Talk Radio: Letting Boys Be Boys

By Susan J. Douglas, El Dorado Sun. Posted June 27, 2000.

"Listening to Howard Stern," noted Boston columnist Mike Barnacle in 1984, "is the electronic equivalent of loitering in the men's room of a bus terminal." Apparently, this was a place a lot of listeners wanted to go to.

Most of the commentary about talk radio has focused on two things: its rudeness, the threat it posed to civility, or on its unrepresentative amplification of right-wing politics, the threat it posed to democracy. But what is obvious, and yet much less frequently discussed, is talk radio's absolutely central role in efforts to restore masculine prerogatives to where they were before the women's movement. After all, eighty percent of the hosts and a majority of the listeners, particularly to political talk radio, were and are male. I suggest that a new gender hybrid, the male hysteric, emerged on talk radio as a deft, if sometimes desperate fusion of the desire to thwart feminism with the reality of having to live with it and accommodate to it.

Talk radio began to make national headlines in the mid-1980s, when Howard Stern gained increasingly notoriety and earned the moniker "shock jock" and Alan Berg, an especially combative talk show host in Denver, was murdered, presumably, it was thought, by one of his infuriated listeners. More headlines came in 1989, when a coalition of approximately thirty talk show hosts coordinated a major attack on a proposed 51 percentCongressional pay increase that then Speaker of the House Jim Wright planned to push through without a floor vote. Broadcasting their outrage and Wright's fax number to their listeners, they unleashed an avalanche of protest that scuttled the pay increase, but just temporarily. As soon as the spotlight went away, the pay increase went forward.

"Except for a few isolated markets like Boston, no one knew we were out here," recalled talk show host Mark Williams. The Wright episode changed all that. The number of radio stations with talk or combined news and talk format quadrupled in ten years, from approximately two hundred in the early 1980s to more than 850 in 1994. As music programmers and listeners evacuated the AM dial in favor of FM in the 1970s, previously thriving, profitable stations were faced with a crisis. Some tried the all-news format, while others clung to music. But by 1980 the talk format, whether the host was a sexologist dispensing advice or a political consultant fielding calls, was proving to be a solution to AM's abandonment. Talk radio didn't require stereo or FM fidelity. It was unpredictable. It was incendiary. And it was participatory. On WOL-AM, for example, in Washington, D.C., the audience increased by 48 percentbetween 1980 and 1981 in response to the talk show format. By the mid-1990s, talk radio was one of the most popular formats on the air, second only to country music. Talk radio and its particular version of radio populism had arrived. Like some of the most successful popular culture -- one thinks of P.T. Barnum's early museums or National Geographic or "60 Minutes," talk radio entertained and educated, fused learning with fun, allowed people to be titillated and informed, even though they were often misinformed, and encouraged them to be good citizens and unruly rebels, all at the same time. Station managers also discovered that talk show audiences were extremely loyal. Once they listened to and liked what they heard, many got hooked. This was, of course, what advertisers wanted to hear. In fact, once the foreground for the genre became established, one of the things that advertisers latched onto with talk radio was that it had what were called "foreground aspects." People didn't listen to it like they did to background music. They paid attention. This is, of course, what advertisers want to hear. Nor did people press their "select" buttons as frequently. So if the host, like Don Imus or somebody else, actually read the ad copy, advertisers felt that it very much improved sales because they were hearing the pitch from somebody they knew, identified with and trusted.

By 1984, Time was able to feature a major story on the talk show format entitled "American Audiences Love to Hate Them." There was a new dynamic here, one that had been developing at least since the late 1960s, in which certain radio shows sought to rile up their audiences, following the notion that fury equals and begets attention and thus profits. Unlike TV in the 1950s and 1960s, which sought desperately to avoid controversy so as not to alienate its audiences and its advertisers, talk radio pursued controversy and again, in total contradiction to the earlier years, used this as a selling point to advertisers looking for loyal, large, engaged audiences.

Controversy and marketability were joined, so that talk radio developed a financial dependence on sensation. By 1995, one general manager of a talk radio station was able to give the following explanation for why conservative hosts dominated the air: "Liberals are genetically engineered not to offend anybody. People who go on the air afraid of offending are not inherently entertaining." No explanation was given as to why progressives and feminists couldn't get air time. Talk radio spoke to a profound sense of public exclusion from and increasingly disgust with the mainstream media in general and TV news in particular. It became an electronic surrogate for the town common, the village square, the general store, the meeting hall, the coffee house, the beer garden, the park, where people imagined their grandparents and even their parents, for that matter, might have gathered with others to chat, however briefly, about the state of the town, the country, the world. Talk radio tapped into the sense of loss of public life, the isolation that came from overwork and the privatization of American life and the huge gap people felt between themselves and those who run the country. There were also responses to changes in the network news and the news magazines in the 1980s, when news staffs were cut, stories became shorter -- even sound bites allowed presidential candidates shrank to about nine seconds -- in-depth reporting was eclipsed by celebrity journalism.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »