Title: How Conservative Talk Radio Came to Dominate the Airwaves

Brooke Gladstone: On this week's On the Media, 17 of the nation's top 20 most listened-to talk radio hosts are conservative. Only one is progressing. How did the public airwaves come to be so politically lopsided?

Brian Rosenwald: If you turn the country station on and you hear Beethoven's Fifth, you're going to be confused. Radio executives think that people feel the same way about talk.

Rush Limbaugh: Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Program, a program exclusively designed for rich conservatives and right minded Republicans and those who want to be either or both.

Terry Heaton: We sold it as news from a biblical worldview, but it was funny how that biblical worldview seemed to line up with Republican Party politics.

Speaker 5: Why would we want to have any Democrats on?

Speaker 6: They're losers?

Speaker 5: I'm never going to speak--

Speaker 7: I am a working mother, and my kids are fine. They have--

Speaker 8: They are not. Who's raising them? You don't have them. The babysitter's got them. You ain't no mama. Get off my program, you liberal.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. As of the end of last week, President-Elect Donald Trump's roster for top cabinet positions is full. Many of the nominees caused a stir when their names were announced, some more than others, but there was one announced last Friday evening that slipped unedr the radar.

Speaker 9: The president-elect named far-right conspiracy theorist Sebastian Gorka to a key national security role.

Speaker 10: A close ally of Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka has doubted the threat of white nationalism in the country and pushed for pardons of January 6th rioters.

Micah Loewinger: Sebastian Gorka also served in the first Trump administration, but he didn't last long. What's he been up to in the intervening years?

Speaker 11: We put it on a T-shirt. He's back. Get yours today. Sebgorkastore.com. That's S-E-B-G-O-R-K-A, sebgorkastore.com.

Micah Loewinger: That's a clip from Gorka's show America First, which airs on the Salem Radio Network. If that name, Salem, rings a bell, it's because that media company was the subject of our podcast series, The Divided Dial. In the series, reporter Katie Thornton introduced us to the Salem Media Group, the largest Christian conservative multimedia company in the country. With the second Trump administration on its way, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the history of how the right team to dominate the airwaves. Here's Katie.

Katie Thornton: By the 1930s, most Americans had a radio in the house and a network of long-distance phone lines brought a select few programs to stations across the country.

Nicole Hemmer: The radio dial really was the cafe culture of the 1930s.

Katie Thornton: This is Nicole Hemmer. She's an author and historian who studies media and conservative movements.

Nicole Hemmer: It was the place where debates about politics, debates about the future of the United States were all taking place, because remember, it's in the middle of the Great Depression and people are pretty panicked. They don't know that the United States is coming out of this.

Katie Thornton: From the left, Louisiana's Huey Long roasted Roosevelt for not going far enough with the New Deal. Coming at Roosevelt from the right, blasting Depression era efforts like the Works Progress Administration, was one Father Charles Coughlin.

Father Charles Coughlin: You people living on the WPA envelopes, WPA envelopes filled partly from the money confiscated from industry and commerce and from the envelopes of those who are working.

Katie Thornton: The Catholic radio priest, once a supporter, became one of President Roosevelt's loudest critics. He hated the nude deal and considered Roosevelt a dictator. He was controversial, but controversy was allowed on the radio, at least for a while.

Speaker 11: The shadow of the goose step falls on Austrian soil, while in Vienna, Austria's Nazi leader watches a gigantic parade on the balcony of the tower.

Katie Thornton: Toward the end of the 1930s, the news focus shifted from the US economy to the brewing conflict in Europe. At first, the idea of staying out of the war predominated. Even Roosevelt didn't want in. Popular sentiment shifted as news of German atrocities crossed the ocean.

Speaker 12: [speaking German]

Katie Thornton: Not everyone changed their mind. Many who didn't began lacing their anti-interventionism with vicious antisemitism. Here's Father Coughlin in a broadcast from 1938 after the violent events of Kristallnacht.

Father Charles Coughlin: Students of history recognize that Nazism is only a defense mechanism against communism, and especially that persecution of the Christian always begets persecution of the Jew.

Katie Thornton: In the late 1930s, Coughlin had an estimated 15 million people listening each month, almost one in every nine Americans.

Nicole Hemmer: The FCC saw that in Italy and Germany, leaders were using radio to propagandize to their people, and they were really concerned about that happening in the United States.

Katie Thornton: Fearing the spread of fascism, the FCC passed the Mayflower Doctrine, which prohibited broadcasters from sharing opinions over the airwaves. With this, antisemitic hate speech really was pushed off of radio, and many on the right felt that the die was cast. The media was a tool of the US Government, and the government was silencing conservative voices.

Nicole Hemmer: They understood their loss of platforms as a kind of censorship of their ideas.

Katie Thornton: Nicole Hemmer says that the effect wasn't just quieting antisemites.

Nicole Hemmer: Non-interventionist voices were finding it harder and harder to find a platform. Particularly once the US goes to war, there is no space in media for people who are arguing that the US should not be involved in the war.

Katie Thornton: It wasn't just non-interventionists on the right like Father Coughlin who were feeling the chill.

Nicole Hemmer: There were socialists and pacifists who opposed the war. There were communists who were for the war because the US was allied with the Soviet Soviet Union, but who had other opinions about the United States and about the US economy that were not welcome on air.

Katie Thornton: In truth, many on the left had found it hard to get on the radio long before the war. With the wartime restrictions on speech, it was the far-right's turn to feel the sting of censorship, but it didn't last long. In 1949, the FCC did a complete 180.

Nicole Hemmer: The FCC says, "Actually stations have an obligation to cover controversial issues. They have to. We give them a license. This is the public service that they provide."

Katie Thornton: Here's the kicker, the on-air coverage had to be fair.

Nicole Hemmer: It's a compromise that, "All right, we're going to let you editorialize, but we still don't want you to turn into propaganda outlets."

Katie Thornton: This is the basis of what comes to be known as the Fairness Doctrine. It required stations to present multiple perspectives on controversial issues, and if a group felt maligned or underrepresented, they could request airtime to refute the claims made about them. That airtime had to be given for free. When the Fairness Doctrine first got going, it wasn't a problem for conservatives.

Nicole Hemmer: Conservative broadcasting really starts to take off after the Fairness Doctrine is implemented because they're considered to fulfill a public interest obligation or that they're introducing controversial ideas.

Katie Thornton: Newly appointed president John F. Kennedy was no fan of these broadcasters. In 1961, he worked with two friends of his, labor leader brothers, Walter and Victor Reuther.

Nicole Hemmer: Victor Reuther puts together this memo on how Kennedy can use the powers of the federal government that he's just acquired in order to battle back against this anti-labor radical right. There are things like the IRS who can audit people, and there's the FCC. He talks about conservative and anti-union broadcasters and says, "You can use the FCC to shut these voices down."

Katie Thornton: Kennedy's FCC liked the idea and sent notifications to stations highlighting conservative talking points with a reminder that under the Fairness Doctrine, such controversial opinions needed to be countered. When the Reuthers memo to Kennedy was leaked, conservatives used its existence to say--

Nicole Hemmer: "Aha, we are victims of federal censorship. Give us money, support our programs. This is evidence of what we've been telling you all of this time."

Katie Thornton: While conservatives lamented the effects of the Reuther memo, there was a movement that was unequivocally finding it very difficult to get airtime.

Speaker: The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation.

Mark Lloyd: The folks who had money and made determinations about what got on television or radio, they were not interested in the appeals of the civil rights movement.

Katie Thornton: Mark Lloyd is a lawyer and former associate general counsel at the FCC. He says leaders of the civil rights movement were not always welcomed on the mostly white-owned stations, which played primarily to white audiences and appealed to white advertisers.

Mark Lloyd: They weren't interested in what it was that Thurgood Marshall had to say about the Brown v. Board of Education and how it was being implemented in schools. That's not what they wanted to hear.

Brooke Gladstone: Those remarks about Brown v. Board of Education that Mark Lloyd referred to kicked up a long legal saga that would change the American radio landscape. That's coming up after the break. This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Before the break, we heard about the long legal saga that would change the American radio landscape. Reporter Katie Thornton picks up the story.

Katie Thornton: In 1955, after future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had argued the case that desegregated the schools, he went on NBC to talk about it.

Thurgood Marshall: We do believe that this decision in itself will encourage the people to take further steps without litigation in many areas. That's what I think is the important part about it.

Katie Thornton: That didn't go over well with the owner of an NBC affiliate in Jackson and Mississippi at a combination TV and radio station called WLBT.

Joseph Torres: Thurgood Marshall was on a national program and they cut the feed when he was on.

Katie Thornton: This is Joseph Torres who co-wrote a book titled News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He says that instead of playing the segment, WLBT's TV station showed a slide reading, "Sorry, cable trouble from New York." It wouldn't be the only time WLBT cut the NBC feed during coverage of the civil rights movement.

Joseph Torres: The general manager of the station was a member of the White Citizens Council and he was a staunch segregationist.

Mark Lloyd: Black folks in the Jackson, Mississippi, area, which were roughly 40% of the population, were not allowed to even buy time on the station.

Katie Thornton: Mark Lloyd.

Mark Lloyd: The editorials that would come out from the Station manager all supported the position of the White Citizens Council, which was against integration.

Katie Thornton: Throughout the civil rights era, a small number of very influential Black hosts were broadcasting on a handful of more progressive stations, but over the years, the KKK and other racist groups ransacked, bombed, and destroyed offices, transmitters, and towers of some stations that played so-called race-mixing rock and roll or that broadcast left-wing content. Intimidation was commonplace.

Speaker 13: The Klan moved this year against radio station WBOX whose owner invited former Arkansas Congressman Brooks Hayes to make a speech on race relations. Klansmen made hundreds of anonymous phone calls to the station sponsors. The effect was immediate. 75% of the commercials were canceled. WBOX is still brodcasting.

Katie Thornton: On many mainstream stations, the lack of media coverage of the civil rights movement was so pervasive that leaders like Martin Luther King started explicitly calling it out in the 1960s and asking allies to help the movement get attention. In the case of WLBT in Mississippi, a liberal-minded church group, the United Church of Christ, answered the call.

Mark Lloyd: The United Church of Christ office of communication joined with a local Jackson, Mississippi chapter of the NAACP and sued the Federal Communications Commission and won.

Katie Thornton: The years-long legal battle eventually ended with a federal court ruling that under the direction of a dedicated white supremacist, WLBT was not serving their local community's public interest. WLBT could stay on the air, but their license would be transferred to a nonprofit, a group made up of Black and white broadcasters. Even before the WLBT case was settled, it was sending shockwaves through the media world. Just by allowing the case to move forward, the court had set an important precedent.

For the first time, members of the public could ask the FCC to investigate a broadcaster if they didn't think their station was serving the public interest or being fair. Joseph Torres.

Joseph Torres: It was monumental. The idea that US citizens had legal standing to challenge a broadcast license.

Katie Thornton: Across the country, listeners filed hundreds of license challenges.

Joseph Torres: The broadcast industry considers this an assault on the [inaudible 00:14:05] They use that language, they're being assaulted.

Mark Lloyd: The stations began to understand that if they did not follow these guidelines, if they didn't follow the Fairness Doctrine, then local communities would challenge their licenses.

Katie Thornton: Broadcasters were panicked, so the FCC started laying out some guidelines of how they could avoid the same fate, how they could better serve the public interest. They start pushing something they called assertainment.

Joseph Torres: Where the station had to go out and ascertain the needs of the community as part of its license renewal process.

Mark Lloyd: This was done by radio stations and television stations, commercial stations, public stations across the country.

Katie Thornton: In fact, doing these ascertainments was part of Mark's job early on in his career.

Mark Lloyd: I had to go out into migrant fields and church basements and women's shelters and ask leaders in their places of power what they thought were the important issues facing the local communities.

Katie Thornton: Though the Fairness Doctrine had been on the books since 1949, it hadn't actually prevented stations from running racist one-sided programming, but with the legal challenges of the 1960s, that started to change.

Nicole Hemmer: Pro-segregation forces are right that they're in the losing end of that shift.

Katie Thornton: The decline in segregationist broadcasts led many on the right to double down on an old trope.

Nicole Hemmer: As they're no longer seeing their viewpoints reflected in positive ways, they read that as liberal bias.

Katie Thornton: Although when some broadcasters asked the FCC to clarify the doctrine, the government made it clear that they didn't expect stations to give airtime to some leftists, like, say, communists or to atheists, but even so, all of the civil rights era changes kicked off what Mark Lloyd refers to as broadcasting's public interest moment.

Mark Lloyd: We had an explosion of not only news programs, but we had an explosion of Sunday morning public affairs programs.

Katie Thornton: The FCC would come to require stations, even those that played mostly music, to run at least a little bit of educational programming. There were wellness shows

Speaker 14: Guides to Good Living, a program designed to help you enjoy a fuller and healthier life.

Katie Thornton: Shows about social justice

Speaker 15: Indian Land Radio, Indian land, Alcatraz Island, on behalf of the Indians of all tribes.

Speaker 16: We understand the only thing that's held Black people down this long is the rampant racism.

Speaker 17: Probably my first step in becoming a separatist was realizing that I was gay and finding that the only literature on gays was about men.

Katie Thornton: There were shows about farming and labor.

Speaker 18: My name is Ray Kaller. I have a 280-acre farm. I would like to know how I could cut down on my harvest losses on corn.

Katie Thornton: TV, also overseen by the FCC, had its own huge public interest moment.

Speaker 19: This is 60 Minutes. It's a kind of a magazine for television. If this broadcast does what we hope it will do, it will report reality.

Mark Lloyd: This was the time when we really began to see news and public affairs programs become really important in the American culture.

Katie Thornton: Let's make something clear. This sea change in the media wasn't because the FCC was going around and punishing stations for not adhering to the Fairness Doctrine or not serving the public interest. They rarely actually enforced these policies. The threat alone of citizens taking legal action was often enough to get stations to change their coverage. In fact, only one radio station ever lost its license for falling foul of the FCC's fairness and public interest guidelines. It was WXUR, owned by fire-breathing Radio Reverend Carl McIntyre. McIntyre repeatedly broadcast scathing screeds against the civil rights movement.

Reverend Carl McIntyre: Then let the guilt lie squarely upon such philosophers as Martin Luther King and President-- What did the Negro apologist of our time expect?

Katie Thornton: He espoused paranoid ideas of communist penetration into the US Government-

Reverend Carl McIntyre: White Americans. What the world ought to see is that the communists are so wicked and so evil that men of every--

Katie Thornton: -and trumpeted antisemitic ideas.

Reverend Carl McIntyre: The Jews at the present time are in darkness. They're going back in unbelief.

Katie Thornton: All of that was legal. What did his station in was his lack of ideological balance. When the license came up for renewal, the FCC denied it. While WXUR was deprived of air by the FCC, Christian broadcasting writ large was not in mortal danger. Just the opposite.

Terry Heaton: Hello, Katie?

Katie Thornton: Hi, is this Terry?

Terry Heaton: This is Terry Heaton.

Katie Thornton: Hi, Terry. How are you doing? Terry Heaton is a TV guy, always has been, but a lot of the work he did on TV helped shape what was heard on Christian radio.

Terry Heaton: The 700 Club when I got there, it was a television talk show at the time.

Katie Thornton: The 700 Club was a little more than that. It was a wildly popular early televangelist show.

Minister Pat Robertson: Thank you and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this edition of the 700 Club.

Katie Thornton: Launched in 1966, it went national in 1974. At its heart was Minister Pat Robertson.

Terry Heaton: Pat Robertson was the son of a US Senator in Virginia, so politics was in his blood.

Katie Thornton: Robertson was an early mover and shaker in the religious right, a close confidant of many conservative politicians. He was also an early leader of the Council for National Policy, that secretive group of conservative strategists, donors, and media personalities founded after Reagan's victory, which would come to welcome the Salem co-founders into its fold. The 700 Club was a megaphone for the group's goals even before Salem was.

Terry Heaton: I became the executive producer of that show during a time when it was transforming from what was a religious talk show into a propaganda news organization with a conservative news bent.

Katie Thornton: Pat Robertson's show was savvy and smart, and his Christian conservative message broke through in a way no religious program had ever done before.

Pat Robertson: Young people are bombarded by distorted visual images and twisted music messages that are saturating their minds and, yet, sabotaging their futures.

Terry Heaton: We sold it as news from a biblical worldview, but it was funny how that biblical worldview seemed to line up with Republican party politics.

Katie Thornton: The show didn't just push conservative politics, it peddled in persecution.

Pat Robertson: If you're a feminist, if you're a homosexual, if you're any of those things, you can say what you want to about your preconceptions, but if you are a Christian and you write in favor of the Christian point of view, then you are considered a right-wing and you can't work any longer in a "objective news orientation." Ladies and gentlemen--

Katie Thornton: Pat Robertson pushed the idea that Christian producers needed to not just make media, but to own the means of distribution. He founded the first Christian TV network, which eventually helped spread The 700 Club across the country. He owned a small string of radio stations, too. That network model was a blueprint for other Christian communicators.

Terry Heaton: All the leaders of all these organizations, they all looked at Pat. Pat knew them all. All of these Christian radio stations and other TV networks, they all had the gospel at core, but they also had this Republican "God needs us to take over the world" kind of mindset.

Katie Thornton: By the start of the 1980s, one out of every seven radio stations in the country was Christian. Though they pushed the idea that conservatives were being silenced, the religious right had established a comfortable place for themselves in the new media ecosystem, and yet they didn't dominate. Thanks to the victories of the civil rights movement and that public interest moment, the radio dial was still a place that welcomed and protected a diversity of voices, but all of that was about to change.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, how we got from that public interest moment to today's conservative talk radio landscape.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. When we left off our story, Christian radio was ascendant, but it didn't yet dominate the airwaves. How did we get from there to here? Reporter Katie Thornton explains.

Katie Thornton: In the 1970s, talk in public affairs shows exploded in part because of the FCC's public interest moment, but also because of a great technological leap.

[music]

No static at all.

Katie Thornton: No static at all.

[music]

Katie Thornton: That was the promise of FM radio. The year this steely dance song came out, 1978, the FM band beat AM and listeners for the first time.

Speaker 20: The difference in reception will leap the ear.

Katie Thornton: With AM or amplitude modulation radio, there was always an ambient hum, lots of interference, like looking through a dirty window, but with FM or frequency modulation, sound was encoded into radio signals differently. Compared to AM's muck, it was freshly shined glass.

Nicole Hemmer: As the FM dial opens up, radio stations that play music are like, "We're going to be an FM station now."

Katie Thornton: Historian and author Nicole Hemmer.

Nicole Hemmer: That actually leads to some languishing in the AM dial, and for AM stations.

Katie Thornton: At first, low-quality AM radio struggled to find its competitive advantage. That is until it landed on talk.

Speaker 21: Talk and more talk. Advice to the lovelorn, to the investor, to the shopper.

Katie Thornton: Talk radio was AM's salvation and the special sauce was the listeners themselves.

Speaker 22: Among the most popular of talk is the invitation to the audience to talk back. "Hello, you're on the air," is as familiar a phrase on radio these days as the station's call letters. It's an invitation--

Katie Thornton: In radio's earlier days, it was awkward and clunky to get a listener on the air with hosts either holding up the phone to the mic or holding it to their ear and saying "Mm. Mm-hmm," before reiterating to listeners what the caller said. Changes in broadcast regulations and improved telephone technology made it easier for listeners to get on the air.

Nicole Hemmer: The idea that somebody can hear themselves on the radio by calling in and talking to the host sounds so old school at this point, but it really was a revolution. You could now be a local celebrity because you're calling in and able to have your voice heard on a station. It changes the medium because it makes people feel invested in shows because even if they don't call in, they hear people like themselves calling in and they feel like they're being represented on this new talk radio.

Katie Thornton: Around this time in the late '70s and early '80s, satellite dishes were also becoming more accessible, allowing some larger networks to beam a select few shows across long distances in real-time. Combine that with easier and cheaper long-distance calling.

Nicole Hemmer: Once you have those two things where I can make a toll-free call to a show that is being aired around the nation all at the same time so that people in Oregon and people in New York can be listening to the same content at the same time, can be calling in at the same time, now you can have a national conversation on radio.

Fred Loring: Network Radio's most listened-to coast-to-coast talk program featuring guests from around the world, and calls from all across America, now--

Katie Thornton: National slots for talk radio were prized going to the rare host like Larry King.

Fred Loring: Larry King.

Larry King: Thank you, Fred Loring. Good evening everybody. On this Friday night, Sarurday morning--

Katie Thornton: In local markets, call-in shows with local hosts and local listeners ruled. These call-in shows, while very egalitarian, weren't always the most.

Howard Stern: You still got your teeth, your original teeth?

Speaker 23: Of course.

Howard Stern: Imagine this woman being your grandmother.

Speaker 24: Oh really? My three-and-a-half-year-old loves you.

Howard Stern: Hey, honey, something about old people, when they get on the phone, they love to talk about their personal life. I know it's real interesting to you, but we got to move along.

Katie Thornton: The early 1980s saw the dawn of the shock jock era, with Baltimore's Howard Stern famously at the helm.

Howard Stern: Ma'am, when I get to your age, I hope they shoot me.

Speaker 25: Oh, I hope so.

Katie Thornton: Hosts like Stern and those who followed in his footsteps were usually confined to local markets early on, and their shows weren't always political, mostly just lewd and abrasive. By the early 1980s, some shock jocks were adding politics to their shows.

Speaker 6: I have been called by my program director, God to bring the truth.

Speaker 5: Why would we want to have any Democrats on?

Speaker 6: They're losers.

Speaker 5: I think I'm never going to speak--

Speaker 7: I am a working mother and my kids are fine. They have--

Speaker 8: They are not. Who's raising them? You don't have them. The babysitter's got them. You ain't no mama. Get off my program, you liberal.

Katie Thornton: They weren't just conservatives. There were liberal shock jocks too, like sharp-tongued former attorney Alan Berg, who broadcast out of Denver on an AM station called KOA. Its powerful signal allowed Berg to reach listeners in about 30 surrounding states.

Speaker 8: If you don't like it, you can move to Moscow. Correct?

Alan Berg: In other words, if you're not a Christian, you're un-American. Is that your point, sir?

Speaker 26: That's right. Move on away.

Alan Berg: Good point, sir. You and your redneck go to bed.

Katie Thornton: Berg was Jewish and he goaded the right-wingers, racists, and antisemites who flooded his phone lines. In a poll, Denver residents were asked to name the city's most beloved media personality and its most despised. Alan Berg won both, and by early 1984, he was making a splash nationally. Here he is on 60 Minutes.

Speaker 26: Isn't there something a little dangerous about this kind of broadcasting?

Alan Berg: There is a danger, I agree with you, but I think that's the danger that we exhibit in all rights of free expression, be it columnists who write newspapers.

Speaker 26: Indeed, but you say yourself, you often go on there, you don't know quite what you're going to say.

Alan Berg: Hopefully, my legal training will prevent me from saying the one thing that will kill me. I've come awfully close.

Katie Thornton: It was less than six months after that segment aired that 50-year-old Alan Berg was gunned down in his driveway by members of the newly formed white supremacist group The Order. The driver of the getaway car was identified as a man who had previously called into Allen Berg's show.

Speaker 27: I think the Jews are still firmly in control of the Soviet Union. I think they're responsible for the murder of 50 million white Christians.

Alan Berg: You think so, huh?

Speaker 27: Yes, I do.

Alan Berg: I think you're sick. I think you're pathetic. I think your ability to reason and use any logic is a tragedy.

Speaker 27: Why don't you put a Nazi on your program and then you'll have somebody to--

Alan Berg: Sir, you are a Nazi by your very own admission. Thanks so much. If he said, that's right, you heard it. 861--

Speaker 28: It's 1042 on a very, very, very blue evening.

Katie Thornton: There were other liberal talkers, but for Berg's colleagues and listeners and for left-wing radio, this was a huge loss.

Speaker 29: You're on the air. Go ahead.

Speaker 30: I am so sorry for your grief. I find it so hard to believe that news, that he's really gone.

Speaker 29: I could not believe what I heard. I can't believe how low people will go.

Katie Thornton: At the time Berg was murdered, radio was undergoing another colossal change, this one from the halls of government. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he inherited a media ecosystem that was flourishing, buoyed by hard-won regulations, but--

Mark Lloyd: The Reagan administration came in and began to eliminate all of those regulations.

Katie Thornton: Mark Lloyd says that not long after his inauguration, Reagan's FCC started killing off the policies and guidelines that had been built up during the civil rights era.

Mark Lloyd: We had ascertainments, we had a set of guidelines about how to serve local communities. It was an entire regime that enforced local service, and then Reagan came in, all of it was gone.

Speaker 31: The FCC made some major changes in how radio stations are run.

Katie Thornton: No more requirements to go and find out what local residents wanted to hear. No more mandate to run educational shows. The FCC also made it harder for people to challenge broadcast licenses like civil rights groups had done by the hundreds to get fairer representation. The long-standing Fairness Doctrine was still on the books, but without these other policies, it didn't have as much bite.

Mark Lloyd: You get rid of all that and the result is Rush Limbaugh. [laughs]

Katie Thornton: When broadcasting's public interest moment was in full swing in the 1970s, Rush Limbaugh wasn't really a part of it. He was on the air, but he was a DJ, queuing up songs and reporting on weather and traffic in between.

Rush Limbaugh: From 1360, solid rock and gold. For the morning rush hour, sunny and cold today, radar says a near 0% chance of precipitation.

Katie Thornton: Limbaugh had been in love with the medium since he was a kid. His dad, who was once a part owner of a station in their hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, got young Rush his first radio gig there in the 1960s when Rush was only 16. After that, he found it hard to keep a job. By the early 1980s, after well over a decade in the industry, Limbaugh had been fired from five stations, mostly for interpersonal reasons.

Rush Limbaugh: A low tonight, down to 22 degrees, nippy, nippy, nippy. For Saturday, partly cloudy.

Katie Thornton: Limbaugh spent a few years working in sales for the Kansas City Royals, but he was back behind the mic in 1983, now in his 30s and trying his hand at news coverage. He lasted less than a year before getting fired again, but the next year, in 1984, a station out of Sacramento took a gamble on Limbaugh and gave him his own show.

Rush Limbaugh: This is KFBK Sacramento.

Katie Thornton: It was there that he really honed his pitch. Less weather and traffic, more politics and preening.

Rush Limbaugh: Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Program, a program exclusively designed for rich conservatives and right-minded Republicans, and those who want to be either or both.

Katie Thornton: The phones lit up. Whether callers wanted to argue or agree with Limbaugh's right-wing hot takes, they all wanted to talk. Ratings soared and advertising dollars poured in. For Limbaugh, who had made it clear that he was an entertainer and moneymaker first, pundit second, it was a gold mine.

Rush Limbaugh: The views expressed by the host on this show are not necessarily those of the staff, management nor sponsors of this station, but they ought to be.

Katie Thornton: Limbaugh was in many ways representative of the new post-public interest radio dial of the mid-1980s. After deregulation began in earnest in 1981, the number of complaints to the FCC about racial stereotyping went up, so did complaints about a lack of programming for minority groups. Then of course, in 1987, Reagan's FCC dealt the death blow.

Speaker 32: This week, the FCC voted down the Fairness Doctrine by a vote of four to zero.

Anne Nelson: The logic of doing over the Fairness Doctrine was, "Oh well, now all of these towns have 100, 500, 1000 channels on their cable system."

Katie Thornton: Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

Anne Nelson: So anybody can find any opinion they want and we don't need to have that requirement for individual broadcasters anymore.

Katie Thornton: She says there were a couple of issues with the FCC's argument.

Anne Nelson: First of all, you can't watch 100 channels. In fact, this firehose of information is going to be so overwhelming that you'll probably just stick to one or two channels.

Katie Thornton: Also, not everyone had cable, and even if you did, you can't watch cable while commuting to work or working on most job sites. Plenty of people still relied on radio, not television, for their news. The existence of cable TV didn't suddenly mean there were more radio frequencies.

The Fairness Doctrine had not been perfect. Adhering to it was a big logistical headache. Station staff had to monitor hosts for controversial material and figure out how to make free airtime available to people who wanted to respond. Many scholars believe that it kept some broadcasters who didn't want to do their due diligence from broadcasting controversial material at all, but for many, including some conservatives, it had been an important means of getting ideas out.

Nicole Hemmer: By the time you have the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, you have a whole cohort of conservatives, people like Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, who want to see the Fairness Doctrine kept in place.

Katie Thornton: The Democratic-led Congress, with the help of some of these conservative leaders, actually passed a law to codify the Fairness Doctrine, which had just been an FCC policy, but Reagan vetoed it. As it turns out, it wasn't a loss for the right. Without the Fairness Doctrine in place, highly political, often vitriolic talk radio skyrocketed. Sacramento area's Rush Limbaugh was the breakout star of the moment. A year after the doctrine was overturned--

Speaker 33: He's taking his act to New York City, where his radio show will be nationally syndicated.

Katie Thornton: Limbaugh quickly made a name for himself from WABC in New York. Limbaugh looked to get a rise out of listeners, including liberals, who made up a quarter of his audience in the early days, but as time went on, he appealed more to those who felt that popular culture was edging toward greater representation of the marginalized, and consequently, they felt, leaving them out.

Brian Rosenwald: People start calling him, saying, "Thank God you're on the air, Russ. We finally have a voice."

Katie Thornton: Brian Rosenwald is the author of Talk Radio's America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party that Took Over the United States.

Brian Rosenwald: It's ironic because this is the '80s. Ronald Reagan is still in office. They have the White House, they have the biggest platform in the world, but they don't feel that way. In some sense, they're right, to be honest, that the liberals are still winning the culture wars even as the conservatives are gaining more political power. Over time, they start to lose the liberal audience.

Katie Thornton: Eventually, even the skeptical conservatives came around on deregulation. Nicole Hemmer.

Nicole Hemmer: It's not until Rush Limbaugh takes off and they see the power of this deregulated medium that suddenly the conservative line is, "Yes, the Fairness Doctrine is bad. It only exists to shut up Rush Limbaugh, and we all oppose it."

Katie Thornton: It wasn't just political conservatives fueling Limbaugh's growth. It was also his large following of evangelical Christians.

John Fea: I was in seminary. This would have been maybe '89, '90, and everybody on my floor, all these seminarians, were listening to this new guy, Rush Limbaugh.

Katie Thornton: This is John Fea, the professor of history at Messiah Christian University in Pennsylvania, who in last week's episode told us about the omnipresence of Christian radio in his childhood.

John Fea: You'd go into the lounge or you'd go into the bathroom or whatever, and they're talking, "Hey, did you hear what Rush said?"

Rush Limbaugh: Which is why I say this cast taught me more about women than anything my whole life.

John Fea: I had no idea who this guy was. I started listening to him.

Rush Limbaugh: He's actually a very smart cat.

John Fea: I remember being quite taken entertained by Limbaugh in seminary.

Katie Thornton: John eventually grew to be a Limbaugh critic, but in the early days, he was on board, and not unlike his dad, who evangelized with Christian radio blaring from his truck, John turned around and shared the word of Rush with his old man.

John Fea: I introduced my father to Rush Limbaugh. I'll never forget this. My parents convinced me to come home from Chicago for our annual trip to the Jersey Shore, and I remember saying, "Dad, you got to hear this guy. I think you'll like him." I remember turning him on and he was hooked.

Rush Limbaugh: Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.

John Fea: He listened to him every single day that vacation and then continued to listen to him. This replaced Christian radio in his truck.

Rush Limbaugh: Most listened-to radio talk show in America [crosstalk] the universe.

Katie Thornton: Years of well-organized Christian media networking and socially conservative programming from the likes of The 700 Club's Pat Robertson or Salem's early teach and talk stations meant that in content, if not tone, Limbaugh wasn't a giant leap from what a lot of Christians were already listening to.

John Fea: Any historian would find the roots of Limbaughism in Christian radio in the '70s and '80s.

It was around this time that Salem, then just a Christian network, surveyed their listeners and found that when they turned the dial, they tended to stop at conservative talkers like Limbaugh. Christian radio helped prime audiences for Limbaugh and Limbaugh, appealing to Anxieties around cultural change, helped shape Christian radio.

John Fea: This anxiety and fear turned Christian radio into a political outlet to serve the culture wars.

Katie Thornton: Republican politicians soon realized that getting in good with Limbaugh meant getting in good with his listeners. President George H.W. Bush literally carried Limbaugh's bags into the White House when he came for a visit. Limbaugh imitators abounded, and by 1995, about 2/3 of talk radio leaned right. End of story. Right?

Mark Lloyd: The story that's often told-

Katie Thornton: Mark Lloyd.

Mark Lloyd: -is that the Fairness Doctrine ended, and that made the way for Rush Limbaugh to come on the air and really reach an audience that had never been served before and provide conservative views. It's nonsensical.

Katie Thornton: If it wasn't Limbaugh's firebrand personality that drove his success, what did?

Brian Rosenwald: Syndicated shows, starting with Limbaugh, come along and they offer programs by what they call the barter method, which essentially means that you don't pay for the show.

Katie Thornton: Brian Rosenwald says that with the barter method, Limbaugh's group offered the show to stations across the country for free, just in return for the ad time within the show, which they could sell to advertisers who wanted to reach a national audience.

Brian Rosenwald: Essentially, you're not losing anything if you're at the station. You're not handing out money, you're not paying a salary, you're not paying a flat fee or something.

Katie Thornton: Barter-based syndication is common practice now. Limbaugh eventually went on to charge stations to carry his show, but as a business model, it was pretty new back then.

Speaker: Rush will still be heard here two hours a day-

Katie Thornton: Then there were those satellites.

Speaker: -via satellite.

Katie Thornton: As the cost of the technology went down, satellite transmission became more affordable, and going national wasn't as big a deal, but perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the right's dominance of the radio dial was the 1996 Telecommunications Act and its elimination of national ownership caps. Those were the long-standing legal limits on the number of stations that a single company could own. That number had been increasing for years under Reagan, but in '96, the national limit for radio chains was eliminated.

Brian Rosenwald: That ends up triggering massive frenetic consolidation in the radio business in the late '90s, where companies are merging, companies are buying each other up. It basically becomes clear to most owners that you're not going to survive as an individual owner. You either need to get big or get out.

Mark Lloyd: We ended up with an operation called Clear Channel that owned over 1200 radio stations, which was just unheard of during the public interest moment, the idea that any one entity could own 1200 stations.

Katie Thornton: Before the '96 act, Clear Channel, now called iHeartMedia, had just 43 stations, and starting in 1998--

Mark Lloyd: Clear Channel owned Premier Radio Networks. Guess who Premier Radio Networks owned. They own the Rush Limbaugh Show. Guess what Clear Channel and the Premier Radio Networks promoted and put on every station they could. They put on the show that they owned, Rush Limbaugh.

Katie Thornton: While no other company got as big as Clear Channel, others like Salem and Entercom, which soon acquired Sinclair's radio stations, grew exponentially. Cumulus, a media giant, was formed in the wake of the act. All of this economic consolidation changed what could be heard on the airwaves.

Brian Rosenwald: Why does this affect programming? It affects programming because you end up getting these companies that become vertically integrated. For one set of talent and one set of production costs, you can program a show that you can then air on a huge chunk of your stations.

Katie Thornton: It was cheaper for a company to invest in one big host who they could blast out across the country than it was to hire local hosts in every city. As the higher-ups were programming for their newly expanded networks, they stuck to tried and tested formats.

Brian Rosenwald: Consolidation in these big corporate ownerships create risk-averse companies, risk-averse executives, executives who want to program something that they know will work, and conservative talk is it.

Katie Thornton: In the '90s and early 2000s, more and more talk stations switched from showcasing a variety of opinions to airing one political perspective all day, mirroring an approach called format purity in music radio.

Brian Rosenwald: If you turn the country station on and you hear Beethoven's Fifth, you're going to be confused. Radio executives think that people feel the same way about talk, that if you turn on the conservative talk station and there's a liberal guy on, you're like, "Well, did I turn the wrong station on?" That there needs to be predictability.

Katie Thornton: From a station manager's perspective, platforming talkers like Rush Limbaugh was predictable and also safe.

Brian Rosenwald: What is dangerous is raunch, stuff that's going to threaten your FCC license. Conservative talk, as harsh as it can be, is largely safe and it's one decision upon one decision upon one decision that makes this make more and more and more sense, to the point that you get to the 2000s, and then they're like, "Okay, yes, all conservative, all political, all nationally syndicated, or mostly nationally syndicated, that's how we make our money."

Mark Lloyd: There were no progressive or liberal talkers on commercial radio in Philadelphia. Certainly there are liberal and progressive people in Philadelphia. There were no progressive or liberal talkers on commercial radio in Houston. Certainly, there are liberal and progressive folks who were interested in that programming, but none. They were not being served by commercial radio stations in those markets.

Katie Thornton: In 2007, Mark Lloyd worked on a study that looked at news talk radio stations owned by the country's five biggest commercial radio companies, including Salem.

Mark Lloyd: What we found was that conservative talk dominated liberal or progressive talk by 10 to one.

Katie Thornton: The study also noted that in some markets where left-leaning talk was aired, it could bring in money and ratings, but the big conglomerates hardly bothered. They could afford not to. The only real attempt by liberals to give conservative radio a run for its money came in 2004.

Speaker 34: Air America Radio, real facts in a filtered world.

Speaker 35: With even more intensity.

Speaker 36: Politics and culture.

Katie Thornton: Air America had hosts like Al Franken.

Al Franken: Today is both an ending and a beginning. An end to the right-wing dominance of talk radio.

Katie Thornton: Public Enemy's Chuck D

Chuck D: In the house on the real. What's up Bruh?

Katie Thornton: Rachel Maddow.

Rachel Maddow: This is the Rachel Maddow Show here on Air America Radio.

Katie Thornton: From the get-go, there were some issues. A lot of the hosts were new to radio and just weren't that great, but importantly, Air America lacked the structures that had benefited Limbaugh. Air America didn't own any stations. They just made shows. They had to convince existing stations to run Air America programs. Not easy in this era of format purity and big chain ownership. Air America was off the air by early 2010. Brian Rosenwald.

Brian Rosenwald: What happens is that a lot of people in the radio business take the Air America failure and say, "See? Liberal radio won't work."

Katie Thornton: The 1996 Telecommunications Act was an economic decision, not one that regulated content, but in practice, it hit both. It meant that the loudest voices didn't have to be the most representative ones. Extreme rhetoric like Rush Limbaugh's might have remained on the fringes if his ideas and attitudes hadn't been echoed by host after host on station after station because with the infrastructure working in your favor, you can bring the extreme into the mainstream and make it look organic.

[music]

Rush Limbaugh was not the first to do what he did, but he was the right guy at the right time when years of deregulation were coming to a head, but because the narrative is that conservative talk radio started with Limbaugh and in many ways was Limbaugh, a lot of people predicted it would end with Limbaugh too.

Phil Boyce: I've heard this narrative now several times since Rush has passed,-

Katie Thornton: Salem's Senior Vice President Phil Boyce.

Phil Boyce: -that talk radio is over without Rush Limbaugh.

Katie Thornton: As Phil Boyce knows well, radio still has an enormous reach. Today, without Limbaugh on the dial, it's still the case that 12 of the top 15 talk radio hosts are right-wing.

Phil Boyce: Talk radio will go on. Those of us here at the Salem Radio Network, we built the strongest conservative radio platform on the planet. This battle will continue.

Katie Thornton: Hey, this is Katie, and I have some news to share. We are working on a second season of The Divided Dial. It'll be ready for you in the new year, and we're really excited for you to hear it. We'll still be talking about radio, its power, its promise, sometimes its failed promise, but this season is all about shortwave radio, the way less listened-to, but way farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM. It reaches across vast distances, across continents and national borders.

It was once painted as a utopian international mass communication tool, a sort of Internet, before the Internet, but like the Internet, it also took a turn for the chaotic, and like AM and FM talk radio, it also went to the right, hard, with extremists and cults still finding a home on the shortwaves. Stay tuned, because this season is the untold story of shortwave radio.

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