With O’Reilly Joining Peers on Radio, Liberals Are Being Left Out of the Mix

Rush and G. Gordon. Ollie and McLaughlin. Sean Hannity and Alan Keyes. Armstrong Williams and Pat Robertson. Michael Medved, Michael Reagan, Michael Savage, Michael Graham, Laura Ingraham.

Sensing a pattern here? The biggest names in political-talk radio--and increasingly, political-talk TV--tend to run the ideological gamut from conservative to ... very conservative. Liberals and moderates, it seems, can’t or don’t attract much of a crowd.

As Bill Clinton ponders whether to launch his own talk show on NBC, broadcasters who’ve made their careers lambasting him continue to gobble up more of the airwaves. Last week, for example, Bill O’Reilly, host of cable’s most popular talk show, Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” started his own two-hour radio program on 205 stations--the biggest debut ever, said his syndicator, Westwood One.

Conservatives and “independents”--O’Reilly’s preferred descriptive--have grown so numerous on the airwaves that they can’t help bumping into one another. In Los Angeles and most other cities, O’Reilly’s show is airing opposite the king of the right wing, Rush Limbaugh, who revived AM radio a decade ago with screeds about “feminazis” and “environmental wackos.”

So, conservatives we got. “Independents” we got. But where have all the liberals gone?

The few proudly progressive hosts who’ve ever gotten their own national gig generally haven’t lasted long. The ranks of the fallen include Jesse Jackson, whose CNN show evaporated after his child-out-of-wedlock scandal. Texas populist Jim Hightower came and went on radio, as did former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. Phil Donahue, the anti-Limbaugh, may be a key exception; he will knock heads with O’Reilly’s Fox show when he returns to talk-TV this summer on MSNBC.

A few liberals and centrists--Michael Kinsley, Paul Begala, James Carville--appear regularly on TV. But they tend to be “canceled out” by a conservative in a “Crossfire”-style format, says Steve Rendall, a senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a self-described progressive media watchdog group.

‘The World Wrestling

Federation With Ideas’

By and large, there’s nothing like being Right. O’Reilly thinks those left of center can’t get the job done on the air. That’s not a knock on their ideology, he says, but a comment on the liberal tendency toward inclusiveness and reflectiveness--both deadly qualities in a medium that talk-show producer Randall Bloomquist describes as “the World Wrestling Federation with ideas.”

“Conservative people tend to see the world in black-and-white terms, good and evil,” O’Reilly says in an interview. “Liberals see grays. In any talk format, you have to pound home a strong point of view. If you’re not providing controversy and excitement, people won’t listen, or watch.”

Besides, National Public Radio “is all left, top to bottom. That’s where the left goes,” he adds. “They listen to Diane Rehm.”

Rehm, host of an NPR-distributed show out of Washington, replies: “If a liberal is a talk radio host who represents more than just one view, then I am indeed a liberal.... I’ve never felt there’s just one way and one way only. [Some hosts] espouse one view over and over again, whereas our message is far more confusing because we’re open to ideas and let you make up your own mind.”

Thanks largely to Limbaugh--and to Clinton, who provided plenty of raw material--the past decade has seen a veritable renaissance for conservative talk.

After only six months in syndication, Fox News’ Hannity is on more than 150 radio stations. Ingraham’s year-old show is heard in almost 200 markets, as is Savage, a man so conservative he was dubbed “Attila the Tongue” by a radio-industry magazine. Medved counts 130 affiliates for his show.

Liberals often suggest that this type of programming reflects the conservative politics of the corporations that own the media. Conservatives counter that their kind of talk offsets the news media’s alleged leftward bias.

The proliferation of conservative talk may, however, be as much about marketing as politics. The audience for broadcast news tends to be older (the average viewer of all-news cable TV is about 55). As a rule, older people tend to be conservative. Ergo, a market niche.

Indeed, the rise of the right on radio and TV may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, argues Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor of sociology and journalism and author of “Media Unlimited,” which explores the media’s impact on culture.

Since the media are imitative, the success of one conservative program tends to lead to another, he says. “You don’t suffer [as a programming executive] by imitating what’s successful,” Gitlin says. “But you are punished for trying something new and [then] failing.”

During the 1980s, the conservative audience wasn’t being well served, says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, which tracks the talk-media field. That left the field open for Limbaugh, whose success eventually led to Liddy, Ollie North and others. Now, Harrison surmises, “we’re getting dangerously close to saturation.”

There’s also a growing Outrage Gap: With a Republican president in office, a Republican-controlled House and a majority of governorships held by Republicans, it’s harder for hosts to find juicy targets. Tom Daschle, after all, isn’t quite the pinata that Clinton once was (there’s still Clinton, of course).

Says Harrison: “Talk radio works best when it’s looking from the outside in, when it’s looking out for the disenfranchised and taking on the establishment and conventional wisdom.”

But how do you take on the establishment when you are the establishment? The drought has gotten so bad that the talk industry is starting to manufacture its own outrage. A few months ago, Talkers magazine created a character called the Lone Liberal, an actual flesh-and-blood guy whose job is to do battle with the legions of conservative hosts.

Harrison reports that the Lone Liberal is averaging about eight to nine talk-show bookings a week. “He’s hot as a firecracker,” he says of the character, who wears a mask when he appears on radio or TV.

What was that about talk shows being like the WWF?