Talk radio, anger and advertising
New Majority finds that there’s a reason why conservative talk radio is becoming more extreme, and it’s not the Obama presidency. Rather, it’s the same thing depressing all media right now: a collapse in advertising revenues. Excerpt:
One of the most civil voices in talk radio, Michael Medved, explains the economic pressure upon the industry. He told NewMajority: “In this [economic] environment, you have something of a push to be outrageous, to be on the fringe, because what you’re desperately competing for is… P-1 listeners [those who tune in most frequently]. The percentage of people on the fringe who are P-1s is quite high,” he explained. As a result, talk radio hosts are feeling more pressure than usual to yell harder, scream louder, and insult further. Talk shows “are fighting for an ever- smaller pie, [which means that] you’ve got to be even louder about it because you’re trying to get the attention of an ever-smaller niche,” said Medved.
Dan McCarthy of The American Conservative has some good thoughts in this vein, regarding ideological extremism and mass media. Excerpt:
I’m skeptical of claims that all human beings have a more or less equally powerful need for faith. Clearly some people are more superstitious than others. Among religious believers, some are theologically inclined and others are mystically and emotionally inclined. Among nonbelievers, some buy into parascientific New Age mumbo-jumbo or imbue science with a religious aura, and others are more epistemically humble. Some number of people do, however, have a compelling need indeed to believe in improbable things that conform to ideological preferences. The toppling of corrupt authorities doesn’t do anything to decrease the credulous and authoritarian tendencies of this subset — it only unleashes those tendencies to find wilder, more ideologically satisfying objects.
[Snip]
There may be a vicious circle here where distrust of flawed mainstream authorities leads to trust in flawed fringe authorities, which in turn produces more alienation from the mainstream (I’m not just talking about the center-left media and government here, but mainstream as in ordinary, non-ideological people). The way out of this cycle of paranoia would be to burnish some less flawed, more-or-less mainstream authorities — a church? disinterested scholarship? anything could do the trick. But once you’ve sunk deep enough into the belief that you can’t trust anyone who questions an anti-mainstream belief, you can only trust people whom nobody else trusts, getting out of the hole becomes impossible. At that point, your ideology has redefined up as down, so that attempting to climb out means only digging deeper.
Sunday August 9, 2009
