The State of Radio

There's an interesting take on Rush Limbaugh and his ilk at this site (I found the link initially at Mark Evanier's site). Beau Weaver, the author of the piece does a good job explaining the negative impact that Limbaugh has had on national political discourse, especially insofar as the talk show hosts have driven more thoughtful, reasoned discussion off the airwaves. I'd argue that, in addition to that, they've largely destroyed what I might refer to as the "art" of radio, which as a medium falls well short of meeting its potential to both entertain and inform. Virtually all of the personality has been stripped from the airwaves (since most successful talk show hosts, right or left, vary little in the personality they present), and the opportunity to offer more creative programming has been tossed away in favor of the cheap production costs that go into replicating the Limbaugh formula. I don't know why listeners don't demand more than a belligerant affirmation of their existing views; when TV first started to drain radio audiences and hence resources in the 1950s, there was an amazing burst of true personality driven programming (much of it tied to the concurrent youth and rock movements), so it can happen. It used to be fun to drive across the country, listening to local radio stations along the way and picking up on the regional differences. Today, such efforts yield endless rounds of Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly-- without a hair's breadth of difference between them (FM is little better, offering only preprogrammed stations of single genre music per station). I know I sound like a old fogey on this matter, but the only people who can possibly think radio is better today than thirty or forty years ago are just too young to know what they are missing.