One of the things I wonder about when right-wing radio hosts force the resignation of government officials or when the Washington Post admits it takes conservative criticism more seriously than liberal criticism is the extent to which right-wing radio influences American politics and media coverage. I *do* believe that reporters and editors are keenly aware that if they piss off the right, it means all of Rush’s 15 million listeners will be on their ass, whereas any reaction from the left will be more diffuse. On the other hand, right-wing radio waged an anti-McCain jihad in the 2008 Republican primaries, to no avail. I happen to believe things would have been different in 2008 if the official candidate of right-wing radio hadn’t been a Harvard-educated Mormom millionaire who bragged about shooting varmints, so we’ll see if things are different in 2012.
I decided to look at some numbers about the portion of conservatives who listen to right-wing radio. According to Arbitron Rush Limbaugh has an audience of about 14 million viewers, with Hannity at 13 and Beck at 8. There’s a lot of overlap in the audiences, buti it’s probably safe to say that the total number of people who listen to one or more of these shows regularly is over 20 million. It’s probably also safe to assume that nearly all of the listeners are over the age of 18, i.e. are of voting age, and that nearly all identify as conservative. The total number of Americans of voting age is around 230 million. The proportion of Americans who identify as conservative is about 34%, so that means the number of self-described conservatives of voting age is just under 80 million. Thus, around a quarter (a maybe more) of conservatives of voting age listen to right-wing radio regularly.
That’s a pretty astounding number. It means that Republican officials are in no position to criticize Rush, Beck at al. without paying political consequences.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
This is so true. I know a former reporter for the Houston Chronicle and that’s exactly how it was described. The Chron was generally in the tank for Dubya but if their reporting ever strayed from orthodoxy, they were deluged with complaints. That upset the crap out of the new section heads who were leaned on by their corporate overlords to not lose any more subscribers. In turn, that leaning flowed down to the reporters.
MikeJ
Lonesome Rhodes: This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep!
Marcia Jeffries: Sheep?
Lonesome Rhodes: Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers – everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don’t know it yet, but they’re all gonna be ‘Fighters for Fuller’. They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I’m gonna be the power behind the president – and you’ll be the power behind me!
wvng
I think you underestimate the influence, because even republicans who do not personally listen to RW Talks or watch Faux News associate with and trust those who do. I would suspect that the circle of influence is at least three times the group that has direct exposure.
BTW, I have no problem labeling these people republicans, but think the term “conservative” should be applied to people who are, in fact, conservative and aren’t batshit crazy radical insane.
I would include Bruce Bartlett and Colin Powell in the conservative category.
burnspbesq
And radio could be an equally powerful force for non-evil, if the people who run the industry thought it was in their economic interest to make it happen. Here in SoCal, for example, we’ve seen Spanish-language DJs mobilize hundreds of thousands of people on 24 hours notice for immigration-reform rallies.
But radio is all about delivering ears to advertisers, and whatever else you want to say about him, Rush is really, really good at that.
Max
If that is the game that Republicans have to play, there is slim hope of them nominating someone who can win a Presidential general election. The 2008 election showed that the extremes, on both sides, turn off the center.
Baba Booey!
DougJ
I think you underestimate the influence
Could be. I was trying to establish a reasonable minimum.
JenJen
I’ve never been one of those people who took Rush Limbaugh’s influence (or any of the radio gasbags, for that matter) seriously. And Fox News kicks ass in the ratings, fine. Who cares? Doesn’t translate into votes, because what people always forget is that the vast majority of people don’t watch or listen to any of this crap at all.
But… I was taken aback during the 2008 Ohio Primary when Rush’s “Operation Chaos” really did have an influence here. Standing in line to vote that day, I was absolutely LIVID at the giddy Republicans in line changing their party registration, and bragging about it. “Oh, just for today! Hee hee!!”
It was one of the most miserable voting experiences I’ve ever had. These assholes won’t even stop at sucking all the fun out of participating in democracy.
Keith
And yet conservatives have rather successfully pushed the narrative that the Democratic party is beholden to George Soros and Michael Moore. Strangely, as a hard-core liberal, I cannot tell you more than 1 agenda item (cannabis decriminalization) that George Soros pushes. Ditto for Michael Moore. OTOH, I can tell you a dozen from Rush/Beck off the top of my head.
SenyorDave
If that is the game that Republicans have to play, there is slim hope of them nominating someone who can win a Presidential general election. The 2008 election showed that the extremes, on both sides, turn off the center.
If the economy is bad anyone could win. The last two months have been an unbelievably bad period for Obama. Here’s a suggestion: Act forecful, like a fucking leader would. When you have idiot bubblehead like Palin using the term death panels, call her out on it, say she is either misreading it or lying.
This is coming from a supporter. I’m sick of hearing leaks from Axelrod, or what Gibbs seems to think.
JenJen
So, the chryon on CNN reads, “Psychological Recession”. They didn’t even bother with a question mark.
Hear that, whiners? Phil Gramm must be proud.
DougJ
The last two months have been an unbelievably bad period for Obama. Here’s a suggestion: Act forecful, like a fucking leader would. When you have idiot bubblehead like Palin using the term death panels, call her out on it, say she is either misreading it or lying.
I don’t agree. The only way to get health care through is to make Congress feel they own the legislation. That means stepping back on it, somewhat. It’s a balancing act, I agree, and maybe Obama should be more of the point person for it. But maybe not. I don’t know where the sweet spot is.
Bush spent years pushing Congress around and he whiffed on his two big domestic policy proposals.
It’s about passing legislation, not about approval ratings 8 months into office or looking like a tough guy.
JenJen
Speaking of psychological recessions, suck it, Michigan!
Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan hits customers with a 22% rate hike
bago
Crazification link? These people are my parents, who describe widespread wiretapping, kidnapping, murder, and torture investigations as distractions, “just looking back to distract us from the future of death panels”. People who think spending 30 million dollars to investigate a blowjob is reasonable, but investigating the loss of billions of shrink wrapped dollars is anti-american.
What an odd philosophy one must have to be pro cubic cash cellophane condoms, yet virulently opposed to latex licked libidinal layers.
licensed to kill time
@bago:
nice alliteration!
Ned Ludd
There’s also Talk Radio Network’s wingnuts, such as Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Monica Crowley, and Erich “Mancow” Muller.
Local markets are also dominated by right-wing personalities. In Minnesota, the #1 radio station has a right-wing morning show. The #1 talk station, CBS affiliate WCCO-AM, got rid of liberal host Jack Rice earlier this year. They are now letting go of a host who is more of a moderate, Don Shelby, and replacing him with the right-wing Michele Tafoya.
Mr Furious
@JenJen: Shit! And they’re a non-profit!
And if memory serves…monthly premiums for my family worked out to be around $1,000/mo at my old job—for exemplary coverage provided 100% by my former employer—so now, that would be $1,200?
Who the fuck is supposed to be able to afford that shit?
Max
@SenyorDave: As soon as health care is passed and the subject is changed to the next GOP outrage, his numbers will go up.
He could do nothing and keep his numbers high, or he can try to get $hit thru that worthless congress and use his political capital, which means his numbers go down.
Joe Lisboa
It’s about passing legislation, not about approval ratings 8 months into office or looking like a tough guy.
This. But don’t tell that to the Armchair Quarterback League (AQL).
bago
@licensed to kill time: Well I was trying to remain gender neutral. The lesbians have their labial lacrimation and lactational licking to go with the lust loaded license.
Yeah, I was at Linda’s on capitol hill last night hanging out with the scene.
chopper
OTOH, the age distribution of listeners to right-wing-nutbag radio is not evenly spread among adults; i think the average age of these guys is pretty high, most are older americans.
we like to point out how the demographics are not in the GOPs favor within the next few decades. it doesn’t bode well for right-wing talk radio either. there aren’t nearly as many 18-35-year-olds glued to rush and beck as they would like.
bago
There are times when profanity is appropriate.
DougJ
OTOH, the age distribution of listeners to right-wing-nutbag radio is not evenly spread among adults; i think the average age of these guys is pretty high, most are older americans.
Yes, and this means they’re more likely to vote and hence represent an even higher proportion of self-described conservatives who show up at the polls.
I agree that the fact the listeners are so old points to a long-term diminishment in the power of right-wing talk radio.
Linkmeister
Re the 20M number: from the NYT earlier this week:
Trouble is, ABC, CBS & NBC don’t take the opposing position to Limbaugh, Hannity et. al., nor should they. But they shouldn’t necessarily put their noisy but slightly more mainstream colleagues like Representatives Pence and Bachman nor Senators Inhofe and Coburn on as the respectable opposition to be illustrative, either.
Max
@DougJ: I’m interested to hear your guess in # of years before we see that hard shift… 10 years? longer?
mutt
When Reagan was elected, I decided to embrace the new State church: hypocrisy. Which is how I came to listen to wingnut radio for 15 years. If you start appreciating hypocrisy like you would a fine wine, chickenhawk radio (cr) is your Opalo Vinyards. Being a housepainter, a pocket radio & a set of headphones & I was good to go. Now, up above someone parsed out the actual number of CR devotees. Posits it as a small number, relatively. BUT- when you start talking to Random Q Citizen about the issues of the day, you get the CR Party Line, which translates into a a “base”, as they call it, to show support for the unsupportable. Its worked so well, CR wingnut talking points dominate- dominate- public discourse.
As did the secret Russian sub base hidden under Grenada, & the fleets of Libyan bombers poised to refuel there on thier way to bomb the Midwest. You had to get past THAT to get to the actual invasion of Grenada. And who wants to talk to a traitor who wants Libya to bomb Cleveland? You think they learned anything? Hell, no.
So, as relatively small as their numbers are, the very nasty fact is they are the screen behind which war profiteers & crackpots work their designs.
I turned them off back when they attacked, as one, the GI who asked Rummy where the hell the armor was.
Now I watch as an outsider, ever surprised by the endlessly unfolding horizon that is these peoples beliefs. there is simply no end to it, if you figure in 83 they were making blackout curtains……
Sloth
These are the ones to watch.
I still maintain that Obama / Axelrod are playing Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck. You can’t deal with these guys with facts or with anger, you can maybe laugh at them (and that is about what the semi-sane members of the republican party have tried form time to time – “just entertainers” – which they immediately retract.) Your best bet is to goad them into over the line insanity, and I’d say that Obama’s managed that.
If it finally becomes clear that right wing talk radio is a bunch of certifiable loons who run around looking for conspiracy theories and invoking nazis, well, the only people that they will influence are the batshit insane. A big improvement.
And deeply problematic for the “mainstream” republicans. I put “mainstream” in quotes, because there pretty much aren’t any more of them.
And isn’t THAT interesting?
As for the whole Van Jones, Beck has his head. Except let’s see what Jones does now that he’s free of the bounds of the WH. And, in the meanwhile, the republicans have had their second major witch hunt of the summer. The first was against an hispanic woman, the second a black male. I think maybe their next one should be against someone of asian descent and then maybe they’ll have to branch to more esoteric ethnic groups.
Brachiator
The GOP has no reason to criticize Rush. He is their chief national spokesperson, a position which become more important as newspapers die (taking down national pundits with them), and television continues to be a shallow, entertainment focused source of intellectual pablum.
If Rush can keep Republican voters in the fold, then he has done his job. And the GOP is betting that the number of people repulsed by Rush is small or indifferent compared to those who are energized by Rush and company.
Jonny Scrum-half
Mutt — You are 100% accurate that the right-wing-radio talking points dominate public discourse. Last week I think I alienated another father at our sons’ football practice when I made the mistake of talking politics with him, and wouldn’t automatically agree that Obama was a radical socialist who was ruining America. He knew the talking points word-for-word, and could argue them as if from memory. (He’s a cop, so I guess he has a lot of time to listen to Rush and Hannity.) It was very frustrating for me, and my guess is for him, too.
Fern
@Sloth:
And looking at it that way, the witch hunt against the hispanic woman was not exactly successful. And Obama did not back down on the nomination.
JK
Tomorrow, Glenn Beck will celebrate the Van Jones resignation by having an orgasm on air.
BB
The media’s love for John McCain is the only thing that could conquer their fear of being yelled at by wingnuts. They were unbowed by Rush because of the throes of true love.
John is the Alpha and Omega. He is the hero of heroes. All of the Village would gladly lay down their careers before the golden microphone of Limbaugh for the sake of the Maverick.
DougJ
I’m interested to hear your guess in # of years before we see that hard shift… 10 years? longer?
I think a little less than 10 years, maybe 8 years.
HyperIon
DougJ, could you point out the place in the ombudsman article where “the Washington Post admits it takes conservative criticism more seriously than liberal criticism”?
I can’t seem to find the sentence(s) that could be interpreted that way.
Allan
It’s good to remember that a small group can have outsized influence due to its relative unity.
Big groups develop factions and splinters and disagree with each other, sometimes more vociferously than they remember to focus on their common enemy.
Message discipline is a key to the Republican’s disproportionate representation on the Sunday panel shows. No matter which one is booked, you get the same exact talking points that another one is spewing on a different channel at the same moment.
aimai
We made a big mistake capturing the White House and the Congress without first building up a left wing, populist, talk radio. We’ve seen that the democrats, when they are in power, are too interested in pleasing the press as it exists and totally uninterested in pleasing their base. That’s because there are no regular, angry, driven, venues where leftist outrage will be vented. Other than John Stewart, who’s just kidding around, there is no one on the left–hell, on the liberal side–that politicians fear to have talking about them. I’m sorry that Al Gore’s TV plans got side-tracked, but what we really needed was a populist right wing radio personality with a popular am show to pull a John Cole and drive his flock right with him.
aimai
Jake
Do Limbaugh’s numbers include the Armed Forces radio listeners?
me
People under 50 still listen to talk radio?
Brachiator
@aimai:
I’m not sure how this was supposed to work. As another poster asked, “People under 50 still listen to talk radio?”
More to the point, I’m not particularly interested in left wing propaganda, nor do I need a great and powerful left-wing talk radio host to give me my daily marching orders.
Right wing radio is based on fear and ignorance. Messy truth is often less entertaining than crap-based certainty.
stickler
Leftwing populism is spelled “Daily Kos.” And about another thousand HTML permutations.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t include the over-50 crowd, for the most part. But the young are mobilized on the Internet the same way the bluehairs are mobilized by AM wingnut radio.
Leelee for Obama
@stickler: All the more reason to have a bit of reality-based understanding of how the legislative process works, along with a constant barrage of e-mails, phone calls and LTEs from left-leaning internet users to push for the agenda we want. Not only does it send a message to the people who need to hear it, it also slides under the radar of the radioheads.
Sloth
@stickler:
And it’s called youtube and twitter and facebook.
MBunge
“According to Arbitron Rush Limbaugh has an audience of about 14 million viewers, with Hannity at 13 and Beck at 8.”
That’s for an entire week. Theses guys do 15 hours of programming a week, which means there’s actually less than one million people listening to any one hour of their shows. If TV ratings were counted like radio, Keith Olbermann would have an audience of over 5 million for just 5 hours of programming a week. And TV viewer tend to be folks who actually watch the show, not have it on as background sound.
Mike
noncarborundum
@HyperIon:
As I see it, there are two ways to interpret this sentence:
1) She had no idea that her article read like a press release from NOM, or
2) She did, but was more worried that right-wingers would object to its tone than that just about everyone else would regard it as a gross abdication of her responsibilities as a journalist.
Clambone
Just to reiterate what Mike said- radio rating take the number of listeners every day of the week and add them up. Rush has three million listeners a day, so he’s be counted as having an audience of almost 15 million. Some of each days’ listeners don’t overlap, but obviously most of them do, so you’re talking about a small fraction of their reported audience as actual separate, individual people.
I guess that everyone in radio understands this, but it means that you can’t do an apples-to-apples comparison with TV or newspapers or websites that measure their audience daily. Otherwise, you end up concluding that more people listened to Rush Limbaugh than watched Friends in its heyday, and that’s just not true.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Clambone:
I am glad someone pointed this out, because those listeners are the same ditto heads who listen to all three hours of Rush’s show, all three hours of Ingrams show, all three hours of Hannity’s show and then turn on the teevee and watch O’Reilly, Beck and more Hannity, these are the same people, you are talking about 3 million people in a nation of over 300 million, a tiny, tiny, percentage not only of the population but of self-confessed republicans/conservatives. THAT is why all of the right wing talking heads put together could not stop John McCain getting the nomination, they have absolutely no power to change anything, let alone anything in their own party, after all if they did we would all be gloomily looking at our first year of a Romney/Thompson adminstration and trying to figure out why the hell we had just invaded Iran and were paying for 15 million illegal immigrants to languish in internment camps.
mclaren
DougJ’s numbers tally with others I’ve heard, so this sounds in the ballpark.
What’s going on here is even more toxic than DougJ has laid out. Dig it: the Democrats are well aware that they have the number to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. This would shut down the hate radio programs.
However, the Democrats don’t want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine because they have made a political calculation that the far right represented by Limbaugh et al. has gotten so crazy that it’s now alienating the rest of the American electorate. Thus, keeping hate radio on the air represents a deliberate a cynical political ploy by the Democrats to preserve their electoral majority in both houses of Congress.
The problem is that this is a dangerous game. It only works as long as the majority of Americans agree that far right hate radio is aboslutely insane. There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that this will continue to be the case. Constantly repreated insanity has an insidious way of becoming the new Common Wisdom. I believe we’re seeing this with the health care “debate,” in which one side (liberals) cite facts and figures, and the other side spews wild insanity about concentration camps fillied with grannies and communist commissars murdering children with cerebral palsy. If one side keeps repeating the wild insanity often enough, even the most sensible people have a tendency to start accepting that gibberish as reasonable. “After all,” the average person starts to say, after hearing about death panels for the 5000th time, “if it was completely crazy, why would the Washington Post give it any column space?”
The Democrats have made the cynical calculation that the level of lunacy on the right is so extreme that no one will be able to take it seriously. This is a dangerously flawed conclusion, since, as we saw during the mass dementia of the Reagan Years and the even more extreme mass insanity of chimpy and his torturers, even the most extreme lunacy can wind up being taken seriously by the majority of the American people.
Arthur Laffer’s insane voodoo economics formed the basis of American economic policy for nearly a decade during the descent into the Reagan dementia, and hardly any of the “respected” “authoritative” news outlets dared even try to debunk it. Crazy hallucinations about WMDs in Iraq and mushroom clouds in Washington D.C. formed the basis of America’s foreign policy for several years, and no one in the mainstream press even uttered a word of doubt.
So a reasonable person has to ask…if the American people and the allegedly “mainstream” press are capable to being swept up in the bizarre levels of mass insanity we’ve already seen over the past 25 years, why do the Democrats believe the American people and the mainstream American press have somehow developed some kind of magical immunity to getting swept up in mass insanity this time around?
It seems all too likely that if far-right hate radio continues to spew lunacy about FEMA concentration camps being prepared for the euthanization of your grandma and grandpa, then eventually the Washington Post will report this as a fact and the American people will accept it as proven truth. Given America’s tendency to build creation museums filled with dinosaurs that have saddles on them so Adam and Even could ride them to church every Sunday, it seems an ill-advised and dangerous political tactic to avoid reinstating the Fairness Doctrine on the basis of the assumption that the far right has gotten so crazy that most Americans will reject their claims.
jl
I read someplace that the average age of OReilly’s audience is over 65. Anyone know about the age distribution of the wingnut radio audience.
Ecks
@noncarborundum:
or:
3) She’s just used to right wingers being the ones who bitch and whine at top volume about everything, no matter how reasonable it is.
I agree with the person above who doesn’t see how this is an admission that they take complaints more seriously from the right. I think they have a standard defensive crouch that comes out whenever they are flooded with complaints that consists of poo pooing that they did anything wrong, then quietly leaning on the reporter not to loose any more subscribers. They’re just used to this pressure form one side a lot more than the other. See the above points about message discipline, and favoring the endless repetition of simple dramatic stories freed from the constraints of truth or sanity.
Sloth
I agree that is what they are doing.
But there is no other way to stop it than to force it into the light. None. If they institute the fairness doctrine, these guys will claim free speech violations – hell, they are doing so preemptively, right now. They will go underground, and these days, underground means the internet.
We, the American people, have got to get a damn good look at the wingnuts and crazies on *all* sides. We have to air them out and examine them and, ultimately, reject them. We cannot hide them or silence them or even make rational arguments with them. It just does not work.
Yes, it’s risky, but there is simply no other path.
bob h
I really do not believe the nation will ever again turn to the Republicans. They are leaderless, and an object of public contempt and ridicule. No way it will happen.
Lisa K.
What it really means is that it is very, very stupid to declare yourself a Republican these days if you are not of the Michelle Bachmann batshit insane type. You will be lying and sucking the dick forever of people you hate (see: McCain, John).
Lisa K.
“It seems all too likely that if far-right hate radio continues to spew lunacy about FEMA concentration camps being prepared for the euthanization of your grandma and grandpa, then eventually the Washington Post will report this as a fact and the American people will accept it as proven truth.”
Human history proves that you are wrong. Liberals tend to give the populace far too much credit in their ability to discern fact from fiction, and thus make wrongheaded assumptions that nonsense like swiftboating or pulling the plug on grandma won’t take hold. They then pay the consequences. Remember, half of Americans are either fully or functionally illiterate, which means they cannot investigate for themselves rather something is or is not true-and it is a fact that if you say something enough times it becomes perceived as the truth by the herd, no matter how ludicrous it is on it’s face.
We cannot be complacent that the sheer lunacy of the opponent is enough to turn the populace against their arguments. It doesn’t work that way.
Lisa K.
Sorry, misread your original post. You are absolutely right. I believe the crazier they become, the more people believe there might be something to whatever they are saying to MAKE them so crazy.
I am very disappointed by the Democrats’ learning curve on this. In fact, they have been on the same one since 1980.
MikeN
I cant find it, but there are substantive differences in how radio ratings are gathered, and they tend to inflate listener counts.
I’ll keep digging, but there is not a one to one ration between ears as Arbitron counts them and votes at the ballot box.