NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I started working at 77 WABC in New York City in the summer of 2002, and although it had been 15 years since the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine requiring radio stations to provide listeners with “balanced” programming, the doctrine’s legacy wasn’t hard to see.
The coveted morning-drive-time slot was occupied by co-hosts Curtis Sliwa, the activist and co-founder of the Guardian Angels, and liberal criminal-defense lawyer Ron Kuby. Though the “golden microphone” into which Rush Limbaugh intoned was still in the studios, by then Limbaugh himself usually wasn’t. Iconic left-wing broadcaster Lynn Samuels still maintained a pile of vinyl records in the production studio where I spent most of my time, and she still occasionally did battle with the station’s increasingly right-leaning callers. In short, the station still played host to political conflict, but not the life-or-death sort in which your very identity is on the line. The mission statement wasn’t to change the world, though that would have been a lovely fringe benefit. It was, for the most part, to have fun.
That ideal feels quaint today. A variety of forces have conspired to suffocate it. Two decades of increased regulatory interference, technological innovation, societal disruption, and an evolving political culture on the right have made that kind of radio into an unprofitable proposition. Carmakers are dropping AM radio from their dashboards, rendering this once ubiquitous and complimentary feature into a pricy upgrade. The demise of the AM band as a lively, provocative alternative to anything that America’s homogenized corporate culture is prepared to risk their shareholders’ assets on may be inevitable.
For a while, AM (amplitude modulation) retained its capacity to shock and delight listeners even as social and technological forces colluded to throttle the life out of its chief competitor, FM (frequency modulation). In the early 2000s, the FCC amended its schedule of fines meted out to the bawdy hosts populating the FM band who danced along the line dividing decency from obscenity. The syndicator and the network became liable for what were once individual indiscretions. In 2005, an act of Congress augmenting fines for “airing raunchy content” altered programming directors’ calculus. Even as the advent of streaming services threatened the music-format model, the upshot of being a jukebox beat the risk of tempting the regulators.
Through it all, AM persevered. Its primary competitors, by then broadcasting via orbital satellites, had broken free from the morality codes imposed on them by congressionally sanctioned vice squads. But the content beaming down from the thermosphere had a national audience and was, therefore, national in its scope. The homogenized product it produced led AM programmers to go the opposite route: hyperlocal content that was unique to a particular region, which had the added advantage of skirting polarizing issues that might scandalize the audience. AM thereby emphasized the competitive advantage but, more importantly, played it safe.
The biggest names that were grandfathered into this new world and retained their syndication deals endured, but attrition thinned their numbers. Art Bell, the host of the delightfully paranoid Coast to Coast AM, died in 2017. Jay Thomas followed him months later. Still a fixture at the microphone despite prolonged absences amid invasive cancer treatments, Don Imus died in 2019. Even before the pandemic killed the daily commute, AM radio was in decline.
And yet the warm, nostalgic signals bouncing off the ionosphere from far-distant points retained their charm. What they increasingly lacked, particularly after Donald Trump’s personality consumed the conservative movement, was unpredictability.
Previously, listening to conservative talk radio felt like dialing in to an illicit opposition being broadcast from an undisclosed location. It wasn’t guerrilla, exactly, not in the ways its critics believed — roiling precincts populated by humorless revolutionaries who were as likely to recruit you as liquidate you. It was boisterous and brash. It had no allegiance but to being antipodal.
Toward the end of the last decade, the AM dial followed the same trajectory as the conservative movement. Its commitment to iconoclastic contrarianism evolved from a hostility to effete sensibilities abroad in the culture toward an internecine attack on those sensibilities where they prevailed inside the conservative movement. Donald Trump’s ascension put an end to the permanent revolution on the right. The order of the day soon became reinforcing his narratives, his grievances.
An ethos that was perfectly compatible with attacking George W. Bush for his departures from conservative orthodoxy transubstantiated into a protective instinct. Unpredictability was replaced with monotony. Right-wing talk radio stopped feeling like Revenge of the Nerds, a band of plucky upstarts contemptuous of the pieties that echoed off the walls in the halls of power. Instead, it started feeling like Downfall, an extended defensive crouch rallying around the powers that be — retrograde maneuvers that only prolonged the inevitable.
Right-wing (even conservative) alternative media was still a growth industry at the time of Rush Limbaugh’s death in 2021. But the business he helped pioneer was necrotizing. AM listenership statistics are notoriously opaque, but Nielsen’s research showed that the audience was rapidly aging. Only 8 percent of regular talk-radio listeners were “key demo” — 25- to 54-year-olds with disposable income. News-radio revenues declined precipitously in the years immediately preceding the pandemic. The lifestyle-altering epidemic accelerated the trends already afflicting a medium that depends on habit-forming, personality-driven programming. But this fate wasn’t the inexorable result of technological innovation. Content was always king, and the content is what has changed.
In the summer of 2002, the acrid odor of singed plastic, and of death, that wafted over Ground Zero for months still lingered in New Yorkers’ memories. The post-9/11 environment is what drew me to that office at 2 Penn Plaza. No place in media achieved news/talk radio’s singular balance between solemnity and riotous flippancy, between the feel of living through history and still somehow standing outside it, mocking its excesses and critiquing its self-seriousness.
The stomach for that irreverence is all too rare in AM programming now, and its audiences now flock to the podcasts keeping that spirit alive. AM can reinvent itself again if it can summon the courage to challenge the industry’s conventional wisdom and the demands of an audience in extremis. But time is running short.
Today, legendary talkers are giving up the ghost, flipping from news/talk to sports/talk and, inexorably, back to the jukebox from whence they came, with dollops of flavorless pablum provided by a host — if there even is a host — who lives in abject fear of ever expressing an even mildly controversial thought. What’s your favorite ice-cream flavor? They’re taking your calls at the bottom of the hour.