"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
A prejudice he seems to have overcome...
I doubt that. Conservatives would call up the "Liberal Rush" with questions based on logic not emotion that the "Liberal Rush" couldn't answer.
Imus and Stern are Liberals who made money and held audiences on radio. But, Liberals don’t want to admit that to be a successful Liberal on radio you have to be like a sniggling, nose-picking teenager.
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.
Even Rush knows you can't build a house on sand. Conservatism is the rock hard foundation upon which the success of this nation (and Rush) is built.
How odd it is that the most successful person in a business that’s 100% about hearing can’t “hear” himself.
[Article] 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.
That sounds like Slick working. Wonder if he charged them a consulting fee for that one?
I don't think his poodle Podesta is smart enough to have come up with that one on his own.
And the #1 reason Rush’s show is a success: He sells expertise.
Rush, there I said it. Now, where is my new phone? ;-)
I find that hard to believe, when he is dismissive of people's complaints that they are bored by his golfing stories, etc.
This (liberal) writer (and the liberal editor in NR) are STILL lying to themselves.... And, of course, to their readers and the world at large.
He ignores the ENTIRE remaining liberal bias and lies in the MSM: Deliberately not mentioning ABBCNNBCBS for example, but admitting the liberal bias in NPR (1/50 the audience of the 30 plus million every night who listen to the three network TV shows) and ignoring as well the liberal bias in nearly every print medium issued every week.
He repeats - as they have for YEARS the bromide that the (supposedly) conservative cooperate OWNERS of the radio channels control what the HOSTS say. And, since the liberal mantra is that the (supposedly conservative) owners are rich, they must be conservative business-domineated republicans. Also a lie.
Liberalism and socialism and big government can ONLY compete where there is no dissent, no opposing well-thought-out ideas and facts. It cannot compete where talk and ideas can be expressed: hence the McCain-Feingold act and the current efforts to bring back government control of radio.
A liberal host can only succeed when his/her ideas the only ones presented: because the illogic and lies that liberals spew can be easily proved false when a caller comes in with the facts. And a radio show with no callers dies.
Most Americans don’t want to hear that the greatest and most successful country in the history of civilization is evil, because most Americans know that is not true. Bashing America does NOT sell well.
Semper Fi’
Jarhead
“Talent on loan from God” bump
People forget that radio was on the ropes after the surge of Television in the Fifties. Stations were losing revenue at such a pace that many were in danger of closing—and there were hardly any local FM stations at all.
And programming? There was none other than top 50 music and sports. The few national talk shows were a joke and there were very few local talk shows.
After the ‘Fairness” doctrine was killed at the behest of the stations, the advent of opinionated talk radio changed the landscape—and the profit line—of broadcasting.
... and what they hear is that they're not alone in thinking the way they do -- that they're not crazy or weird for thinking things are getting out of hand with blatantly biased mainstream media.