Apparently the Magic of the Market Only Works in Radio
This week the Center for American Progress issued a report documenting the severe imbalance between conservative and liberal political talk radio (over 90% of programming is conservative) and postulating that structural factors such as consolidation of ownership and syndication practices are at least partly responsible for this imbalance.
The reaction from the right was swift and dismissive. Among right-wing bloggers and pundits, the suggestion that anything other than normal market forces explains the dominance of conservative talk radio is greeted with instant mockery and scorn. As Ed Morrissey put it:
Yes, the people who insist that conservative dominance of talk radio is purely a product of the market and mock any suggestion of structural imbalance are the very same people who complain endlessly that every other form of news media is plagued by "liberal bias." According to conservative gospel, the "mainstream media" is dominated by liberals who continually foist their liberal views upon the public.
But, you ask, why doesn't the magic of the market work in the television and print industries? By Captain Ed's logic, shouldn't conservatives stop "crying" about liberal bias and just come up with better ideas? After, it is a market. If conservatives would just come up with material that people liked, the advertisers would flock to them, right?
It really is amazing. A central tenet of the modern conservative worldview is that all sorts of structural imbalances in the news media unfairly disadvantage conservatives. This is supposedly why they had to go and create Fox News, because everything else was dominated by liberals. But when it comes to talk radio, they insist that only market forces can possibly explain the situation, that any suggestion of structural imbalance is crazy talk. Is a little bit of intellectual consistency too much to ask?
The reaction from the right was swift and dismissive. Among right-wing bloggers and pundits, the suggestion that anything other than normal market forces explains the dominance of conservative talk radio is greeted with instant mockery and scorn. As Ed Morrissey put it:
Rather than run crying to the federal government, progressives may want to find out why their shows don’t attract listeners. It’s a market, just like any other in broadcasting. If liberal talk shows attracted listeners, then advertisers would line up to sponsor them.Now putting aside the question of whether Morrissey is right about the radio market, can anyone spot the astounding bit of cognitive dissonance embedded in this claim? If the phrase "liberal bias" popped into your head, then congratulations, you're smarter than the average conservative blogger.
Yes, the people who insist that conservative dominance of talk radio is purely a product of the market and mock any suggestion of structural imbalance are the very same people who complain endlessly that every other form of news media is plagued by "liberal bias." According to conservative gospel, the "mainstream media" is dominated by liberals who continually foist their liberal views upon the public.
But, you ask, why doesn't the magic of the market work in the television and print industries? By Captain Ed's logic, shouldn't conservatives stop "crying" about liberal bias and just come up with better ideas? After, it is a market. If conservatives would just come up with material that people liked, the advertisers would flock to them, right?
It really is amazing. A central tenet of the modern conservative worldview is that all sorts of structural imbalances in the news media unfairly disadvantage conservatives. This is supposedly why they had to go and create Fox News, because everything else was dominated by liberals. But when it comes to talk radio, they insist that only market forces can possibly explain the situation, that any suggestion of structural imbalance is crazy talk. Is a little bit of intellectual consistency too much to ask?
posted by A.L. at 2:53 PM
18 Comments:
"Is a little bit of intellectual consistency too much to ask?"
Based on empirical evidence, I'd say that the answer is an unqualified "Yes."
Dear Sir/Madam,
I found your site recently, and have read a large number of your posts from the last month or so. I am impressed with the site and plan to stop by regularly to see what's here. Thanx for what you're doing.
I'll second David's comment and make an additional prediction: their distaste for something like the Fairness Doctrine will last just a little longer than their advantage on radio.
Frankly, though, evolution will take care of the problem. Radio is a dying medium, to be displaced by the internet. And on the internet, the advantage is quite the opposite.
Non-interactive media is just so last-century. Screaming at the TV or cursing at the radio just isn't as satisfying as being able to comment (thanks, A.L.)
This won't happen overnight. It will probably not be obvious (especially to the likes of Ed Morrissey) until near the end of Hillary's second term.
Having worked on all three of the former big three networks, plus PBS, I can inform you that "marketplace rules" don't operate when you have a trifecta of trivia like the closed circuit that existed until FOX News came and broke the liberal daisy chain.
We know you illuminati on the left believe you are sophisticated and we conservatives are hoi-polloi. But I read the Duino Elegies in German, Proust in French [as well as Layla wa Majnun in Arabic] and I still think Rush Limbaugh is the best thing to listen to while driving from Point A to Point B in the afternoon here in Boca!
The fact that Liberals have to twist and contort stats and polls to get around the fact that the US population is 5/2 or 3/1 self-described as conservative [versus “liberal” which few want to stain their resume with]. Polls from Pew, Gallup, Zogby and Jeffrey Goldberg’s wonderful article on Midwest Democrats all confirm that most Americans, even if they may vote or call themselves Democrats, are people of religious faith and a “Show Me” disposition—-except for “opinion-makers” in the MSM, Hollyweird, and Academicide, where life-long slackers with an attitude congregate.
I had Democratic credentials from way back until 9/11 when I underwent a rite of initiation, grew up, became an adult, began to let the scales fall from my eyes, and smelled the jasmine gardens of South Florida’s best radio person on air. [Actually, I just began late last year to listen on the advice of a PhD medical expert—who thinks Rush is great, but B O’R is primarily an entertainer.]
Talk radio is the ONLY "marketplace of ideas" except for the WSJ and Fox News out there [plus Drudge]. The reason the NYT is in a tailspin approaching death spiral is that the country is hungry for honest commentary, not the patty-cake bromides that libs on the three "broadcast" networks [ex-FOX] pretend are the parameters of debate.
Dave in Boca:
Limbaugh constantly lies. This is an established fact. Why listen to him?
Dave,
OK, so you think Rush is great. Fine.
Glad you have such a mastery of foreign languages, but I'm a bit worried about your comprehension, since nowhere in your comment did you come anywhere close to the subject of this entry.
Perhaps you'd care to actually try to understand the point A.L. made (with what I thought was admirable clarity) and comment on that?
You actually expect consistency from hypocrites who lie like champs?
Here, BTW, is one of the ways they do it in the print-media realm. The following is from an e-mail plea I just received from The Nation, a progressive magazine of some note.
"One-half million dollars.
"That's what the latest round of rate-juggling by the United States Postal Service will cost The Nation in the next year.
"Rate increases go into effect July 15, 2007. We are fighting this increase as best we can, but even if we "win," which is a long shot, we are still facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional postage. Now it's time to accept the reality: The Nation needs your help and we need it now. Click here.
"Here's the history of this situation:
" * In an unprecedented move, postal regulators rejected the rate plan submitted by the United States Postal Service in favor of a complex scheme designed by Time Warner, the country's largest publisher!
" * The new plan gave much lower increases, or in some cases decreases, to mega-magazines like Time Warner's own Time, People and Sports Illustrated, shifting the burden to smaller publications like The Nation.
" * We were given just eight working days to prepare a response to the 758-page rate plan before it was declared a fait accompli."
Keep in mind, the market is a mechanism that neither knows nor cares about democracy or despotism, humans soaring or suffering. The common good means nothing to the market. The market is about buying, selling and profit making. Period.
How ironic that the pols in bed with the religious right have as their de facto religion marketplace imperatives.
There's some real cognitive dissonance for you.
What is it about 9/11 that pushed big intellectuals like Dave over the edge into RushWorld? Irrational fear has a way of making people senseless.
"Is a little bit of intellectual consistency too much to ask?"
Yes. Consistency is the enemy of hypocrisy, and that's something we know they're full of.
If the phrase "liberal bias" popped into your head, then congratulations, you're smarter than the average conservative blogger.
Uh, if you can make it through the day without setting yourself on fire, you're smarter than the average conservative blogger.
dave in boca:
I never have been able to figure out why so many people find AQ to be a huge threat. 50 years ago we were looking at Russian nukes and saying 'better dead than red'. Now we're supposed to give up our liberties to defend ourselves against a bunch of guys who don't even have their own planes.
Since you are so intelligent, perhaps you can explain what it was about 9/11 that made "the scales fall from your eyes" and let us know why this is such a big threat.
Uh, if you can make it through the day without setting yourself on fire, you're smarter than the average conservative blogger.
Heh, indeed.
I think I am missing the point here. Conservatives argue about the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but they do not argue that this bias is not due to market forces. The success of Fox News demonstrates that there was indeed the absence of a more conservatively-tilted cable news perspective, which the Fox News guys have now captured and done pretty well with. Fox regularly beats out CNN and MSNBC in the ratings.
There is nothing wrong with complaining about liberal bias at the NYTimes or NBC/CBS/ABC and also complaining about conservative bias in talkradio. It may very well be that these mediums lend themselves more to those particular viewpoints.
I don't see the lack of intellectual consistency. What worries me though, AL, is your buying into this "structural imbalance" argument. I mean what the hell is structural imbalance anyway -- and why should it matter?
There is nothing wrong with complaining about liberal bias at the NYTimes or NBC/CBS/ABC and also complaining about conservative bias in talkradio. It may very well be that these mediums lend themselves more to those particular viewpoints.
I've heard conservatives argue that the NY Times is biased because New York itself is so liberal. But how can it even be argued that those who watch ABC/CBS/NBC are disproportionately liberal? Everyone watches TV.
The success of Fox News demonstrates that there was indeed the absence of a more conservatively-tilted cable news perspective.
But it doesn't demonstrate that pre-Fox cable news was liberal; it was just not obviously conservative. And more importantly, FoxNews still represents only a small fraction of the news on TV. If conservatives are going to argue that market forces explain all this, doesn't that mean that there is only a tiny market for conservative views?
What worries me though, AL, is your buying into this "structural imbalance" argument. I mean what the hell is structural imbalance anyway -- and why should it matter?
The idea that the content of broadcast news programming (whether on radio or TV) is purely driven by "the market" is nonsense. All sorts of other factors are at work, including the views of ownership and the view of the companies who provide the ad revenue.
How else do you explain the fact that MSNBC's highest rated show, by far, is Keith Olberman's (the only left-leaning show in cable news), yet the network continues to provide precious primetime real estate to Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough, whose ratings are constantly in the toilet. Ditto for CNN with Glenn Beck.
Something other than "the market" explains that.
Either way, Olberman, Carlson, and Scarborough are all regularly trounced by Fox's conservative line up. Does something other than "the market" explain that?
Anonymous,
And cable news is regularly trounced by ABC, NBC, and even CBS. The fastest-growing audience over the last year has been The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I'd say it's explained by carefully choosing your dataset.
Assuming the New York Times is liberal or the Washington Post for that matter is overlooking how much they trumpeted the Whitewater investigations or hounded Al Gore with really trivial coverage during the 2000 election. The WAPO op-eds are truly clueless.
For more details on how the mainstream media is not as liberal as they or even we think jump onto www.dailyhowler.com.
The whole premise of this thread is quite silly. Of course markets "work," and they work always and everywhere. But markets only work to do what markets do, nothing more nor less. Often they produce results that some or many do not like, whereupon it is proclaimed that the market in question doesn't work. That is not a persuasive argument.
The market works in radio, in blogging, in newspapers, in television, and in pork belly futures. People buy, read, watch and listen to what they want. That is why the circulation of the New York Post is greater than that of the Times. That is why--despite any claim of "structural imbalance"--liberal talk radio fails, and fails repeatedly, regardless of how much money is initially invested in it. People don't like listening to Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Al Franken or Jeanine Gerafolo in sufficient numbers to keep them on the air. They demonstrate these views by their listening habits every time they are given a chance.
There is conservative bias in talk radio because in the market for talk radio most people want to hear conservative opinion. There is a liberal bias on CBS, NBC and ABC because without such a bias the viewership who enjoy that sort of opinion would have nowhere to turn--those networks, now that they no longer comprise an oligopoly, are simply a niche. Good for them. I enjoy watching their nich grow smaller and smaller, but I don't begrudge it to them.
O'Reilly's audience is three times that of Keith Olbermann because three times as many people enjoy watching him. O'Reilly and Fox News are conservatively biased. So what? Let MSNBC compete with them.
Questions?
Oh Zeus, you are just so devastatingly smart. How can I ever rebut such ironclad logic.
I do have some questions, though. It's probably worth pointing out that the "niche" the Networks occupy is many orders of magnitude larger than, say, the audience for Fox News. If they are and have always been liberally biased, how do you explain that? Is most of the country liberal?
Second, in case it's not clear, I don't actually think that there is any noticeable liberal bias in mainstream news coverage, I'm just asking these rhetorical questions to point out the total incohorence of standard conservative talking points.
Finally, the notion that factors other than public demand play no role whatsoever in what gets put on TV or the radio is just laughably naive. As is the notion that markets always "work." Just to take an obvious example, markets can be horribly skewed by monopolistic and other anti-competitive conduct, which is why we have elaborate antitrust laws both at the state and federal level.
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