Leary Vs.Liddy

After being released from prison, G. Gordon Liddy was helped into a new career was a talk radio host by Timothy Leary, a man he had once thrown in jail. There could not be two more different men in all of America. They were an exponential order more adversarial than the Odd Couple. How they ended up doing debates together is a very odd tale. More here.

Dr. Timothy Francis Leary Jr. was a psychologist, lecturer, author and advocate for both the therapeutic and recreational use of psychedelic drugs.  George Gordon Battle Liddy was a lawyer and bagman for President Nixon who went down for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Both did some time in prison and that is the genesis of their improbable friendship. Both men ended up as inmates at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution in California.

For his involvement in the burglary of the DNC offices, Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping. He was sentenced to 20 years in Federal prison in 1973. President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence to 8 years in 1977. The commutation made him eligible for parole and he was released in 1977 having served 4 and a half years. More here.

Leary was arrested in 1965 for drug possession following a raid orchestrated by Liddy.  Following a similar arrest in 1968, he was sentenced to 10 years in 1970, with a further 10 added for a prior arrest in 1965 to be served consecutively. (The 1965 conviction was later overturned by the Supreme court) Leary escaped from jail and fled to Algeria and then Switzerland. The Swiss briefly imprisoned Leary but refused to extradite him. He traveled to Austria, Beirut and was eventually arrested in Afghanistan. Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown. More here.

By 1981 both Leary and Liddy had re-entered the public sphere as guest commentators on morning radio programs and talk shows. (Leary can be heard on some rare CBS transcriptions of the program "Rock Connections." ) After a speech at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981, Leary ran into Liddy. To exploit their opposing backgrounds and viewpoints Liddy joined with Leary for a series of debates at college campuses. Those tours continued through at least 1984. The debates were the topic of a documentary film in 1982 titled the Return Engagement.

In December of 1991Liddy did some holiday fill-in work on New York talk station WABC-AM. This impressed Mel Karmazin, president of Infinity broadcasting, owner of 1300 WJFK-AM which was simulcast in that era on 103.1 WJFK. That Spring Mel hired Liddy for the mid-day slot following Howard Stern. Within a year, it's popularity led to national syndication through Viacom's Westwood One Network and later on, Radio America, in 2003. Liddy's retired from the show in July of 2012 at the age of 82. I am curious if he we still was driving that 1985 black Volvo with the license plate "H20GATE."

Annenberg Public Policy Center Talk Radio Study

If you listen to talk radio... 

you should read this study: [LINK]

It's titled "Call-In Political Talk Radio: Background, Content, Audiences, Portrayal in  Mainstream Media." 
The study was published in 1996, so some of the data is a tad dated. Rush Limbaugh plays a central role in the narrative, but that makes a lot of sense for 1996, the middle of Bill Clinton's first term as president. Now, almost two decades later Clinton is lionized, his wife is running for the same job, and Limbaugh is a shadow of his former self.

The fairness doctrine was struck down in 1985 causing an explosion of talk programming  It peaked within 10 years and cultural change has caused it to wither away in just 10 years time.

The study was performed unknowingly at the end of the AM talk radio era. In 1993 60% if respondents told a US News and World Report survey that they listened to talk radio. But a decade later, Pew researchers found in 2004 that 17% of the public regularly listens to talk radio. In 2011, the Arbitron compiled data indicating that talk radio had lost the most market share of any nationally rated format. It was so pronounced I wrote it's obituary in 2013.[LINK]

Talk Radio: Old, Male, Conservative and Dying

In 2006, almost exactly 4 years ago I wrote a post predicting the migration of AM talk radio to FM. I predicted that the aging demographic is dying off, creating a need for change. I  predicted that there would be more centrist and left wing talk because of the younger demographics of FM radio. I think that radio will adapt to the audience, because historically it's something that radio has always been good at. You can read it here.

Because of the effectiveness of search engines I got an anonymous comment on it only recently. Inexplicably the response was railing against the perceived left-wing tilt of NPR I am not sure that the troll actually read my post, but that's only because their comment had almost nothing to do with it. It is possible that they were deeply offended by a single offhand comment. I wrote that AM talk radio was "wildly conservative, politically."

That comment was, and still is factually true.  It's been a few years so I thought I'd revisit the topic and cite my sources. I'll start anecdotally. Rush Limbaugh is the biggest name in AM talk radio. He makes an estimated $58 million dollars a year, and just recently was topped the Newsweek "Power List." [Source Here.]  As of September 2010 he has the number one most listened to talk program on the radio.  [Source Here.] Despite that his listenership is down. Rush Limbaughs audience peaked in 2003 at an impressive 14.5 million. It's all downhill from there. According to Talkers Magazine, Limbaugh only reached a weekly audience of 14.25 million in 2008 and only averages 13.5 million in 2007 and 2006.It's called a rough plateau and it's what happens before the drop.

His audience isn't turning off the radio. They're just dying. He is still delivering the same quality program he always has and to 600+ stations. But the median age of a Rush Limbaugh listener is 67. A full 72% of Limbaugh’s audience are male adding to the early fatality rate (women outlive men). [Source Here] This data is not an outlier. The Fox News audience has a median Age of 65.  [Source Here] This is a big problem. According to a recent actuarial table (below) almost 20% of Americans do not make it to age 67. If you look past 67. It's a cliff.Check out the actuarial chart below:

Listeners of AM talk radio are not a random cross-sampling of America. Only 5% are between the ages of 18 and 24, and 80% are over the age of 35. They are more likely to be male than female (64% vs. 37%). [Source Here]  According to the Pew Research Center self-identified "conservative Republicans" make up 28% of talk radio’s audience, compared to only 17% of the general public. As for registered voters that regularly listen to talk radio, 41% are Republican and 28% are Democrats. [Source Here.] 

Extrapolating this as an industry-wide trend isn't difficult. The top 10 talk radio show audiences according to Talkers Magazine are as follows: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Dave Ramsey, Dr. Laura,  Neal Boortz, Laura Ingraham and Jim Bohannon.  Of that set, Boortz is a Libertarian, and Bohannon is more or less middle of the road. The other 8 are solid conservatives. [Source Here.] So as the whole AM radio talk audience "ages out" it will have a disparate effect on conservative talk programs.

"Up until 1978, half of all radio listening was done on the AM dial. Now that share has dropped to about 17 percent, according to the FCC...  AM radio accounts for only about four percent of listening among the 12-24 set, with FM making up the remaining 96 percent. Only nine percent of listeners aged 25-34 still tune in."

This is not a reflection of programming quality, or a political change in the general population. It's a result of the vagaries of AM radio itself. AM radio stations have been dropping like flies. Back in 1990 there were 4,987 AM stations and 5,832 FM stations. In the 20 years since, the number of AM stations has dropped by 200+ and the number of FM signals has nearly doubled. [Source Here] In 10 years there will be nothing left on the AM radio band but Spanish, Religion, and Spanish-Religion. Political conservatism is not going extinct. But it definitely is going to lose it's domination of AM radio and therefore specifically— AM talk radio. So where will conservatives go to get their media?  Some will go to FM radio, some to TV, and the rest, doubtlessly to the internet, but the diaspora appears to be inevitable.

The Migration of Talk Radio

In the 1980s talk radio programming began to move from FM to AM. Today the AM dial is largely talk and younger people tend to think of it as all-talk. Which for us more "experienced" radio men seems kind of silly. Talk moved to AM because music sounded better on FM. Music on FM took off, pushing out the talk programming. It left FM to skew demographically (in general) for younger listeners.


So twenty five years later we see three trends in talk.

1. Ratings are down. (duh)
2. It's moving back to FM
3. It's wildly conservative, politically. (I promise not to be rude)

In Phoenix recently Bonneville moved 620 KTAR-AM to the FM dial. they bought KKFR from Emmis to do it. But previous success is what propelled the plan forward. In Washington D.C. their FM simulcast of WTOP-AM was a ratings winner. Then in Salt Lake City they made a similar move with KSL-AM. Their programming is strong, the listenership is there, but it's moving. The AM dial is slowly, almost imperceptibly draining. And the youngest listeners aren't interested in radio AT ALL... which is terrifying to some of us.

Those same younger listeners that have been listening to the FM dial for music programming are now older. They're older and entering the age bracket where we'd expect more talk format listener ship and we're not seeing the growth from this generation. The reason is that they don't listen to AM. They like the programming, and in fact NPR has been very happy to scoop them up, but if Mohammed won't go to the mountain...

Currently the primary approcah seems to be to add FM simulcasters. Buy a workable FM signal over the metro, adjust branding statments slightly and try to keep the current listeners and add yonger ones. The long-term problem with a demo that skews old is that they die. You need to continually transition in new listeners. With ciggarettes they call them "replacement smokers" but talk radio, while addictive rarely kills. The above pic is from a killer Orlando Weekly article on this here. The big gap in talk radio is not just between left and right. The gap is also between men and women. Older, conservative men listen to AM talk. While younger, more liberal men (like me) listen to FM talk. Notice the "older" factor here in the demo relating to the replacement-smokers theory above...

And Talk radio listener ship isn't 100% testosterone. Dr. Laura and a handful of other advice-type programs do score with middle-aged women, and NPR scores some high-income women as well. The truth is that most American women listen to the radio just for music. So where does this leave talk radio?

It leaves it trying to keep it's older core audience but also trying to reinvest itself in the low end of its demo. It's smart, and it's going to work. The downside is that Air America is still competing with NPR and losing. But that's been said and said and said. Logo on left stolen from Tom Paine, another funny lefty bastard.