517- The Divided Dial

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That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've ever flipped through the radio dial, not satellite, not podcasts, but good old fashioned AM and FM radio, you may have noticed something. First of all, Don't Stop Believin' still gets a shocking amount of airtime. It's a great song, but maybe culture should evolve. But also, when it comes to talk radio, a lot of it sounds kind of the same. Just be on this highway for a while. I think it's a good time to see what's on the radio. SPEAKER_22: That is Katie Thornton, reporter and friend of the show and total radio nerd. She started working behind the scenes at radio stations when she was just a teenager. SPEAKER_06: Whenever I go on road trips like this one earlier this year from Minneapolis down to Memphis or even just sitting around at home, I always let the radio be my companion. SPEAKER_17: But for the years I've spent surfing the radio dial, it's always been clear that on talk radio, one style and one political perspective tends to dominate. SPEAKER_16: I'm going to keep surfing now. SPEAKER_19: Hello and welcome to the Glenn Beck program. This hour, we have Nikki Haley on. SPEAKER_17: Right wing talk radio is everywhere. Across the U.S., it's not uncommon for talk radio in cities and small towns alike to sound like this. Racial profiling is good for your health. SPEAKER_08: With the COVID pandemic, gender confusion is being driven by societal mania. SPEAKER_06: Drill, build a Keystone pipeline, deport illegals, build the wall, defy the federal government. As of this fall, 17 of the country's 20 biggest radio talk hosts were conservative. SPEAKER_17: Only one was progressive. And that matters because broadcast radio is still a really important medium. It has a higher reach than television. It's nearly neck and neck with social media for how Americans get their news. And in studies, it often ranks as the media format that Americans trust the most. SPEAKER_22: Katie has just released a new five part podcast series with WNYC is on the media about how one side of the political spectrum came to dominate broadcast radio and how one company is using the airwaves to launch a right wing media empire. Katie's series is called The Divided Dial and it's out now. Today on our show, we wanted to talk with Katie about some of the little known history behind how we got such lopsided airwaves. OK, Katie, where do we start? SPEAKER_17: Well, to get into the meat of our story about how the radio dial once had more diverse perspectives and how that arrangement was undone, I want to start in a time when radio sounded pretty different than it does today. Just pour it in from around the nation. It all comes into your Goodwill station. SPEAKER_10: WDIA presents the award winning feature Brown America Speaks. In the middle of the last century, the U.S. radio dial was a rare, publicly accessible space that was integrated. SPEAKER_17: I hadn't really thought of it as a place that could or couldn't be integrated, but it makes so much sense. SPEAKER_22: I mean, you could go to the radio and hear thoughts and conversation and music of people that were from different places and different races and different backgrounds. Right. On some stations, a variety of voices could be heard. There was black talk radio and music, some religious shows, some union stations, but it was far from perfect. SPEAKER_17: In the mid 1900s, most radio stations were still white owned, largely because at first the government wouldn't even grant broadcast licenses to black or Jewish Americans. And in the middle of the century, there was one movement in particular that was finding it hard to get airtime. Mark Lloyd, professor and former associate general counsel at the FCC, is going to tell us more. SPEAKER_23: The folks who had money and made determinations about what got on television or radio were interested in, they were not interested in the appeals of Martin Luther King. SPEAKER_22: I can't say I'm surprised that the early civil rights movement was not getting much airtime back then. Exactly. Unfortunately, it's not very surprising, though I should say this was the golden age of black radio with really popular DJs across the country using their influence to promote civil rights and to spread the word about demonstrations and marches. SPEAKER_17: But there were a lot of white owned stations who were determined not to air black voices. And this was especially true in the south, but in the north as well. They weren't interested in, you know, what it was that Thurgood Marshall had to say about the Brown v. Board of Education and how it was being implemented in schools. SPEAKER_23: That's not what they wanted to hear. SPEAKER_17: Mark isn't mentioning Thurgood Marshall out of nowhere. In 1955, an incident involving Marshall actually kicked off a legal saga that would prove to be a revolution for radio. The future Supreme Court Justice Marshall had successfully argued Brown v. Board, which desegregated schools, and that fall in 1955, he was interviewed on NBC. The program was sent out to NBC affiliate stations, but one of those stations, a joint radio and TV station called WLBT in Mississippi, decided they didn't want to run it and they cut the feed. SPEAKER_22: Wow. And so this was this ideologically motivated interruption. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, yeah, absolutely it was. The manager of the station was an avowed white supremacist. And this was not the only time WLBT refused to cover the civil rights movement or even just air the voices of black Americans. SPEAKER_23: Black folks in Mississippi and in the Jackson, Mississippi area, which were roughly 40 percent of the population, were not allowed to even buy time on the station. And so the folks in the local area were hearing one particular perspective about the civil rights movement. They weren't hearing both sides. SPEAKER_17: This continued into the 1960s at WLBT. In 63, they cut the NBC feed during coverage of a lunch counter sent in and repeatedly refused to let civil rights leaders appear on the station. SPEAKER_23: WLBT was just one station, but there were many stations in the south that did the same thing. And there were stations in the north that did pretty much the same thing. SPEAKER_17: In the 1960s, the lack of media coverage was so pervasive that civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King started explicitly calling out the lack of media attention and asking allies to help get coverage. And after this call goes out, a liberal minded church group, the United Church of Christ, ends up working with activists, many of whom had long fought for coverage themselves, often unsuccessfully, to try to get more airtime. And to do this, they decided to use some tools that the government themselves had created. All right. So what are those tools and when were they created? SPEAKER_17: OK, so flashback to the 1920s and the emergence of something called the public interest mandate. Basically, when radio was new, a ton of people wanted to broadcast the demand for space on the dial outstripped supply. So to narrow the field, the federal government says that any station using the public airwaves needs to serve the public interest. SPEAKER_21: So what do they mean by the public interest? SPEAKER_17: Yeah, right. It's like super vague, right? Yeah. But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War Two. They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they didn't want U.S. radio stations to become propaganda outlets. And so in 1949, the FCC basically says to stations, in order to serve the public, you need to give airtime to coverage of current events and you have to include multiple perspectives in your coverage. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the fairness doctrine. So it's the 50s and 60s, the stations, they're cutting NBC coverage of the civil rights movement. SPEAKER_22: And it's not just morally dubious. It's actually against the policies of the FCC. Exactly right. So civil rights activists decided to put that to the test, and they ended up challenging WLBT's license for repeatedly denying them airtime. SPEAKER_17: At first, the FCC dismissed the case, but then the activists sued the FCC and they won. And eventually, years later, a federal court decided that WLBT could stay on the air, but their license would be transferred to a nonprofit, multiracial group of broadcasters. Wow. That's huge. Yeah. SPEAKER_22: So this case ended up having impact beyond the station, right? Like, obviously, the problem of racist, one-sided coverage went beyond just WLBT. Right. And this case actually had enormous repercussions for the radio and TV industries. They were both overseen by the FCC. SPEAKER_17: And there were a few really big things that this case did over the course of its many year back and forth. First of all, just by accepting the case, the court set a really important precedent. The ruling gave local communities the power to challenge licenses, radio and television licenses across the country. SPEAKER_17: So for the first time, people, common citizens, could legally and successfully challenge licenses if they thought a broadcaster wasn't following the FCC's rules, like serving the public interest and being fair. So it wasn't just the FCC, like, looking for violators and then therefore, like, challenging licenses. People actually took the power in their own hands to challenge licenses around the country. SPEAKER_22: Yeah. Yes, exactly. People could write to stations saying they weren't being balanced in their coverage and asking for airtime for certain issues. SPEAKER_17: And now all of a sudden, the station actually felt pressure to listen to them. Huh. And I'm assuming this makes broadcasters really nervous, especially the gross ones that are anti-civil rights. SPEAKER_22: Yes, it does. And that brings us to some of the other industry changing things that the WLBT case did. SPEAKER_17: As it was going through the courts and especially after it was decided that the license would be transferred, broadcasters were worried about their licenses getting called into question. So the FCC starts giving broadcasters recommendations of how they can avoid that same fate, how they can satisfy that longstanding, vague requirement to serve the public interest. And they really start pushing this thing called ascertainment. Assertainments were when people in local communities were interviewed by station officials and people who were never asked before. SPEAKER_23: You know, what do you think ought to be on radio? What do you think ought to be on TV? Now they were being asked these questions. This was done by radio stations and television stations, commercial stations, public stations across the country. SPEAKER_22: You know, this seems so simple and so revolutionary at the same time, like just ask people they want to hear about and maybe that would shape the broadcasting accordingly. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, it was pretty revolutionary. Like people who worked in radio and TV, which were both overseen by the FCC, were literally going into church basements and women's shelters and asking about the issues that people wanted to be covered. Within a handful of years, the FCC would actually come to require this process, and they would also come to more or less require that all stations, even stations that played mostly music, which was a lot of stations, run some small amount of educational programming. So as all this was shaping up in the late 60s and the early 70s, the radio was changing because people had a say now. SPEAKER_23: And as the stations began to understand that if they did not begin to follow these guidelines, if they didn't follow the fairness doctrine, if they didn't do these ascertainment reports, then local communities would challenge their licenses. SPEAKER_17: People did challenge broadcast licenses, but often the threat alone was enough to get stations to pay attention. In the 1960s, Boron, the civil rights movement started getting more on air coverage on radio and TV. And when people started hearing and seeing civil rights activists getting attacked by police dogs and brutally harassed by white residents, it helped increase support for the movement. SPEAKER_22: Right. I mean, the fairness doctrine works when you hear perspectives, multiple perspectives, you actually learn and change. Yeah, like media exposure. SPEAKER_17: That's a good thing to know. Very helpful. And, you know, coming into the 1970s now, people continued to use the airwaves to talk about all sorts of political and cultural issues that were important to them. SPEAKER_05: To my black brothers in the United States of America, I say simply that your dilemma as a historical advantage of people is the same as mine. SPEAKER_17: You could turn on the radio and hear a broadcast about black history or indigenous solidarity. This is John Trudell inviting you to Indian land radio, Indian land Alcatraz Island. SPEAKER_07: Realizing that I was gay and finding it. SPEAKER_17: There were gay and lesbian shows, shows about agriculture. SPEAKER_13: I raised about 80 acres of corn. SPEAKER_17: Whatever potential listeners said was important to them. SPEAKER_23: This is this was the time when we really began to see news and public affairs programs become really important in the American culture. SPEAKER_21: This is getting into the radio I really like. And it really represents a really big shift. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a really big moment. SPEAKER_17: All of these changes result in what Mark calls broadcasting's public interest moment, where he says there was an explosion of news shows and Sunday morning public affairs shows on radio and TV. This is the era that public broadcasting first got serious federal support. Between the late 60s and late 70s, shows like 60 Minutes start up. Good evening. SPEAKER_09: This is 60 Minutes. It's a kind of a magazine for television, which means it has the flexibility and diversity of a magazine adapted to broadcast journalism. SPEAKER_21: I mean, this sounds so much like somebody trying to describe their podcast. You know, things aren't so different. SPEAKER_17: Totally. But, you know, this was really like a different moment, a changing moment for broadcasters, because newsrooms start to become ever so slightly more integrated. In just a few years, the radio dial and TV band had become much more representative of all that America was. And I want to say conservative voices had long found a pretty solid platform on radio. They were ultimately part of the status quo that many civil rights leaders were pushing against when they took on media reform. But conservative voices are part of this public interest moment, too. You saw right wing watchdogs using the fairness doctrine to get a bunch of airtime to respond to critical news coverage with pro-Nixon content. So this legal battle that started with civil rights leaders ends up providing all sorts of people with tools to increase speech on the air, even folks who might have previously fought against civil rights. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, even them. So conservative voices were definitely on the air, but it was far from the one-sidedness you're liable to hear today. SPEAKER_22: And so why is it the way it is today? Like if it was this mess of conservative voices and new liberal voices and civil rights and even anti-civil rights, like how did we get to the point where one person can talk for two hours with just sort of misinformation and right wing nonsense? Right, right. And two hours like every day across states and across the country. SPEAKER_17: Right. Well, before we get there, which we will get there, let me tell you about one other thing that was turning the radio world on its head in the 1970s. SPEAKER_13: And here's a brand new deluxe AM-FM model, the XF-4 emissary. The difference in reception will leap to the ear. SPEAKER_17: So all of these legal changes coincided with the explosion of FM radio, which overtook AM and listenership in the late 1970s. And what is the significance of FM, you know, for the purposes of this conversation? SPEAKER_22: Basically with AM or amplitude modulation radio, the signal was super buzzy. There's always a sort of ambient hum. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, mmm, constantly. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, totally. It's a little annoying. It's kind of like looking through a dirty window. But then with FM, sound was encoded into radio signals differently. And it was super clean. Like compared to the muck of AM, it was like freshly shined glass. So if you really want high quality, which is like music, you move that over to FM. SPEAKER_22: Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what happened. Music stations rush over to FM. And so for a while, the AM band is kind of floundering. Like, AM needs a unique selling point. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. And that selling point is talk radio. You know, that's what they can do well. SPEAKER_22: Exactly. Exactly. You don't need high fidelity sound. You just talk. So talk radio is pretty much AM's salvation. SPEAKER_17: And that's especially true once this new revolutionary high tech format entered the scene. And that's the call-in show. You're on WOR. Hello? SPEAKER_11: Yes, Bob. I have a problem. What should I do? SPEAKER_15: I don't know. Hello? SPEAKER_21: Okay. So talk to me about call-in shows because I mean, this is just the foundation of radio broadcasting. Talk to me about how that was affected everything. SPEAKER_22: Totally. I mean, now it was just like quintessential radio, basically. Almost sort of kitschy. SPEAKER_17: But at the time, like the seamless call-in show or more or less seamless, I should say, was pretty new. The idea that somebody can hear themselves on the radio by calling in and talking to the host. SPEAKER_19: And I sound so old school at this point, but it really was a revolution. This is Nicole Hemmer. She's an author and scholar of media and conservative movements. SPEAKER_17: And she says this really was a big deal. Like to be able to be part of the media. There had been some call-in shows in the past, like as early as the 1920s. But basically the host would answer the phone and either hold the receiver up to the microphone or they just take the call privately with a live mic and say, oh, OK, OK, listener. So what the caller said was, that's like high art. SPEAKER_16: I totally agree. So Nicole Hemmer says that live national call-in shows, as we know and love them today, became possible because of two technological advances. SPEAKER_17: One, satellite dishes were becoming more and more accessible and affordable, meaning more stations could run a show simultaneously in two different cities for cheaper. And around the same time, there were some changes in long distance telephone technology and the cost of the calls went way down. And 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 listen to the same station, SPEAKER_19: 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. Our phone lines are now open on The Larry King Show. From all time zones, the number to call is 703-685-2177. SPEAKER_11: Thank you very much, Fred Lowry. And it changes the medium because it makes it more interactive and it makes people feel invested in shows because even if they don't call in, SPEAKER_19: they hear people like themselves calling in and they feel like they're being represented on this new talk radio. Yeah, I can see why this is just a huge change because before this, you know, people just consumed media. SPEAKER_22: They did not partake in it. They didn't have the Internet. It's just this was the first time people could hear themselves. Totally. Yeah. The call-in model was kind of astonishingly democratic for the time. SPEAKER_22: So there's FM and AM and call-in shows and there are these policies that are getting more diverse viewpoints on the air. Yeah. So how does this slide us into all conservative all the time? Well, Roman? The Reagan administration came in and then began to eliminate all of those regulations. SPEAKER_23: Reagan came in, all of it was gone. Yeah, it always starts with Reagan. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, go figure. As is often the case, Reagan is the plot's pivot point. SPEAKER_22: So Reagan comes in in 1980 after a decade or so of pretty exciting changes in media. So what exactly did the Reagan administration do? Well, basically, not long after the president took office, SPEAKER_17: Reagan's FCC started killing off all of the policies and guidelines that had been built up during the civil rights era. The FCC made some major changes in how radio stations are run. SPEAKER_17: No more requirements to go out and see what local residents want to hear. No more mandate to run some educational shows. There are no longer limits on the number of commercials a station may play. SPEAKER_23: The FCC also made it harder for people to challenge broadcast licenses. SPEAKER_17: The fairness doctrine was still alive, but without these other policies, it was losing its teeth. SPEAKER_04: The free market will now determine what a station plays. SPEAKER_17: During this era, the number of complaints to the FCC about racial stereotyping and a lack of programming for minority groups both went up. But with public interest guidelines removed or defanged, people just didn't have much recourse. SPEAKER_22: So people like everyday people didn't have nearly as much say in what was on the radio anymore. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, exactly. And coinciding with this decline of public influence was the rise of a new breed of talk show host. Early in the morning, when most of us are still sleeping, there's a madman loose on the Baltimore, Washington airwaves. SPEAKER_18: And anyone with a phone and a thick skin is invited to join in the madness. SPEAKER_22: After the break, the dawn of the American shock. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. 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So after years of this public interest agenda being an animating principle within the FCC, Reagan got into office and basically deregulated the living hell out of broadcasting. And this coincided with the rise of a new, loud, provocative type of radio host. That's right. This was the era of the shock jock. It's basically brash, offensive, high energy disc jockeying. SPEAKER_17: Ma'am, when I get to your age, I hope they shoot me. SPEAKER_14: Oh, I hope so, too. SPEAKER_22: So this is Howard Stern. Yes. The all hail Howard Stern of Sirius XM radio. SPEAKER_17: Yes, that is correct. This is Howard Stern pioneering Shock Jock King. I mean, but Stern, especially when he started, wasn't especially political. I mean, you know, he's become politicized over the years, but he wasn't like a political talk show host. SPEAKER_22: He was just trying to get people's attention. Right, exactly. Just shocking people. SPEAKER_17: Shock jocks were rarely political, especially in the early days. They were mostly just kind of like lewd or gross, shocking, you know. As is in the name. But as that sort of brash new style got popular, it became clear that political talk could bring that shock jock energy, too. SPEAKER_14: My dear, anybody who's programmed like you is per se a racist. Oh, then I'm the guy who's one of a Christian mother. You are. They got me the wrong way. You are committable. Goodbye. 761. SPEAKER_17: This is Alan Berg. He was a liberal talk radio host out of Denver. He got started in the late 1970s and was really taking off in the early 80s. He was Jewish and was known for being pretty vitriolic and calling out racism and bigotry. 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. SPEAKER_15: You think so? Yes, I do. I think you're sick. I think you're pathetic. I think your ability to reason and use any logic is a tragedy. SPEAKER_14: Why don't you put a Nazi on your program and then you'll have somebody... SPEAKER_15: Sir, you are a Nazi by your very own admission. Thanks so much. SPEAKER_14: That's right. You heard it. OK. 861-talk, 861-825. SPEAKER_22: Given what we know about AM and FM talk radio now, this is very surprising to hear. I mean, it's got the in-your-face confrontational talk show vibe, but it's from the opposite side of the political spectrum. SPEAKER_17: Totally. It is surprising. And to paint a picture of how he was received, at one point there's this poll that goes out in Denver that asks residents to name the city's most beloved media personality and its most despised. And Alan Berg won both awards. That's a feat. Yeah, it's kind of incredible. And Alan Berg was super well known. I mean, he was on a huge station. His show could be heard in about 30 different states. SPEAKER_22: But obviously not everyone used their radio platform to call out racism and bigotry. That is true. And a heads up that this next section is going to include some really hateful talk radio. SPEAKER_17: Let me put it to you this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the bloods and the crips without any weapons. SPEAKER_22: OK, here he is. This is Rush Limbaugh. SPEAKER_17: Yes. For the uninitiated, Rush Limbaugh is known for these racist diatribes and also for calling feminists feminazis and for some incredibly homophobic recurring segments for vilifying the poor. You name it, he probably said it. SPEAKER_22: And not to say the obvious, but this is very different from what Alan Berg was doing. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, a lot of people have referred to Alan Berg as a sort of Limbaugh of the left. And it's true, you know, their styles were similar. I mean, their styles may have been similar, but Berg was calling out racism and Limbaugh was literally just spreading racism. SPEAKER_22: Yeah, exactly. It's actually really interesting to look at Limbaugh's trajectory because I think it kind of tells a story in itself. SPEAKER_17: Limbaugh had always been a radio guy, but not always the most successful one. Over almost two decades in radio, he was fired as a deejay from six stations. But during these years, working on and off behind a mic, he noticed something when he talked about politics, which wasn't something he really cared about in his early years. The phones lit up. This was the 1970s and into the 1980s, right as America was experiencing the start of a conservative wave fueled largely by backlash of the civil rights movement and the rise of the religious right. And Rush rode that wave all the way to the host chair. In 1984, a radio station in Sacramento took a chance on Rush and gave him his own show. SPEAKER_22: And this is where he really found his sound. SPEAKER_17: Yes. And while I really don't feel like we need to give Limbaugh much airtime, he had a lot of it in his life, I do think it's important to hear just a bit more of what this sounded like. Because you can hear a lot of similarities to present day talk radio in everything from the conversational, if totally hostile tone, down to the really biting and just abhorrent and false commentary. How many of you guys, in your own experience with women, have learned that no means yes if you know how to spot it? SPEAKER_06: This is hard to listen to. SPEAKER_21: Yeah, it's really hard to listen to. But, you know, Rush's political and cultural rants made phones ring off the hook, ratings soared, and that meant more advertisers. SPEAKER_17: And Limbaugh, from the beginning, was not shy to admit that he was in it first and foremost for money. So he did more of what sold. So we've got Limbaugh and Berg as pretty much polar opposites using a similar style to reach listeners. SPEAKER_22: Yeah, and you can imagine a world where these two fast-talking, in-your-face hosts are duking it out and fighting about politics over the public airwaves. SPEAKER_17: But in 1984, the same year Limbaugh got his start out West, 50-year-old Allen Berg was murdered in his driveway. And I'm going to play you some tape from Berg's home station KOA from the night of his murder. It's from his friend and fellow KOA host Ken Hamblin. It honestly still gets me really choked up, even though I've heard it now dozens of times. 1039 KOA time and I'm still trying to piece information together off the air. SPEAKER_08: I'm finding out that someone passing in a vehicle using a semiautomatic weapon or an automatic weapon, I'm not sure which, fired upon Allen Berg when he was exiting his vehicle in front of his home. To describe how I feel right now, I've got a high-pitched ringing sound in my ears, my head is throbbing, and I can't believe it. SPEAKER_17: Berg was killed by members of a newly formed white supremacist group called The Order, founded by a man named David Lane, who drove the getaway car from the scene of Berg's murder. And remember that caller we heard earlier, the one who Allen Berg called a Nazi by his own admission? That caller was David Lane. Oh my God. Oh my God. SPEAKER_22: So he was like a regular listener and called into the show. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Yeah. He listened, called, talked to Allen Berg, and proceeded to organize his murder. And Lane died in prison in 2007, and he remains a really influential figure in the white supremacist movement of today. I tell you, we used to sit down at lunch, and Allen always used to say, they're out there, but you can't worry about them. SPEAKER_08: They're out there. You can't worry about them. You never know, you know, you never know where the nuts are going to come from, is what he used to say. So you live from day to day. SPEAKER_22: It's just so sad. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. It's really hard to listen to. SPEAKER_22: So at this time, this style of brash political talk at Skinnings team and the left just lost one of its most prominent up and coming voices to white supremacist violence. SPEAKER_17: That's right. And just a few years after that came a change in the national radio landscape that allowed provocative political talk to reach whole new heights. SPEAKER_00: This week, the FCC voted down the fairness doctrine by a vote of four to zero. What do you think this is going to mean for the average consumer of news and information? Various pundits think that eventually it will cut off minority viewpoints that have been using the doctrine to get heard. SPEAKER_22: The fairness doctrine was that piece of policy that required stations to present multiple perspectives on coverage of controversial issues. This is like the cornerstone of why there were multiple voices on the air. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, that's right. In practice, the fairness doctrine had already been weakened when other public interest guidelines went out the window. But this was its formal death blow. SPEAKER_22: And so what was Reagan's and the FCC's basis for getting rid of the fairness doctrine, besides just, you know, a love affair with getting rid of all government regulations? Yeah, basically, the fairness doctrine was built in part on that idea that there weren't enough channels or radio frequencies for everyone who wanted to broadcast to get on the airwaves. SPEAKER_17: So having one of those stations was considered a privilege. And part of what you had to do in exchange for that privilege, they had said, was to present multiple perspectives. But Reagan's FCC points to a new thing called cable television to say that that scarcity argument isn't really relevant anymore. So the idea was that with cable, there are now tons and tons of channels. SPEAKER_22: So if you don't get airtime on one station, you can just go to a different one or you can just make your own. Right. Yeah, that's the idea. SPEAKER_17: But there are some flaws with that argument. First, not everyone had cable. Also, you can't watch cable while you're commuting to work or working on a job site. Plenty of people still relied on radio, not television, for their news, which, you know, is still the case today. SPEAKER_22: Yeah. And also the existence of cable TV doesn't mean there's suddenly more radio frequencies available. Right. Exactly. Like that's another huge flaw in the argument. SPEAKER_17: So describe to me what happens after the fairness doctrine dies. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, well, you know, highly political, often vitriolic talk radio without any counterpoints skyrocketed. And their breakout star was Rush Limbaugh. He talked about the fairness doctrine a lot on his show. You know, he went into national syndication for the first time in 1988, which was the year after the fairness doctrine was eliminated. When lawmakers would try to reinstate the doctrine in the years that followed, a bunch of people on the right would call it the hush rush bill. So for Limbaugh, the end of the fairness doctrine was a permission slip to kind of say whatever he wanted. And there was certainly an appetite for what he was saying. Rush gave voice to the grievances of a lot of people who were resistant to changes in culture and power. And Republican politicians understood that getting in good with Rush meant getting in good with his listeners. Yeah. Yeah. I think I remember President George H.W. Bush literally carrying Rush's bags into the White House when he came for a visit. SPEAKER_17: Right. Right. That is the perfect image. Limbaugh had so much power over elected officials and he inspired a lot of them, too, including this guy. In the 1990s, Rush inspired me to start a radio broadcast of my own. SPEAKER_01: I used to say I was Rush Limbaugh on decaf. And for three hours a day on the airwaves of small town Indiana, I proceeded. And so that is Mike Pence. SPEAKER_22: That is Mike Pence. Yep. Decaf Limbaugh, Mike Pence. SPEAKER_17: He was among the many talk hosts inspired by Limbaugh. And by 1995, about two thirds of political talk leaned right. I mean, two thirds is a lot. It's already really significant. SPEAKER_22: But like you mentioned earlier, now it's almost completely right wing talk radio and often pretty far right, too. Right. And there are a few other steps that helped us get there, including in 1996, something that really tightened the conservative grasp on the airwaves. SPEAKER_17: President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law. Among the many things the 96 Telecom Act did was completely restructure the radio industry. There's a provision that goes into the bill that removes national ownership caps. SPEAKER_20: So, Roman, this is Brian Rosenwald, a media scholar who wrote a book about the Limbaugh era of conservative talk radio. SPEAKER_17: He says that basically since the 1940s, the government had limited the total number of radio stations that a single company could own, both in a single city and nationwide. Those ownership caps had been increasing for years under Reagan, but in 96, that national limit was completely removed. SPEAKER_20: And that ends up triggering massive, massive, like 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 like an individual owner. You either need to get big or get out. This led people who were already at an advantage in the market compound their power. SPEAKER_17: For some perspective, the number of black owned stations was cut by more than half in the years between 1995 and 2012. The numbers have gone up a bit since then, but black Americans still own less than 2 percent of commercial radio stations in the country. And it wreaked havoc on local ownership, too. Here's Mark Lloyd again. SPEAKER_23: We ended up with an operation called Clear Channel that owned over twelve hundred radio stations, which was just unheard of during the public interest moment. The idea that any one entity could own twelve hundred stations. SPEAKER_17: For reference, before 96, Clear Channel, now iHeartMedia, owned 43 stations. It took them less than a decade to get to over twelve hundred. SPEAKER_22: Oh, my goodness. So 43 to twelve hundred stations. That's wild. I mean, you said this helped Rush Limbaugh. How did this help Rush Limbaugh in particular? Well, it helped a lot of big hosts and big radio companies, but I'll let Mark explain what it did for Limbaugh specifically. SPEAKER_17: Well, Clear Channel owned premier radio networks and guess who premier radio networks owned? SPEAKER_23: They own the Rush Limbaugh show. And guess what Clear Channel and the premier radio networks promoted and put on every station they could? Well, they put on the show that they owned, Rush Limbaugh. Of course they did. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, and I should say Clear Channel bought premier in 1998. So Limbaugh found a lot of success before this. But this is an easy way to stay on top and for other radio companies to point to his success and say, see, that's where we should be. So there was this burst of conservative talk hosts who took off in the early 2000s. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Consolidation was already pushing conservative talk radio to the right. So tell me about that, because deregulation, consolidations, these are economic processes. SPEAKER_22: They don't explicitly have to do with programming or programming tastes and what is popular. Yeah. So basically these big radio companies like Clear Channel vertically integrate. SPEAKER_17: They own sometimes hundreds of stations. And rather than finding and paying hundreds of local hosts for time slots on those local stations, they can pump a bunch of money into one high profile host whose show they can air everywhere. That still ends up being cheaper and easier than cultivating and hiring and getting advertisers to back a ton of individual local hosts all over the country. SPEAKER_20: Consolidation and these big corporate ownerships create risk adverse companies, risk adverse executives, executives who want to program something that they know will work. And conservative talk is it. SPEAKER_17: At the same time, a concept called format purity was trickling into talk radio from the music radio world. Basically, program directors started to think that one station should stick with one genre. That way, us fussy listeners would know what to expect and we'd tune in for longer, more TSL, time spent listening. And that would mean more advertising dollars. Radio executives think that there needs to be predictability, 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? SPEAKER_22: So most talk stations see what is working in many of their areas and then they control more stations and then they just, you know, very conservatively put that on there. And therefore, the whole system is taken over, you know, just almost by force to represent one voice. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. I mean, the limbo model was seen as a good, safe business move. 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. SPEAKER_20: And then they're like, OK, all conservative, all political, all nationally syndicated or mostly nationally syndicated. That's how we make our money. So conservative talk, you know, it comes to dominate. But does anyone on the left have to sort of, you know, counterstrike? SPEAKER_22: Like there's just, you know, there's no reason why this couldn't work on the left. Yeah. You know, kind of. The big attempt to counter the right to hold on talk radio came when George W. Bush was running for reelection in 2004. SPEAKER_17: It was a project called Air America. SPEAKER_22: I remember it well. I was already in radio when Air America started. And this is like where, you know, Rachel Maddow really took off and like Chuck D. from Public Enemy was the host and one of the hosts that I actually worked with at K.L.W. in San Francisco left Public Radio to go work at Air America. So, yeah, it was it was a it was a big deal in that moment. Wow. Yeah. But Air America had some problems from the start. SPEAKER_17: A lot of hosts just didn't really have backgrounds in radio and like they didn't have great chemistry on their shows. And they also just didn't really do like a great job of speaking to listeners across the country. Just wasn't really great radio, I guess. But importantly, beyond just the content, Air America also suffered from the exact same system that was giving Rush Limbaugh a boost. Remember, by this point, Clear Channel, with over a thousand stations, owned the company that owned the Rush Limbaugh show. Air America didn't own any stations, so they had to convince existing stations to run their progressive talk shows. Which I imagine wasn't easy with a lot of stations already airing conservative talk program from morning till night. SPEAKER_22: Right. Air America went bankrupt in 2006 and were totally off the air by 2010. SPEAKER_17: It's worth noting that there were other individual cases where liberal talk show hosts had success in some markets. But in general, the big companies just didn't really run them. They could afford not to. SPEAKER_22: And I can imagine, like as a liberal listener, you know, just hitting a wall of conservative talk when you turn on AM radio, you just begin to not look for it anymore. And then there's this refuge inside of public radio, which gives you some nuanced and complex views and longer stories. And therefore, then things just stay the way they are, because why would any liberal upstart, you know, find purchase in that landscape? Because I'm not looking for it. And I've given up so long ago that it doesn't really matter. Yeah, definitely. I think that's a huge part of it. But a lot of people still rely on talk radio for their news and information and entertainment. SPEAKER_17: And so those folks are getting pretty much one viewpoint. This is also interesting because throughout the history of radio in America, there have been decisions that have helped increase the diversity of viewpoints and the voices and the airwaves and decisions that have lessened that diversity. SPEAKER_22: And that wasn't always stated as the goal of the decision. I'm sure it was just like free markets and whatever kind of nonsense they said. But that was the impact. It lessened diversity. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it was a decision to put policies in place that could help increase perspectives on the airwaves. SPEAKER_17: And it was a decision to do away with them like the market is not neutral or natural, like leaving things to the market is also a design choice. The erasure of those civil rights era broadcast victories that gave some local input and local control, the end of the Fairness Doctrine, allowing massive consolidation within the industry. Those decisions helped make it so that the farthest reaching voices didn't need to be the most representative ones. And a voice like Rush Limbaugh, whose rhetoric was extreme, didn't have to speak to everybody or even a majority. But with behind the scenes structures working in your favor, you can bring the extreme into the mainstream and make it look organic. But it's not organic. Like you said, it's totally designed. I mean, these are decisions that people make and you could make different decisions if you wanted a different outcome. SPEAKER_22: All this stuff is so fascinating to me. I love radio. I got into this business because I love radio so much and I live through much of this history. What are some of the other things you're talking about on your series for On the Media? Yes. So the series, The Divided Dial, takes an even deeper dive into how the right captured American talk radio and how one company is quietly launching a conservative media empire from the airwaves. SPEAKER_17: We talk about everything from the religious rights role and shaping what we hear on the radio to whether or not repeatedly broadcasting falsehoods is legal. As we said at the beginning, radio is still an incredibly influential format. But, you know, it's it's you and I maybe know this because we both sort of got into this work because we love radio. I started working in radio as well. But radio is not a particularly glamorous medium. And especially for mainstream media outlets, they don't often report on what happens on the radio dial and just logistically like, as you mentioned, hours and hours a day, 24 seven. So many talkers. It's hard to call through. It's hard to fact check. It's hard to parse, hard to analyze. And it ends up getting overlooked despite it still having a ton of power. SPEAKER_22: Thank you, Katie, for bringing us this story and for the rest of the series. I can't wait to listen to it. Yeah. Thank you so much, Roman. It was great to talk with you about this. SPEAKER_22: Ninety nine percent invisible was produced this week by Katie Thornton with help from Emmett Fitzgerald and Abigail Keel, edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Amita Kanatra, music by our director of sound, Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Vivian Lay, Christopher Johnson, Martine Gonzalez, Chris Berube, Lasha Madon, Jason De Leon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. So thanks this week to Katja Rogers, executive producer of On the Media and tireless editor of Katie's series, Katie Thornton series, The Divided Dial is produced by WNYC's On the Media with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. You can find On the Media at On the Media dot org. Four of the series, five episodes are out now. The finale is out soon. It's available in the On the Media feed wherever you get your podcasts. And you can follow along with Katie's other work on her website. It's Katie Thornton dot com or on Instagram. It's Katie Thornton. The 99 percent invisible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence like 13 years ago and has never changed. It's that good. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P.I. org. Run Instagram, Reddit and TikTok to find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99 P.I. at 99 P.I. dot org. SPEAKER_12: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto home or life insurance. It's empathy because at Amika your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98 percent of our customers stay with us every year. Amika. Empathy is our best policy. SPEAKER_24: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says make delivery order. McDelivery in the McDonald's app. SPEAKER_12: Participating McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than restaurants delivering the fees may apply. SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today. Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops Toucan Sam. Welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. SPEAKER_02: And it's fruit loops. Just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah. Fruit. No. It's fruit loops. The same way you say stew do. SPEAKER_03: That's not how we say it. Fruit loops. Find the loopy side.