Matzko writes: "At least 15 million Americans every week tune into one of the top 15 talk radio programs. They are not monolithically conservative, but they are overwhelmingly so."
The radio host Rush Limbaugh introducing President Trump at a campaign rally in 2018. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
Talk Radio Is Turning Millions of Americans Into Conservatives
10 October 20
The medium is at the heart of Trumpism.
t least 15 million Americans every week tune into one of the top 15 talk radio programs. They are not monolithically conservative, but they are overwhelmingly so. A dozen of the top 15 shows feature conservative or libertarian hosts — with devoted followings like Rush Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” or Michael Savage’s “Savage Nation” — and only one leans left.
Talk radio may face an aging audience, a decline in ad revenue and competition from new mass media forms like podcasts, but there are still millions of Americans whose politics are shaped by what they listen to on talk radio all day, every day. Fox News gets more of the attention for shaping conservative opinion and for its influence on the Trump administration, but we shouldn’t overlook the power of conservative talk radio.
The conservatism of talk radio only partly overlaps with institutional conservatism, that of right-wing Washington think tanks, magazines and the Republican Party itself. 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.
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