Here's My Public Writing Project Paper

Talk radio has been an important part of my life. I would spend hours as a kid listening to Howard Stern’s show. In my high school years, I would spend summers sprawled out on the front yard listening to talk radio on WYSP for 12 hours straight. I would wake up with Howard, move on to Don and Mike, and round out the afternoon with Opie and Anthony. As far as political talk radio, there was only one guy on, Rush Limbaugh. He was syndicated on Reading’s WEEU. I couldn’t get passed his staggered speech and nonsensical commentary. Of course I wasn’t into politics back then.

After I left my politically sterile high school and moved on to college, I decided that political commentary was important, so I started my very own political talk show on KUR. As I was balancing out our conservative college radio station with my liberal rants, real political talk shows (republican propaganda machines for the most part) were also being challenged by an opposing force, Air America Radio. That is what inspired me to write my final paper, so here’s a preview:

The changing voice of talk radio is becoming a new medium for political discourse. The idea of talk radio started in the 40’s when some guy named Barry Gray started to get bored playing the same music over and over again. Gray called up Woody Herman, a famous clarinetist and big band leader of the time, and he held the telephone up to his microphone. Eventually, Gray started taking callers and the talk format was born.

More and more station began adopting the talk radio format. Most talk shows found a home on the AM frequency because listeners turned to the clearer sound of FM for music. However, the most controversial talk shows were found on the FM band, like the Howard Stern Show.
Stern is probably the most famous on-air personality. His show has raised much controversy over public discourse and censorship. The FCC’s relentless effort to silence Stern has merely destroyed the commercial radio market. Stern now resides on satellite radio along with other “shock jocks” whose creativity was also regulated by the government. In their place are Stern clones that lack the originality and ratings of their forerunners.

While FM stations are tuning into automated jukeboxes, AM has revived an old format: politics. Political talk radio is starting to flourish as the new wave of neoconservatives and theocrats begin to stick their foot in the door of the dull world of American politics. Since the repeal of the “Fainess Doctrine” in 1987, Rush Limbaugh pioneered the political talk radio market. In his image, other conservative radio show hosts started to pop up like Ben Ferguson, Lars Larson, Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Larry Elder, Michael Reagan, and Ken Hamblin. A lot of these people are more than just radio hosts and have influenced their followers with publish books, newspaper columns, television appearances, and public lectures.

In response to a conservatively dominated market, a full-service radio network called Air America launched in 2004. Similar to the conservative radio hosts, Air America’s hosts are influencing public opinion beyond the airwaves by appearing on news networks, debating on C-Span, writing books, doing USO tours, writing for news papers, etc.

As the neoconservative assault on America gains new ground, the left has begun to fight back with equally radical discourse. With radio show hosts using television, newspapers, books, and blogs as their arsenal, the media wars are escalating to new levels.