Hugh Hewitt Boosts Talk Radio

RADIO TALK-SHOW hosts come in different colors and sizes. There are the former Dee-jays like Rush Limbaugh. There are the guys that starting doing it for free on weekends. There are the guys that used to be construction workers, like Sean Hannity. Then there are the former political staffers, like Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, and Bill Bennett.

But they all share one thing, according to Hugh Hewitt. Soaring ratings. It all started last fall, according to Hugh.

Salem’s new talk station in New York City, AM 970 WNYM, debuted in August and has burst out of the blocks with a quarter million listeners. Audience growth in more conservative parts of the country is even stronger.

Michael Medved is up 83 percent in Sarasota, Florda. Dennis Prager is up 47 percent in Denver. Medved is up 150 percent in Honolulu among the “money demo” of 35-64 year-olds.

Why is talk radio doing so well? Is it just that conservatives are energized by Democrats in the White House? Hewitt claims that talk radio is the only place you can find non-MSM analysis:

Talk radio is prospering because it is the last place for extended, serious discussions with policy experts who are not part of the MSM’s dominant worldview. I spent a decade as a news anchor with the PBS affiliate KCET in Los Angeles, so I know as well as anyone about public television’s strong leftward tilt...

The variety and quality of talk-radio programming, combined with the liberal-Left domination of the political and media elites, is powering talk radio’s growth — and that’s something not just conservatives but the entire country ought to be glad for.

Last fall, everyone was counting the conservative movement out. It had lost its way.

But that completely misses the point. You cannot do political organizing when your side is in power. Liberal or conservative, government is a mess of incompetence and corruption. So you can’t get people excited about conservative ideas when conservatives are in power.

In fact you can’t get people excited about anything unless there’s a problem. You can’t get people to reform Fannie and Freddie until they are broken. You can’t get people to vote against government programs until gigantic bureaucracies are breaking the back of America.

Now that the Obamanoids are in power and determined to governmentize everything in America, people are starting to get the point about conservatism, about limited government, and about the incandescent beauty of the “little platoons.”

The frustrating thing about Democrat Bill Clinton was that he was so smart that you could never lay a hand on him for being a liberal.

But the Obamanoids are fed up with hiding in the tall grass. They just want to be liberals and do as much liberal stuff as they can before the American people change their minds.

Talk-radio hosts like Hugh Hewitt will be a big part of the mind-changing process.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close 0