Silence!

Has anyone but myself noticed the recent decline of talk radio?  Last week in Boston, the FM talk station, WTKK, went to an (atrocious) all-music format.  It had been almost exclusively talk and mostly right-leaning talk ... except for Margery Eagan and Jim Braude in the morning hours.  They had had a conservative Michael Graham filling up the drive-time slot and that occasional righty, Mike Smerconish in between … see: Gaulitics.com.  Even that power-mouth Rush Limbaugh, after a little over a twelve month move to AM’s WXKS Talk 1200 from the feeble-AM-signaled WRKO 680, recently was forced to move back … just a little humbled (see: Boston Radio Watch ).  WXKS then went to a silly all-comedy format.

Over the last year here in Boston we have seen quite a parcel of other silenced right-wing voices … Lara Ingraham disappeared (and, in her last months, pleading for more advertisers) as well as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Jeff Katz, Jay Severin, and Michael Savage. And, as of now, the only oral oasis for us crypto-Nazis here in Boston is WRKO (whose signal fades fast after sundown … very annoying in the winter time) which carries just the few voices of right-reason remaining -- Jeff Kuhner, Howie Carr, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.  (Of course there is still FM-radio’s NPR here in Boston (WGBH 89.7) … on which one can hear how to make Nina Tottenberg’s cranberry sauce, listen to Terry Gross castigate conservatives and learn about All [Liberal] Things Considered.)

But the real reason for this blog entry is that I sense that this shrinkage is not happening by accident.  I strongly suspect that there is an invisible hand at work behind the scenes that is somehow convincing advertisers (and station managers) that it would be better if they were not abetting this brand of right-wing political talk radio.  And when Rush Limbaugh offered up a derogatory name for Sandra Fluke after she “testified” to Congress about her need for free contraceptives, even this ratings giant lost significant advertisers.  President Obama has not minced words about his disgust over conservative talk radio and the messages that it conveys (see: American Thinker).  And as Joe Biden says, President Obama carries a big stick and, as we have seen, he is not afraid to use it.

And so, at least in Boston, the pond for conservative talk radio is rapidly drying up.  This was one of the few alternatives to the mostly-liberal Main Stream Media ... but has drawn the ire of both it and the party currently in power. As long as they are going after the Second Amendment to the Constitution, why not scuttle the First Amendment also?