -- and I frankly do not believe he did a good job on immigration. Although he laid out the threat very admirably and in some detail on a few days, on other days he expressed his annoyance with the constancy and fever-pitch of the debate. He wanted to talk about his damn golf.

We almost lost the immigration debate. It mattered a lot that someone with an audience of the size of Rush's would come on the air on some of the critical days and DEFLATE the ferver of people upset at shamnesty, explaining that he no longer gets too upset by these things.

He no longer gets too upset by them, because he is not the least angry anymore, as all conservatives need to be. What has he got to be angry about? He can build his own wall, have his drivers carry him about in Hummers. He doesn't shop at Walmart. Nobody is going to put a car up on blocks in the yard next to him. He cares about golf and fancy restaurants and a celebrity lifestyle. Good on him...he earned it and he has a right to enjoy it. But he is not longer doing much of a service for the conservative movement, IMO. I'd like to let him play golf EVERYday and give over that golden EIB microphone to someone with some fire in the belly.

In my (NC) area, Rush is the ONLY conservative national talkshow host who is on a stations that covers the market. When he is slacking, it hurts the cause.

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