The Huge Success of Liberalism on Radio? Yes.

Here’s a mistaken idea: practically all of the significant radio hosts on the air today are conservative. A survey of talk show hosts certainly seems to justify that claim. The traditional pantheon of Rush, Laura, Mark, and Shawn create a practically monolithic wall of sound five days a week. While laced with humor, sarcasm, and mostly jesting ad hominems, their presentations are as a matter of course rational, propositional, and argumentative (in the good sense) in nature.
Here’s the origin of the mistake: when liberal ideologues tried to compete with the conservative-talk-show-hosts (hyphenation provided to identify what is an idiomatic expression in our country) on their own playing field they failed miserably. In particular, Air America stank and sank. There was no lack of talent. It was just a terrible idea. How many people willing to think rationally for three hours at a stretch as a form of entertainment are going to buy into the vapid ideas of myopic liberalism? Just like every other example of a conservative/liberal comparison, and in every venue where it is played out Adam Smith’s free market embarrasses Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism. In this case, the pretense of “equal time” succumbs to the knob-turning liberty of intelligent listeners. But if that line of reasoning is at all correct, (and it is arguably so), from where arises the purported mistake?
Here’s the what the conservatives have mistakenly overlooked: liberal radio is alive, well, and a dominant force in American culture. But people have looked for the wrong thing. Why would a movement or ideology whose nature is to oppose standardized truth (and therefore standards of accountability) choose to exchange discourse in a setting of propositional truth? To compete on that stage is to lose before beginning. So liberals reach just as great an audience as conservatives, while promoting their agenda not through propositions and arguments, but through emotive, relational, and culturally provocative entertainment. Howard Stern is not a fluke. He is the means by which liberal ideology actually succeeds at leading a huge portion of the culture away from the normative ideologies of conservatives.
And conservatives should recognize the issue. The only other option is to find after successfully winning all the debates, that they have lost the election and war anyway. After all, the choir already believes.