Talk radio shows’ reception seems to be getting weaker

Talk is cheap -- unless it’s political talk on the radio, and then it’s influential.

At least it has been.

Now some people think the talk bubble has, if not burst, begun to lose its wind.

Since these days the medium is overwhelmingly and partisanly Republican, those on the blue side of the aisle fervently want this to be true. Those in the red pews argue that talk is, in some ways, a victim of its own success and of an audience whose attention waxes and wanes with the election cycle.

As more than one person interviewed for this column pointed out, Rush Limbaugh can’t really be expected to go on adding stations, because he’s already everywhere.

Still, however you measure these things, broadcasting professionals agree that audiences for political talk shows have declined significantly throughout this year. That’s certainly been true in Los Angeles. This week, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis-St. Paul reported that Limbaugh has lost 43% of his audience there, while Sean Hannity’s has declined by 63%. An executive at the station that airs both programs in the Twin Cities told the paper, “We have really become concerned with what I could call their tight play list of topics revolving around politics.” A Clear Channel programming executive in Northern California, where declines also have occurred, admitted, “We’re not sure yet what’s really going on.”

Michael Harrison, who as editor and publisher of Talkers magazine is one of the medium’s leading analysts, acknowledges that “ratings across the country have dropped,” but cautions that measurements of radio audiences are notoriously imprecise, a problem complicated by the fact that the industry is in transition from one rating system to another.

But he also suspects that something fundamental is shifting. Harrison argues that “the partisan, left-right approach, where hosts identity themselves as Republicans or Democrats, is an anomaly in the history of talk radio. The standard for the medium is more populist than partisan -- where the host is suspicious of big business, big media and big government. The host is on the little guy’s side and skeptical of all politicians, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.”

Harrison thinks talk radio populism “is waiting in the wings for its comeback and will be there in a second, if the left-right approach falters.”

Does he think that’s happening?

“Personally, I think it will.”

Hugh Hewitt, who is the subject of an interesting profile in this week’s New Yorker, is the very model of a contemporary political talk-show host, who also writes a column for the Weekly Standard as well as a lively and well-read political blog. His Republican politics and unwavering certainty on every question large and small are standard issue, but, unlike most radio hosts, he actually talks rather than shouts and is witty and civil. He describes his show, which continues to add stations, as “primarily for political junkies who are center-right” and argues that “nothing is anomalous in a medium that is only 80 years old.”

The ratings decline is simply a matter of the election cycle. We’re at the “low ebb of a political news cycle. The August after a presidential election is the worst time to do political talk radio,” he said.

We’re also in the middle of a war of which fewer and fewer people approve. Moreover, as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, most of talk radio has to explain a president whose poll numbers are in freefall and, in California, a governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose popularity is tanking as badly as some of his films. It’s a political axiom that, when you grab a guy’s coattails, his direction becomes yours.

Is it any wonder that, in places like Minneapolis, talk audiences are switching to sports programming? “Don’t like Bush, tired of hearing about Fallouja and Baghdad? ... well, what about those Twins?”

Something a little deeper also may be at work.

Hewitt, for example, does his press interviews on his talk show or tapes them for later broadcast -- a canny economy for a busy ideological entrepreneur. Our conversation touched only briefly on political talk radio and its future, and then centered mainly -- and, in this context, inevitably -- on the purported impossibility of doing unbiased journalism.

In this, as in so many instances, the taste for talk radio is like a fondness for grand opera -- to indulge it, you have to listen to the same song over and over.

You know this particular argument like a mantra: All humans have personal beliefs, including political ones, which inevitably bias anything they write or broadcast. Therefore, everyone who reports or analyzes the news must publicly declare everything they believe and all their personal associations so that their readers or audience can -- to borrow Hewitt’s phrase -- “correct” for the journalist’s bias. The notion that the former -- all people have biases -- might be true, but not the latter -- they always determine absolutely everything you say or do -- never is considered. Nor is the possibility that personal discipline and the conventions of the craft already accomplish that “correction” among journalists who observe them. It’s simply not an admissible idea here. (Let’s not even touch the common-sense proposition that it’s the normality of the mainstream media’s workaday, unbiased journalism that makes the biased stuff stand out so clearly -- and offensively -- when it occurs.)

This is a relentlessly political and deeply reductionist view of human affairs.

It also suggests one of the singular things about contemporary talk radio: It may be politically preoccupied and loyally Republican, but it isn’t conservative in the traditional sense.

Historically, the West’s conservatives have believed in the persistence and profound influence in human affairs of all sorts of nonpolitical institutions -- religion, family, tradition, social convention and property, for example. It’s a conception that respects privacy, proportion and restraint, and resists the urge to reduce all human activity to the product of a single source or impulse -- whether economic (communism) or historical (fascism).

While the political talk-show hosts and right-wing bloggers claim to have a quarrel with mainstream media’s alleged bias, their real gripe is that the news media’s traditional values stand between them and what they’d like to accomplish, which is the total politicization of all reporting and analysis. Combine this with the messianic confidence that new media -- mainly talk radio and the Internet -- inevitably will undermine and destroy the economic health of mainstream media -- especially newspapers -- and you’ve pretty much got what Yeats had in mind when he wrote:

If Folly link with Elegance

No man knows which is which

Political talk-show hosts see everything through the prism of their partisan politics and insist, as an article of faith, that everyone else is always doing the same. In this sense, their approach to current affairs is less a conservative one and more a creature of that most powerful of American vices: narcissism.

The controlling assumption is: I look at the world in this fashion and, therefore, everyone else does too.

Anyone who’s ever been trapped sitting next to that greatest of dinner party bores, an unrestrained narcissist in full cry, knows that the only coherent thing that comes to mind is escape.

Maybe that’s what’s happening to political talk radio’s audience. As the physicists say, the simplest explanation is always the most elegant.