Conservative commentators may be cackling about the failure of Air America radio, trying to make it into an indicator for both the inherent weakness of liberal-leaning radio and liberal politics. But any reasoned analysis of the radio industry demonstrates that neither is the case. Rush Limbaugh, in particular, and the rest of the nation’s most popular conservative hosts owe much of their success to first-mover advantages taken before and after the Telecom Act of 1996 completely changed the business of radio. The fact that they are politically conservative is less important than the cleverness, deviousness and luck of the companies that made it happen.
Fundamentally, Air America was a mediocre idea, poorly executed. Make that, disasterously executed. As former Crossfire co-host and current talk radio host Bill Press notes, Air America was insufficiently funded from the very beginning and
Even before its launch, it was taken over by a con artist who was later convicted on un-related charges of business fraud. Managers spent money lavishly on talent and studios, while generating little advertising income….
Except for Jon Sinton, few of their executives had ever worked in talk radio. In many ways, it was amateur hour from the beginning.
Putting aside even that inauspicious start, any new radio network started in 2004 would have faced an uphill battle, regardless of its political leanings. Simply put, timing was not on Air America’s side.
He'll trade you a 3-hour show for 15 minutes of ad time.
By comparison, let’s examine
Premiere Radio Networks, which is the largest radio syndicate in the country. And while not explicitly conservative in the same way that Air America espoused itself as liberal, Premiere is home to the nation’s most highly-rated conservative hosts, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck (along with liberal Randi Rhodes). There are many commentators who would argue that the success of Premiere and its roster of talent springs primarily from the sheer popularity of conservative views, especially on AM talk radio.
That may be how it looks today, but let’s turn back the clock to a time before AM talk equaled all-conservative, all the time. 1988 was the year when Rush Limbaugh’s program first went national with the support of former ABC Radio executive Edward McLaughlin’s newly founded EFM Media Management. While the radio business was stable, at the time AM radio was having a tougher go of it, relative to FM, which offered higher fidelity for music, the mainstay of radio programming for the last quarter century.
It’s a simple fact that Limbaugh’s program grew quickly, reaching a nationwide listenership of two million in 1990. But the question that doesn’t get asked so often is, how did he get there?
Bill Mann, a former contributor to Inside Radio, reminded us just last year:
[a] little-known practice in broadcast syndication called a “barter deal.” (Barter deals were briefly mentioned in Michael Wolff’s first-rate recent piece on Rush in Vanity Fair).
Here’s how a barter deal works: To launch the show, Limbaugh’s syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks [then EFM] — 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.
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