With my service job of 17 years or so, I drive a lot. Over 20,000 miles a year. Limbaugh used to say that if you listen to him for six months he will win you over. I listened for many more years than that and I know he is just an unconscionable lying gasbag tickling the ears of simpletons. Talk radio has so much potential to teach but it just goes to waste here in America. Now I have satellite radio but most of the talk radio is still shit. Even the "lefties" suck with gasbags floating retarded conspiracy theories or constantly using inane tortured logic to push their points and fill time (Alex Bennet, Ed Shultz, Lynn Samuels). I will say that the Stephanie Miller and Thom Hartmann shows are excellent but she is on late in the day and Thom only gets one hour on Sirus. On top of this, for the talk channels on Sirus it's 3 to 1 reichwing all the time (!) and the rightwing blather shows are just unlistenable nonsense.
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Conservatives Dominate The Airwaves
Conservative Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) raised a furor last week when he called out the right-wing radio hosts working to defeat comprehensive immigration reform. "Talk radio is running America ," Lott said. "We have to deal with that problem." Indeed, despite the dramatic expan-sion of viewing and listening options for consumers today, traditional radio remains one of the most widely used media formats in America , reaching an estimated 50 million listeners each week on more than 1,700 stations across the nation. More importantly, talk radio is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives. The Center for American Progress and Free Press yesterday released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States . The results confirm the stunning lack of diversity in talk radio, and raise serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.
HOW BAD IS IT?: In the spring of 2007, 91 percent of the political talk radio programming on the stations owned by the top five commercial station owners was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive. Ninety-two percent of these stations (236 stations out of 257) do not broadcast a single minute of progressive talk radio programming. In the top 10 radio markets in the country, 76 percent of the news/talk programming is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive. In four of those top 10 markets -- Philadelphia , Atlanta , Dallas, Houston -- the domination of conservative talk radio is between 96 and 100 percent.
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