An earthquake rattled Twin Cities radio this past month. It cracked open the notoriously unstable Clear Channel fault line and took down a legendary monolith, Mick Anselmo, previously thought to be impervious to corporate shock waves.
Until his firing, Anselmo ran the seven stations Clear Channel owns here in the Twin Cities—Cities 97, KFAN, K102, KTLK, KOOL 108, The Score 690, and KDWB—and oversaw dozens more in the Upper Midwest. Over twenty-five years he had survived a half-dozen or more buy-outs, mergers, drive-by shootings by rival radio gangs, and too many intracorporate IED attacks to number, much less remember.
Of all the scenarios involving Anselmo’s eventual return (“More Country!,” “Limbaugh and Hannity to WCCO!”) it is his attitude toward so-called “Progressive” talk radio that is worth a comment here. Why? Because as a regional VP for the largest goddamn radio/media empire ever inflicted on the planet (as Anselmo himself would describe it), he saw no upside to testing the appeal of a talk station that didn’t genuflect to Rush Limbaugh; that didn’t regularly ring the bells summoning white male knuckleheads to 24/7 sermonizing on the wisdom and valor of George W. Bush, on the hoax of global climate change, or on the need to seal the Mexican border against the threat of brown-skinned terrorists hell-bent on clipping hedges in San Diego and packing meat in Colorado.
I’ve covered Anselmo’s years in radio and worked for him for seven long months at KTLK. Because he was successful in a world where every host and format must have a neat one-word definition, I was to him, first and foremost, a “lefty.” One of those guys who doesn’t know how to play for the money very well. The sort of problematic character who would actually flip on a mic and tell Anselmo’s knucklehead audience(s) that contrary to what they were being told by far more famous, far wealthier, and infinitely more lucrative advertising vehicles, weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq, human activity does have something to do with climate change, George W. Bush is a callow sock puppet for Dick Cheney, and by any objective appraisal the French really do have a better standard of living than we do.
Personally, I always got a kick out of Anselmo. He wore loud guayabera shirts and two-tone loafers around the office and reminded me of that great line about Hollywood producers: “They talk like hippies and do business like gangsters.” (Which is not to say that Anselmo engaged in illegal doings. Rather, shall we say, he practiced a ruthless dedication to positive cash flow.) The way I saw it, he spent more time arranging to get his Escalade detailed than fretting over politics. Radio was all about money. What worked made money. It really was that simple.
We had a couple of chats about “Progressive” or “lefty” radio. His view was that “all the lefties are over at MPR, there’s really no audience left.” Then, like all radio professionals, he’d make a reference to woebegone Air America and AM 950, the Twin Cities’ hapless “lefty” venue. The fact that Clear Channel has its 40,000-pound gorilla grip on the best, most powerful frequencies from coast to coast, relegating Air America to the tinny, low-power AM band (like AM 950) and leaving it barely able to cover its individual markets, was beside the point. The “lefty” thing doesn’t work.
Anselmo’s view was that the only future for “lefty” talk was on digital/hi-def radio, the not-yet-fledgling terrestrial competition to satellite. If things worked out, he’d say, he’d think about giving me a shot on hi-def, where I could rant at a fraction of the fifteen people who own such receivers in the Twin Cities.
My basic view on left-wing radio is that professionals like Anselmo need to understand a fundamental difference in the psychology of conservatives and liberals. As ex-Nixon aide John Dean has described it, conservatives place far greater value on allegiance to authority figures and group unity than liberals do. Lefties basically have an aversion to being preached to. (Most of us know for a fact we’re smarter than anyone preaching at us, even if they do vote like we do.) Moreover, where conservatives eagerly consume staggering amounts of bullshit—“facts” no reasonable person could ever believe—and call it “entertainment,” liberals have almost no patience for wall-to-wall schtick.
Lefties, I’d try to explain to Anselmo, demand value for time spent listening. Accurate, broadly eclectic information is their highest criterion of value. For that reason alone, left-wing radio that apes the rhetorical gimmickry of Limbaugh and Hannity is doomed to such a pathetic percentage of the available market bottom line that operators like Mick Anselmo will always be more comfortable with Limbaugh-Hannity 3.0 than lefty speechifying.
Read Brian Lambert’s blog at www.rakemag.com/media
; email lambert@rakemag.com