Talk Radio Tuneout

When Talk Radio Forgot How to Be Radio

Now that we’re firmly in December, I can comfortably drive around in the truck with Jimmy Durante’s gravelly crooning of Frosty the Snowman for the eighteen-millionth time in my life, rather than tune into what passes for talk radio these days.

To be sure, I’ll even turn up The Chipmunks—poor old Alvin being screamed at by Dave—before I switch over to the local AM station carrying Clay and Buck, or, God help me, Sean Hannity.

The local hosts in my market do a pretty good job of going over the day’s events, with plenty of local news discussed—political, weather, and otherwise. But these national hosts have gotten on my last audio nerve, and it’s just more than I can do to listen anymore. That’s been the case for a few years now. I’m just getting around to saying it out loud.

To cover my bases, know that I spent some forty-five years of my career in broadcasting—as an on-air host playing music (disc jockey), a programming and music manager, in airtime sales, and as manager of entire radio stations. So I come to you with valid complaints, not just the ravings of a semi-retired senior citizen with too much time on his hands yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.

Starting with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton: who even gave the go-ahead for these two to fill the time slot of the late Rush Limbaugh? The first I heard of Rush was in 1990, when I was managing an AM/FM station in a Texas market and sales literature—along with a cassette tape of a portion of his program—landed on my desk. At the time, AM radio was wandering in a wasteland. Music listeners preferred the static-free stereo sound of FM. AM was simulcast, or relegated to local programs featuring volunteer housewives droning on about raising begonias or potty-training toddlers. Not the stuff that jammed phone lines or got noticed in the Nielsen ratings.

In a meeting, I voted to take the Rush Limbaugh feed but was outvoted by a CEO who favored Chuck Harder out of Florida. Harder was what we’d call a “doomsday” host, in the vein of Glenn Beck. He broadcast from the old Telford Hotel on the Suwannee River, while Limbaugh, at the time, was in Sacramento, California. “Nothing any good comes out of California,” the CEO boomed—so we took the Harder show.

Harder went on to build a small network over the next few years, with Ralph Nader as his primary guest. Throughout much of the 1990s, their daily focus was the looming doom-and-gloom predictions surrounding Y2K—the catastrophic “Year 2000” computer failures that were supposed to cripple civilization, and ultimately never did.

The competition in my market took Rush, as did hundreds of stations across the nation, and the rest is history. Rush wasn’t just about politics. He seldom had guests because he had the talent (on loan from God) to discuss a wide variety of topics—football and baseball, golf, what he’d had for dinner—and when he did pontificate on politics, he could explain a situation in the present with informed historical context, expose the charlatanism of newsmakers, and literally predict what would happen nationally or worldwide next.

Sean Hannity repeats himself verbatim, ad infinitum. If you listen to an hour of his program, you’ll learn that over the course of his life he’s tended bar, done construction, and started in a small market working for free. If he’s penned a new book, you’ll hear a great many promos for it. Sean’s greatest claim to fame—and the way he attained it—was being in the right place at the right time, following Rush Limbaugh on radio in the afternoons. He stepped into a ready-made audience of millions the moment he cracked the microphone.

Hannity relies heavily on guests, who sometimes manage to get their point across between his self-serving storytelling and—worst of all—frequent interruptions by his producer, “Linda.” The whole thing should be renamed The Sean and Linda Show. She adds nothing germane to the discussion except her own half-thought-out observations.

If Hannity ever reads this, he’ll smugly say, “Well, I’ve worked my way up from bartending, painting houses, and bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly to having a national audience! What do you have, George?”

For reference, for decades no one knew who Limbaugh’s producer was. And when the fellow was finally named, he never spoke on air.

Buck Sexton and Clay Travis inherited Limbaugh’s time slot—and his EIB Network distribution system. The Clay and Buck Show (C&B) is hosted by former Fox Sports Radio personality Clay Travis and former America Now / The Buck Sexton Show host Buck Sexton.

Overall, they’re not awful. It’s just that once they’ve discussed their wives’ idiosyncrasies and the obvious national headlines of the day, they’re done. There’s no in-depth dissection of the news, no illumination of why the topic made the news, no autopsy of the events leading up to the headline. The program is shallow and strictly surface-level.

And my goodness—overall, these two sound like absolutely miserable people. Everyone is a moron, an idiot, or some other version of stupid. That’s everyone except them and Donald Trump.

The show is also heavy on ads. Don’t get me wrong—I sold airtime, and I used to say “advertising is the world’s oldest profession.” But these guys have no concept of how to do a live read and make it sound like show content. They make commercials sound like… commercials. And the program is loaded with oddball small companies, as if the network were a small-town, 250-watt, daytime-only station.

All in all, with the repetitive, ancient storytelling of Hannity and the shallow “we’re smarter than you” attitude of Clay and Buck, talk radio has already seen its zenith and has now devolved into personalities who should never have made it out of a top-fifty market—much less be broadcast nationally.

Talk radio didn’t die for me because of politics.
It died because it forgot how to be radio.

And now, back to John Denver and “Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas.”