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.
I make a product: It’s “50’sDad Brand Conservative Pork and Beans.” I use a family recipe that is a hundred years old, home grown beans, only 100% American-farmed USDA pork, the leanest cuts, and smoky flavor from hours spent in a real hickory smoker. People LOVE my product. It is popular, good for you, tastes fabulous, and sells so well we can’t keep it on the shelves. It so matches what Americans know in their hearts is good, that they swear by it and are not very interested in anything else.
Another company makes a product. It’s “Liberal Brand Healthy Tofu and Bean Curd.” They use vat-gown tofu, because they know what is good for you, even if you don’t. They use bean curd that has lain in the summer sun for days, absorbing nature’s bounty and the rich, chewy bonus protein of fly larvae. It contains no meat products whatsoever, because raising meat destroys the environment; Al Gore says so. And none of that corrupt “smoky” flavor is included, because a cubic yard of wood is certainly more important than any kind of pleasure you simpletons out in the Midwest might think that you deserve when there are people starving in this world, thanks to George Bush! We mix in a variety of all the healthy vitamins that you should be getting if you actually were smart enough to feed yourself without government help. And we include just a spoonful of sharp iron filings in every can, because we read somewhere that humans need iron, and even if it hurts a little perforating your digestive track, we know better than you do, after all.
Now, the second product tastes, well, lousy. Nobody wants to buy more than the first can they try. But since the Liberal company includes a handy consumer evaluation phone number on the can, they do get plenty of marketing data to fine tune their product. “This tastes like a dead dog left by the side of the road for a week,” a mother in Nevada writes. “I was interested at first, but your product gave me painful bowel cramps,” says a student in Florida. “Who in the world would buy this?” demands a father of five in Chicago. The Liberal Company carefully examines the hours and hours of valuable customer input and makes a decision. The obvious problem with the product isn’t with the product at all…the problem is that their customers are idiots who don’t know what is really good for them. (They are probably all from Flyover states and they just don’t understand what “good” tastes like!) So, an important decision is made: They carefully soak all the old labels off the cans, and put shiny new ones on, only this time, they are labeled: “PROGRESSIVE Brand Yummy Tofu and New Improved Bean Frappee”. (It always helps to use French wording, they know. Those guys really are so much more advanced than we are.) They roll out the New Improved product.
Crash and burn time. Now, not only do people hate their beans, but they dislike the company that lied to them. The cans only move off the sales floor when they are being picked up and thrown through the windows of the few stores willing to try and unload them. For the good of the children, something has to be done!
That week, in a response to the plight of a “small business” in his home state, Senator Ted Kennedy pushes through the “Fairness in Marketing Act of 2007.” Under this legislation, for every can of Conservative beans you buy, you will be forced to purchase a can of Liberal (sorry, “Progressive”) beans as well. The less popular product will actually be welded to the side of the popular one, so you can’t get out of the store without taking it with you. Since no one in his right mind would PAY for iron filings and digestive trouble, the second can of beans is free…but of course we will need to charge three times what the good can costs and give the extra money to the Progressive Company because of the unjust nature of the marketplace. In this way, the horribly unfair tastes of you hicks in the sticks will be addressed, and you will hopefully gradually be re-educated enough to stop buying thing you want, and begin chewing and swallowing everything that the currently unpopular and persecuted Progressive Company knows is good for you.
The Libs simply do not get it. It has nothing to do with “fairness” and everything to do with what people want. Nobody wants to pay to hear whiners malign the country for three hours a day. If the only way you can get your product down the gullet of America is with legislation, the problem is not with the buying public. No amount of additional exposure will make Liberalism popular. They know this…the goal is to force the stations to cut back their Conservative talkers to the point they can still make money by allowing a handful of Liberal talking heads on as well, so that nobody can listen to them.
If the product was beans, and you tried to force people to buy something that they couldn’t stomach, we would laugh the problem out of the courts. You can’t make people actually buy and eat something they find unpleasant and repellant! But cloak it in the fabric of a 1st Amendment issue, and people’s thinking gets fuzzy.
So Libs, please, go right back to pushing your “Progressive” wares, when everybody but you knows it is secret code for “Liberal”. As long as you are so ashamed that you can’t call yourselves by your True Name, I have hope. And please remember, no matter what you put on your label, America knows that you are still selling the same old beans.
I don't think Rush succeeds so much because of his marketarian purity, but because of his values, which agree with the values of the America that has been bull-steered by the Left for 90 years and more.
Consider: Michael Savage is moody, undisciplined, and peripatetic. I've heard him complain about being "depressed" and not wanting to talk about issues; I've heard him going on about Italian food, spaghetti ai vongole or something, wandering off topic until I wondered why people even tuned in. I've heard him irascible and abusive. And yet he still has a show. Mark Levin, whom I seldom listen to, is rude, sarcastic, and frankly abusive. I'd listen to more of Laura Ingraham if I could find her on, and I like Larry Elder at night, who has his mom on ("the chief justice of the supreme court"). None of these people is as successful or as tightly-wrapped as Rush (Laura one afternoon was lamenting her lack of a social life: "I have no life!"), and yet they have listenership.
I don't think it's the crisp marketing or commercialism of their shows that has brought Savage, Elder, Levin et al some success. It's the fact that they think and sound like Americans, as opposed to the pecksniffy, BBC-izing liberal jerks on NPR. Even BBC's own Katty Kay has been overheard to lament that BBC's people think they aren't taken seriously in America. That's because they're, well, pink.
JMHO.
Brilliant analysis. I just wish I’d come up with it.
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.
Much like disgruntled DMV employees, or public school teachers it doesn't matter how much you suck. You will always have a job.
Having said that, there is another factor at work here which even Rush and Sean have acknowledged. The media market is so saturated with liberal, left wing, progressive propaganda that there is a fertile market for Conservative thought.
Like good capitalists, they see the opportunity and provide the service to meet the market demand. That's not good for Communists.
A brilliant (and factual) analysis!