The Secret to Limbaugh’s Success Is Giving It Away + Consolidation

Clear Channel, the Republican Party and Rush himself would have you believe that the key to his success in radio is due to the popularity of his idiosyncratic conservative viewpoint. But how did he get there? The same way as your friendly corner drug dealer — he gave it away for free.

This is something that folks who’ve watched the radio industry since the 90s know, and I blogged about six years ago:

Rush’s popularity rose in the early 90s at the same time that the fortunes of many radio stations was declining, especially small AM stations. At about the same time Premiere radio networks saw an opportunity and started selling these stations talk programming like Rush and Dr. Laura that was cheaper than these stations even attempting to do their own programming. For its part, Premiere could offer cheap rates to stations because they could leverage the nationwide coverage with their advertisers.

To start with, stations didn’t sign on to carrying Rush because he was so popular and entertaining. No, simply his program was long, relatively consistent and cheap, cheap, cheap.

Media blogger and former Inside Radio contributor Bill Mann reminds us all of this fact with a piece at the Huffington Post, now that Limbaugh’s back in the news as the apparent leader of the Republican party. Mann writes,

Here’s how a barter deal works: To launch the show, Limbaugh’s syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks — the same folks who syndicate wingnut du jour Glen Beck — gave Limbaugh’s three hours away — that’s right, no cash — to local radio stations, mostly in medium and smaller markets, back in the early 1990′s.

So, a local talk station got Rush’s show for zilch. In exchange, Premiere took for itself much of the local station’s available advertising time (roughly 15 minutes an hour) and packed the show with national ads it had already pre-sold.

He adds that his sources indicate that many small market stations are still paying nothing or next-to-nothing to air old Rushy.

The point that Mann doesn’t get to is the close relationship between ownership and political programming. It’s all the more relevant now while Limbaugh and his imitators keep crying wolf about the red herring of highly improbably revival of the Fairness Doctrine. I’ve always thought it unfortunate that many liberals and progressives have pinned hopes on resuscitating the Doctrine as a way to stem the tide of right-wing hate broadcasting. That’s because the Doctrine almost never worked the way they’d hope it would, mostly being used by political or commercial rivals to get at each other.

More importantly, while the rise of Limbaugh was certainly helped along by the absence of the Fairness Doctrine, the most potent force was the 1996 Telecom Act which removed the national radio ownership cap. That allowed Jacor Broadcasting to buy up an unprecedented 169 stations (sound quaint now, doesn’t it) before the ink on the Act was dry. Then a year later Jacor bought Rush’s syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks. Not long after that Jacor was acquired by Clear Channel, which would go on to own a peak of over 1200 stations.

While not every Limbaugh station was or is owned by Clear Channel, a very significant majority are, especially in major markets. While Clear Channel has made tentative steps into the liberal/progressive radio programming arena, by and large its overwhelming conservative bent has reflected the politics of its owners and founders.

Put simply: it’s the ownership, stupid.

Clever marketing (who can argue with free) taking advantage of the AM band’s poor fortunes in the early 90s combined with rapid consolidation created the Rush Limbaugh machine we know today. If Jacor and Clear Channel’s management had a liberal political bent, would Rush be the giant he is now? Hard to say, since not too many liberals head up companies like Clear Channel. But what we can’t lose sight of is the fact that liberals didn’t own Clear Channel, and the path to talk radio dominance was bought and paid for, just like payola, only technically legal.

FCC Chair Choice Sparks Hope for Net Neutrality, Other Issues Less Clear

Last month Matthew Lasar dug up info on this mysterious Julius Genachowski whose name starting circulating as a candidate for Obama’s FCC Chairman. Late Monday night the news broke that Genachowski is slated to be Obama’s nominee for the job. As Matthew noted in his Ars Technica article yesterday, the public interest community is responding positively to this news, primarily based upon Genachowski’s work on Obama’s “Technology and Innovation” plan. Given that candidate Obama was specific in his support for Network Neutrality, the hope inspired by Genchowski’s likely nomination appears to be more well founded than any other news on the Net Neutrality front in the last year.

However, much is still unknown about Genachowski’s views on media issues, like ownership concentration and indecency enforcement. He was an assistant to Clinton-appointed FCC Chairman Reed Hundt in the 1990s, and we might learn a little bit about Genachowski by looking at his former boss’ tenure at the Commission. With regard to media ownership, Hundt opposed lifting the nationwide radio ownership cap. The lifting of the cap–which brought on the Clear Channel era–happened with the passing of the Telecomm Act of 1996 by Congress, signed by President Clinton, and was not decided by the Hundt FCC. Hundt was also a proponent of children’s programming requirements, while also pushing for indecency fines against the likes of Howard Stern.

We’re sure to learn more about Genachowski’s views on a whole panoply of communication issues when he goes up for confirmation by the Senate. Here’s hoping that his apparently progressive outlook on Net Neutrality is combined with the willingness to put the brakes on the Bush FCC’s full-speed gallop on loosening media ownership limits. I must admit that ensuring a free and open internet, along with enacting policies to stimulate high-speed broadband build-out really should be the top priority for media and telecomm, above all.

With the lessons learned from the 1996 Telecomm Act and the ill-considered experiment of taking away common carrier status from internet (therefore creating the need for Net Neutrality) there exists a blueprint for creating a much more vibrant, diverse and free media ecology.

mediageek radioshow for 11 December 2008: Looking Behind the Curtain at the Tribune Bankruptcy

Mitchell Szczepanczyk from Chicago Media Action joins to discuss the Dec. 8 filing for bankruptcy by the Tribune Company. Mitchell has been watching Tribune for many years now, since the company is a major media player both in the Chicago area and nationally. So he has some longitudinal perspective often lacking in press reports.

Download/Podcast:

mediageek 11 December 2008 broadcast quality mp3

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On Tonight’s Radioshow: Breaking Down the Tribune Bankruptcy

Over at Chicago Media Action Mitchell Szczepanczyk has written a concise “Chicago Citizen Activist’s Guide to the Tribune Bankruptcy” that makes simple work of untangling the how and why the Tribune company is in the financial dumps:

The Tribune debt didn’t just happen. It happened because Zell used the debt to buy the company.

Why did Zell buy the company? Because a Tribune shareholder revolt in the summer of 2006 demanded a change of ownership, and the following spring they got it.

Why did Tribune shareholders revolt? Because the Tribune thought that by 2006 they would be rolling in cash for having a bunch of TV-newspaper duopolies. They banked their future on it. And for good reason: The Tribune already owned four such duopolies across America, and what, you were expecting media concentration to stop or something? Are you some kind of anti-market communist freak?

Mitchell will be my guest on the radioshow tonight (9 PM WNUR 89.3 FM, Evanston-Chicago, IL) to talk more in depth about the greed, incompetence, arrogance and myopia that led to so many job losses, eroded journalism and who-knows-what-more.

I’m working on my own piece triggered by the Tribune bankruptcy, but more broadly aimed at the rotten outcome of the post-1996 consolidation era. Some observers, free-marketeers and big media apologists are now claiming that such disasters as Clear Channel going private equity and all these bankruptcies are evidence that we don’t need ownership regs, because clearly the market is acting to correct the excesses of consolidation: See, now these big consolidated behemoths will be broken back down into littler pieces.

But what they fail to account for is the real human toll — the lost jobs, the lost public service, the diminished local content, news and information.