Media consumption patterns are segregated by class.
Ironically the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute explained what analyst and Democrat War room (if there is one) what they missed. (Talk Radio Is Turning Millions of Americans Into Conservatives 2020)
Talk radio’s power is rooted in the sheer volume of content being produced each week. The typical major talk radio show is produced every weekday and runs three hours, so just the top 15 shows are putting out around 45 hours of content every day. Even setting aside hundreds of additional local shows, the dedicated fan can listen to nothing but conservative talk radio all day, every day of the week, and never catch up.
Yet talk radio still somehow manages to fly below the national media radar. In large part, large part, that is because media consumption patterns are segregated by class. If you visit a carpentry shop or factory floor, or hitch a ride with a long-haul truck driver, odds are that talk radio is a fixture of the aural landscape. But many white-collar workers, journalists included, struggle to understand the reach of talk radio because they don’t listen to it, and don’t know anyone who does.”
Until the early 2000’s before Trump, the talk shows focused on free markets and small government.
(Excerpt Nicole Morgan: Haine rouge et Blanche Peur)
They paved the way to the tea party itself instrumented by “he sugar daddies” said Frank Rich who fund it. “There are three particularly generous ones. You've heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans.”
The Rage of Talk Shows In the 1980s, radio talk shows had begun the work of repetition, relentlessly spewing insults, slander, and open hatred toward feminists, environmentalists, minorities. It was the age of pitchforks. People didn't just want a change in policy; they constantly demanded heads. They wanted bloody cuts to government benefits. Under George W. Bush, some Republicans began to give them these cuts. Paul Krugman admits: "It's scary." This Nobel Prize winner in economics couldn't understand the meaning of the economic measures imposed by the Bank for International Settlements, which targeted the most vulnerable and the poor. He searches for his words: He says it very quickly at the end of an article: "It seems they're dealing with a deep, compelling need to inflict suffering, to expunge sin, or something like that." And that's precisely what it's about.
When Obama came to power in 2008, the rage rose a notch among the "Fifty-three (53) million listeners to the 91% of radio talk shows that were conservative: 2,570 hours of conservative talk were thus scheduled each weekday, compared to 254 hours of so-called progressive programming." Funding was (for three decades) and still is, of course, provided by the same donations that financed the Tea Party, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. [26] In his excellent study of radio talk shows.
Mort Sébastien invites us to meet host Rush Limbaugh, who hosts a very popular American conservative talk show and who played an important role in the country's political life, notably in the Ultra Republicans' return to power in 2016. His analysis is worth repeating here. Between its launch as a licensed (syndicated) broadcast on fifty-five stations across the country in August 1988 and the midterm elections of November 1994, which marked the return of a Republican majority to Congress, The Rush Limbaugh Show established itself as the number one radio show of all categories. That year, Rush Limbaugh reached some 20 million listeners daily on no fewer than 650 stations. Since then, the genre has diversified with the arrival of new shows on national airwaves, whose hosts have developed their own unique discourse based on a common ideological foundation.
Thus, at the turn of the millennium, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity joined Rush Limbaugh in the ranking of the most listened-to radio talk show hosts, all categories combined, and climbed into the top five spots in the fall of 2009, with Rush Limbaugh remaining in first place. The ratings have shifted somewhat since then, but as of February 2014, Rush Limbaugh still led the rankings with 14 million weekly listeners, a high number for a radio genre that remains a niche medium.
One of the strategies radio talk show hosts deploy to attract listeners is to constantly denounce the idea of a liberal bias in the mainstream media and collusion with the forces of the Democratic Party: in their eyes, journalists betray the standard of objectivity supposed to govern their investigative work. Thus, this accusation, established as an indisputable paradigm, legitimizes the conservative bias of conservative talk show hosts, just as it allows them to claim to give visibility to conservative citizens whose ideas are underrepresented in traditional media. To this end.
Mort Sébastien continues, one of the strategies is to open the airwaves by soliciting listeners' input on the topics discussed during the show…. The participation of ordinary citizens is one of the fundamental characteristics of radio talk shows in the United States. By the late 1960s, more than a thousand radio stations across the country had been offering listeners the opportunity to participate on the airwaves, leading to the emergence of what some communication scholars have described as dial-in democracy.
However, conservative radio talk show hosts also employ a more subtle method to include the audience in their programs: taking full advantage of the intimate space offered by radio to constantly remind listeners that the host is indeed addressing them and speaking on their behalf. Thus, the hosts' remarks are peppered with dialogic markers such as "let me tell you something" or vocatives such as "you people," which suggest that the audience of these shows is not simply seen as the target of the message but is also part of it. Their presence, inscribed in the host's own discourse, is manifested through a very emphatic use of the phatic function of language. Almost all fundamentalists, terrorists recruiting for ISIS, among others, use the phatic function of language, the purpose of which is to establish or prolong communication between the speaker and the recipient without actually communicating a message.
There are messages that essentially serve to establish, extend, or interrupt communication, to check if the circuit is working ("Hello, can you hear me?"), to attract the listener's attention or ensure that it doesn't slacken ("Hey, are you listening to me?") or, in Shakespearean style, "Lend me your ear!" − and at the other end of the line, "Hm-hm!" This accentuation of contact − the phatic function, in Malinowski's terms (...) − can give rise to a profuse exchange of ritualized phrases, or even entire dialogues whose sole purpose is to prolong the conversation. In more blunt terms, it's about making the listener believe that they are being listened to, that they are being understood, that a conversation is taking place—one of those highly effective means of seduction also used by those we call "pick-up artists." Once the connection of complicity is established, all that remains is to preach what you want to preach. If you listen to Limbaugh, you (the listener) are never at fault. You are perfect. You are the exceptional heart of American exceptionalism. The problem is them—those liberals, foreigners, feminists, etc., idiots at best and traitors at worst, who are destroying you and preventing you from having the good life you deserve. We have a gas crisis? They refuse to let us drill and use nuclear power. We have an education crisis? They are prejudiced against private schools. We have a health care crisis? It's their way of excusing big government.
The dialogue between the host and the listener is all the more intimate because we're talking about reality. Everyone is invited to give examples of the government's turpitude, its thieves, its lies, and its profiteers from public funds: there would be much criticism to be made of the way the welfare state has been managed. Indeed, there was much criticism to be made of the abuses, and there were numerous examples of mismanagement. But the hosts' aim here is not to advocate transparent and responsible management. The host is not a journalist who, on radio or television shows, investigates political crimes with supporting evidence and analysis, interviews multiple sources, and calls for reforms. Talk shows are not there to inform, investigate, and provide civic education.
They want the total rejection of Satan, Big Government. If a listener who doesn't belong to the tribe tries to call in, even to make a minor correction, the host showers them with sarcasm and insults and abruptly disconnects the call. Beneficiaries of the welfare state, regardless of their disability, are showered with insults. No one is spared, not even sick children: one of the most outspoken stars of these shows, who, it should be noted, has a doctorate, attacks autism that day. "Now the disease of the day is autism," the Joker yells into his microphone. "Do you know what autism is? Well, I'll tell you. In 99% of cases, it's a spoiled child who hasn't been put in his place. That's autism. What do they tell me that these kids are screaming or remaining silent? Don't they have a father to tell them: 'Stop your circus. It won't get you anywhere in life. Stop acting like a smartass. Stand up straight. Become a man.'" And stop standing on your back yelling and screaming, you idiot.
3) By the early 2000s, it had embraced a version of conservatism that is less focused on free markets and small government and more focused on ethnonationalism and populism. It is, in short, the core of Trumpism — now and in the future, with or without a President Trump.
For that one why not listen to How Conservative Talk Radio Came to Dominate the Airwaves.
Listening is not being fascinated by an image