Svirnovskiy Podcast:The Letdown of Liberal Talk Radio

For the 144th episode of the Journalism History podcast, Journalist Gregory Svirnovskiy discusses Democrats’ unsuccessful attempts after the 1994 midterm elections to counter conservative hosts like Rush Limbaugh with the liberal voices of Mario Cuomo, Gary Hart, and Ed Koch.

Gregory Svirnovskiy is a digital producer at POLITICO.

Transcript

Gregory Svirnovskiy: Any Democrat that was getting into sort of the radio/media sphere in the 1990s was doing it in a world that was fundamentally dominated by Rush Limbaugh.

Nick Hirshon: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew, and the ones you were never told.

Teri Finneman: I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.

Ken Ward: And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

Nick Hirshon: And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.

And together, we are professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history. This episode is sponsored by Lehigh University’s Department of Journalism and Communication, inspiring the future-makers. Transcripts of the show are available online at journalism-history.org/podcast.

(01:00) The 1994 midterm elections left Democrats shellshocked. Republicans gained fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives, giving them control of the chamber for the first time in four decades. Much of the GOP’s success was attributed to Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk radio host with an audience of millions across the country, who characterized liberals as the “heathen left,” and encouraged listeners to rebel against President Bill Clinton. Democrats scrambled to respond to their opponents’ dominance on the airwaves.

Several high-profile Democrats tried to balance talk radio’s right-leaning tilt. None of them were able to match Limbaugh’s audience size and influence. Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, brought a style of thought talk that proved too introspective to catch on. Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator and presidential candidate, had a Sunday night show that went up against Denver Broncos games. Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, had more flare, but he wasn’t known beyond his hometown and rarely waded into national issues. One radio host summarized the Democrats’ disadvantage: “You’re asking me why aren’t there any liberals on talk radio? The main reason, without question, I’m going to tell you, is that they’re not entertaining.”

(02:27): On this episode of the Journalism History podcast, we analyze this letdown on the left with Gregory Svirnovskiy, a digital producer at Politico and the lead author of an article in Journalism History named “‘Tin Cans and String’: Democrats Failed Attempts to Challenge Conservative Talk Radio from 1994 to 1996.”

Well, Gregory, thank you so much for joining us here today. Your research looks at a side of political talk radio that we don’t hear much about. We’re really used to hearing so much about Republicans and their dominance but not so much about Democrats and how they responded. And in this article, you write that by the early 1960s, a dozen conservative broadcasters aired on a hundred or more independent stations across the country, most on a daily basis, and then thirty years later, by the 1990s, tens of millions of people were listening every week to conservative hosts like Rush Limbaugh. Can you go into some of the factors that led to the rise of conservatives on talk radio?

Gregory Svirnovskiy (03:28): Yeah. Nick, thanks so much for having me here. Certainly excited to get a chance to speak on this topic. I was reflecting, you know, really quickly as an off-time roadmap that I pitched this project to Professor Marshall like, you know, three, four years ago, and it’s fast and slow at the same time. But yeah, I think, you know, can certainly really get into – can talk about sort of the implications of this radio/media gap that we’re seeing, specifically as it relates to Rush Limbaugh in 1992. Democrats, any Democrat that was, you know, getting into sort of the radio/media sphere in the 1990s was doing it in a world that was fundamentally dominated by Rush Limbaugh. I think, you know, gains syndication in 1998. The Limbaugh Show is attracting thirteen million listeners a day in 1992, twenty million by 1995. And Democrats don’t have anyone that has, has really come close to that level of ubiquity, you know, on their own side.

(04:35) And the implications are really important. I think there’s a 1996 study that, that I highlight in the research paper that, you know, talk radio listeners were something like three percentage points more likely than non-listeners to vote for GOP House candidates in 1992. And by the time Republicans romp in the 1994 election winning fifty-four House seats, you know, flipping fifty-four House seats, eight Senate seats, listeners were ten points likelier to vote for GOP House candidates than non-listeners. So, you’re seeing Limbaugh and, you know, other Republicans on the airwaves changing political discourse and dynamics and the zeitgeist in a really profound way.

(05:20) And when you look at sort of the reasons for that, the reasons that Democrats, you know, weren’t doing that, honestly, I think in a lot of ways Democrats just didn’t believe that talk radio had the kind of legs to propel any kind of political messaging. I finally had a chance to speak to Dick Gephardt, a fellow Northwestern grad, in 2022, and he told me that at the time, his – you know, the leaders of his party had sort of dismissed talk radio as crank radio, where cranks got on and talked. And so there just wasn’t a lot of belief in the medium as a means to propel any kind of messaging and, and to sort of, you know, speak to the masses and change minds. And so, you know, sort of to that end, we talked a little bit, I’m sure, you know, listeners are familiar with the implications of the 1994 midterms. Clinton elected in ’92. In 1994, Republicans do fantastically well, radio a big reason why.

(06:19) Democrats, at that point, only are really finally beginning to understand the implications of radio and their sort of ignorance to the medium. There’s a famous 1995, you know, multimedia presentation that Jon and I cite in our article. Democrats, Democratic House leadership are sort of funneled into a room in D.C. and shown sort of all of the different ways that the GOP is getting out its political messaging on the airwaves.

And, and, you know, Chris Dodd, the senator, tells the New York Times that, you know, by comparison, our side has “tin cans and string.” So, you know, for the first time, I would say there’s an understanding among Democrats that like, “Wow, there’s a gap here and, and this is potentially a disaster for our side. We’ve gotta, you know, close it.”

Nick Hirshon (07:14): And you mention in the research how there’s also these demographics that are folding into this. In the 1980s, the U.S. population was growing older on average and a lot of those older people were more likely to listen to talk radio, to vote Republican. There were also a lot more of those whiter, wealthier kind of listeners who a lot of advertisers want to tap into. So maybe the liberal cause that appeals more to younger people, maybe still starting out in their careers and don’t have a lot of disposable income, those might not be as appealing to some of those advertisers.

Um, and, so yeah, so you talk about this turning point in 1994 where Republicans are trouncing Democrats in the midterm elections. You mentioned the fifty-four-seat gain in the House of Representatives, and that was the first time Republicans controlled the Chamber since 1954. So, how do Democrats try to respond to this?

Gregory Svirnovskiy (08:05): That – yeah, you know, leads me right into what I wanted to say next. (laughing) But I just want to emphasize, I mean, this was shocking to people in the party. To Dick Gephardt, who I had a chance to talk to, to the late Joe Lieberman. Um, and so, you know, I would say there are a few different ways that the party responded. But really sort of the broader consensus among the institutional elites, I would say, you know, in Congress, at the DNC, and at the White House level, was the idea that—you know, I’m going to be blunt and say it, and, just like they were, “There is no liberal Rush Limbaugh. We’ve got to do this by committee. We’ve got to get people on the airwaves, sort of, you know, talking to established radio presences to try and turn the message out that way.”

So, in Congress, they hire, you know, a House aide whose sole sort of purpose to be on the job—his name is Fred Clarke—was to, you know, book Democrats onto radio shows. He, you know,  wired a room in the Capitol to, you know, serve as a sort of makeshift studio. You know, Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, is doing something like twelve interviews a week. You know, Joe Lieberman develops a pretty close relationship with Don Imus. You know, he takes him to the Capitol, goes on shows there.

(09:24) And, you know, Democrats find themselves sort of, you know, working inside of a system that’s already established, trying to get as many on their side, you know, onto these talk shows as possible to hone their points.

Um, so it was something that was, you know, certainly done in Congress. You know, also, at the White House level, Bill Clinton’s going on Imus. I think he went on something like a hundred radio shows in his first term in office before, you know, souring on the prospect a little bit later. And the DNC too, you know, understanding, like, there’s no liberal Rush Limbaugh, we’ve got to do this another way. They hire this guy named Jon-Christopher Bua, an off-Broadway actor, to tour the country and train volunteers to call in. You know, he puts together memos. He’s teaching Democrats, you know, what kinds of messages to employ, how to stay on message when you hop onto a show that’s, you know, maybe conservative-dominated, how to sort of pull people in one direction and serve as that talking head that, like, their side could support. You know, he and, you know, his team talked, you know, to thousands, you know, appear on, you know, over I think 1,800 shows in the lead-up to the 1996 election, you know, as they sort of tried and got their messaging out.

(10:43) Um, and so, you know, on this side, on the side of sort of institutional side, you’ve got Democrats understanding, look, there’s no silver bullet here. You know, there’s no career politician that’s going to be this really exciting sort of liberal Rush Limbaugh that we can turn to in this moment and say, like, “Be brash and be ridiculous just like he was.” The dittoheads, you know, that was Limbaugh’s situation. Democrats did not have someone like that.

And to an extent, you know, we saw some evidence that, in the lead-up to the 1996 election, the strategy was working. I mean, the LA Times reported in 1996 that seven percent more radio listeners, you know, supported Bill Clinton than in the year prior. So, I guess there was some consensus that, like, maybe this was working.

(11:31) Underlying numbers, you know, we still had, like down ballot, lots more Republicans, lots more people voting Republican, but there was a little bit more of sort of an even split in 1996. And so that, I would say, is one side of the coin.

And on the other side, you’ve got, you know, these out-of-work, you know, Democrats who had either run for president before or flirted with the idea, who find themselves out of a job in either 1992 or 1994 because of, you know, maybe term limits or because of, you know, that 1994 sort of crazy Republican romp, you know, that decide, you know, maybe they’re thinking, “We could be the liberal Rush Limbaughs. We could be the solution here.”

Um, and former New York governor Mario Cuomo, Doug Wilder, who had been the governor of Virginia until he, you know, was term-limited in 1992, and Gary Hart, who famously ran for president in 1998 as senator from—or 1988—as senator from Colorado who sort of had been out of politics for close to a decade, (12:43) all of them sort of thinking, you know, maybe I can be a solution or the solution here. In particular here, I think, Cuomo had some momentum where people thought that he could really, you know, make a dent in that gap.

Nick Hirshon: Yeah, let’s talk about some of those personalities because you said that the liberals recognized they did not have a Rush Limbaugh replacement, but there are all these different folks who kind of try to rise to the top. And one is Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York. And the article talks about how, in the Republican landslide of 1994, his political hopes seemed to be buried. He was, at one point, considered a presidential candidate, but he loses his bid for a fourth term as New York’s governor and now he’s unemployed. He’s trying to figure out other ways to get involved and he’s practicing law, writing a book, but it’s not the same as being in charge of one of the most prominent, you know, most populous states in the country.

(13:39) So, Cuomo does present some tantalizing possibilities. He’s high-profile, but he does have some limits and you talk in the article a little bit about what those were, his interactions with some of the handlers who were trying to help him with the show. So, what was the deal with Mario Cuomo, and why didn’t he work out?

Gregory Svirnovskiy: Yeah, I’m going to start, I think, I’m going to dig into this passage from the text that I think was really particularly evocative and particularly sort of can help explain why Cuomo maybe didn’t live up to expectations.

In April 1995, before he starts his show, he appears alongside National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition host Susan Stamberg and tells her what he thinks is going to be sort of, like, his perfect, ideal radio program. Um, he would begin with an essay at the top and then do a little poetry from time to time and play classical jazz for younger listeners.

(14:35) Like, that is Mario Cuomo’s ideal radio show. It just doesn’t jive with, like, what, you know, Rush Limbaugh was doing. Even with what New York City mayor Ed Koch was doing at the time. And, you know, Stamberg tells him, “Mr. Cuomo, your idea sounds so reasonable. Um, but to make it as a radio host, talk show host commercially, you’ve got to yell. You’ve got to scream.”

And so, you know, Cuomo comes in with these really high expectations in 1995. You’ve got people like Paul Begala saying that, you know, “This is perfect. Like, he’s our liberal lion. Like, he’s going to do this.” And at the same time, you have detractors that say, like, you know, “Mario Cuomo is so, you know, soft-spoken and deliberate and articulate and reasonable, and he really doesn’t have this sort of killer instinct.”

(15:26) And he had no desire to develop that either. Like, he championed this idea called “thought talk.” He’s like, “I’m going to go on the radio. I’m not going to ‘shock talk’ or ‘jock talk.’ I’m going to ‘thought talk.’ You know, I’m going to talk to my listeners thoughtfully and, you know, have conversations with them and explain the political process, um, and write, you know, speak,” as he said, “in fine-point quills.”

Um, and it’s, you know, it’s not something that appealed. I talked to—his producer at the time was this guy named David Rimmer, who was working in sort of the New York radio scene a few years ago, and, you know, he told me he still gets PTSD when he hears the term ‘thought talk,’ because it’s so antithetical to, you know, how political radio works. It just, you know, it just was, was doomed from the beginning.

(16:18) I’d say there are a number of other things that Cuomo, you know, tried to sort of push that really, you know, doomed his show from the start. I think the folks at Sony Worldwide—with the sort of channel that was working with him—they wanted him to do a daily talk show, really establish a presence to get syndicated. He wanted to do it, you know, once a week. And so, other sort of lifestyle factors, I would say, that got in the way of Cuomo really, you know, dominating here.

And that gets into a discussion that, you know, we might have a little bit later, but why Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and some of the guys on the Republicans’ side were so successful. You know, radio was their thing. Gary Hart and Mario Cuomo and Doug Wilder, you know, they were politicians. Like, that was their thing. They were just looking for something to occupy their time, it feels like.

Nick Hirshon (17:10): Right. They knew how to speak to the public and they definitely want to get back in the mix, but they may not be as willing to get as energetic or, (laughs) you know, as vocal as some of these other folks are. You include in the article this quote from the last show of Mario Cuomo where he tells one caller, “There are some shows that give a false impression. They stoke up the passions. They get the decibel count high. They call names. That’s very entertaining and some people enjoy it the way they enjoy mud wrestling.”

So, you can see that Mario Cuomo has a very low opinion of that style of radio but, let’s be honest, when you’re listening to the radio for leisure and you’re driving and you just kind of want to be entertained, you’re not necessarily sitting by the fireside and looking for a long treatise about the state of our country today. (laughing) And that might have been one of the reasons why that, you know, that Cuomo show, the “thought talk” concept that you talk about, didn’t really pan out.

(18:04) Now, you then go into Gary Hart and you mentioned, you know, Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator, and he’s kind of interesting because I imagine, at that time, most listeners knew him for the political scandal that he had been involved in. Gary Hart was running for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and the Miami Herald reported he was having an extramarital affair. He ended up suspending his campaign, big political scandal that we still talk about and teach today. Um, so, he ended up not running for re-election of the Senate, became a private citizen and, similar to Mario Cuomo, was practicing law and writing books.

So even though he did have that similar kind of approach, the intellectual style, it seems like perhaps he might have a little bit more of a chance with the audience because they know him from this scandal. But why did Gary Hart, then, not really work with audiences?

Gregory Svirnovskiy (18:57): Yeah, and you know, I think it’s another good question that—it goes back, in a lot of ways, to that same idea of “thought talk” just not really resonating with audiences. At the time, Colorado was a lot redder. I spoke to folks that, you know, from Colorado in the ’90s that, you know, talked about listening to Limbaugh every day, and Hart was just, you know, couldn’t hope to match that gravitas. He, you know, famously said he wasn’t going to do callers.

So, he didn’t have callers call in and, and have that sort of fun interplay with them. And again, like, you know, looked at sort of the radio experience on his end—his show was called Hart Land—as an opportunity to speak and conceive of the political arena in a way that he wanted journalists to, while he was, you know, really up high making decisions in the Senate and then running for president.

And, and so again, it’s just a style that really doesn’t jive with what listeners are looking for in the ’90s. There are other reasons that Hart’s show in particular failed. He was on a radio station that was famous for its coverage of the Denver Broncos and had on a weekly program that, you know, was on Sundays, I believe, and so, you know, in some ways, like, his show just sort of didn’t really jive with, I would say, like the Sunday ethos of the station he was on and it ended after just a year.

(20:16) And, and I would say the other thing with Hart is, I think, of the three—you know, of Cuomo, Wilder and Hart—I think he was maybe the least interested in becoming a national brand with respect to his show and that was maybe in part related to some of the trauma that he’d, you know, dealt with seven years prior. And so there maybe wasn’t that same, you know, push on his end as Wilder and Cuomo had.

Nick Hirshon: Right. And even though, I guess, a lot of Americans knew him for that salacious story, he was not eager to talk about that. In fact, you write about how he didn’t want that to be a part of his, you know, his show, and he was concerned that if he got back into the public arena that people would just keep talking, you know, calling in and asking him about that scandal that ended with suspending his presidential campaign.

(21:06) Um, and then you get into Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City. Kind of an interesting case study here because Ed Koch, unlike the others, is a much more dynamic personality. Adds a lot of humor. Uh, but he does have a smaller profile. His show is only really airing in the New York City metropolitan area. For myself, as someone who grew up in New York City, still lives here today, Ed Koch remains a well-known personality. But if I go outside of state lines I don’t know how many people would really think about Ed Koch so much.

So, you know, and you mentioned here he is a star. You know, he was the judge in People’s Court, nationally syndicated show. Um, so he does have a little bit of that profile and certainly the personality, but I guess he’s limited by the geographic area, right, and his, kind of, where he’s a known quantity. So, so what happened here with Koch?

Gregory Svirnovskiy (21:56): Yeah, I think the thing for Koch is, and you sort of hinted at it, not only was he limited by, you know, a specific name brand issue, I don’t think he really cared to be well-known outside of New York and New York City.

Nothing in my research ever spoke to a desire on his end to, you know, gain national syndication like Cuomo and certainly Wilder did. Um, I think all he cared about was being number one in New York, and for a time he was. We quote him in the story—or in the paper, sorry, journalism coming out—speaking to, you know, his WABC show being number one at his station in its time slot for New York City.

“I beat Rush Limbaugh,” he, you know, proclaims. So, I think in Koch’s case, he has that sort of shock talk, bombastic style, you know, and, you know, importantly, really isn’t afraid to criticize Democrats and Republicans and, and sort of is very much his own man. You know, but I don’t think he expressed any kind of a real desire for national notoriety beyond New York City, and that’s why maybe, you know, he doesn’t really rise to that level of Limbaugh-type or a Liddy type.

Nick Hirshon (23:10): And it also sounded like he wasn’t going to be potentially that kind of an advocate consistently for Democratic causes, right? That—like it seemed like maybe more Hart and Cuomo were cerebral and really cared about, deeply about these kind of Democratic issues nationally. And as you’re getting into Koch was more—he’s out of the public arena, he’s older, he’s trying to just kind of keep his position as a king of New York and that’s, you know, more important to him than necessarily how Democrats fare in the midterm elections.

Gregory Svirnovskiy: Yeah, I mean, in 1993, he endorsed Rudy Giuliani to be New York mayor. Um, I think, you know, no greater sort of, you know, proof of concept there relating to his attempted bipartisan bona fide. Certainly not going to be a Democratic cheerleader in the same way that a Cuomo would be.

Nick Hirshon (24:02): Yeah. That’s—it’s really interesting how the Democrats struck out with so many of these different folks that they turned to who each had their pros, but the cons in each case were really overwhelming and just some of the stubbornness of personalities of Mario Cuomo, as you’re talking about, refusing to go on five days a week and to cut out some of the jazz or the other sorts of things that would only appeal to a limited audience and, you know, it’s just a kind of interesting to plot this all and see, you know, how we get to where we are today.

Um, I just want to get to a little bit of a shop talk question with you here for the historians who might be listening. So, you mention how researching talk radio from the 1990s is a particular challenge because there just aren’t many recordings or transcripts of these shows. So, if you really want to hear what Cuomo and Wilder and Koch and Hart were talking about, it just doesn’t really exist. So, you know, so. you were relying, I know, on some newspapers and you did go to some archives. Um, I’ve always found this is kind of surprising to listeners because it sounds, like, very weird that it would be more difficult for you to study talk radio from the 1990s than, let’s say, newspapers from the 1890s, which are readily available in all these online databases.

(25:16) And I remember when I started my Ph.D., my very first article was about sports talk radio in New York City. And it included Don Imus, who comes up in your piece. And it was just, like, stunning that none of this exists. And that it was—if you find it, was because someone happened to upload it to YouTube. Or it’s, you know, it ended up in some archive ’cause someone, you know, was recording the radio that day and got a snippet of a show.

So how did you piece this together when so much of the primary source material just doesn’t exist anymore?

Gregory Svirnovskiy: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think, you know, Nick, I’m not a historian, or maybe I don’t consider myself one. I’m a journalist. I currently work at Politico as a producer, a digital producer and also I work for their health team and write enterprise stories.

(26:06) And so, you know, for me, I really employed the principles of journalism in this historical research paper. And what does that look like? I called everyone I could. Reached out to  and got in touch with, you know, Doug Wilder and Gary Hart and Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt and Bill Clinton’s press secretary, McCurry, and Marjorie Mezvinsky, who’s in the piece. Uh, I spoke to, you know, twelve or thirteen, I think, by estimation, people that were really major players in that era to get a better sense of the dynamics, the feelings that they had.

And I think that’s really what informed our piece was these sort of first-person interviews, you know. And I think, you know, that’s the great advantage of doing something from the ‘90s is a lot of these folks are on the older side, but they’re still certainly around and able to have these conversations. And so, you know, it’s funny. I was doing a lot of this research when I was twenty, twenty-one. You know, I’m a twenty-one-year-old kid, the middle of COVID-19 sort of in my basement talking to Joe Lieberman. Was just a wild place to find yourself (laughing), especially as someone that considers themselves a bit of a nerd, you know, with, with politics and history.

(27:33) And so I would say that was really how I compensated for that, is I, you know, I went straight to the source and just emailed and called people until I was finally able to get in touch with them and do interviews.

Nick Hirshon: You know, that’s very similar to what I ended up doing when I was looking into research. I was looking at the sports talk radio station WFAN 660 AM in New York City, the first all-sports radio station and very similar kind of a strategy because as a former journalist myself, I used to be a reporter for the New York Daily News, I was employing that same approach of, well, a lot of these folks are still around. So, we’re not doing something from the 1890s where it’s hopeless. There’s no way to really find out what they think unless we get a diary or something like that. Uh, these folks are around, and so hopefully we can go there.

(28:23) So good on you for, you know, reaching out to some really big names for this piece. We don’t often think of that as historians and certainly writing for a smaller audience that sometimes these big names are less interested in reaching. But I guess if you’re going back to some of the nostalgia, and they want to revisit what happened, what went wrong, and, you know, enough time has passed that it’s not quite as sensitive anymore for them to talk about what happened. So, that’s pretty neat.

Um, and so just as we start to kind of wrap up here, you know, you write that we’re still feeling the ramifications of these failures nearly three decades later and that today people with strong conservative views host eight of the ten most listened-to talk radio shows. So, this is really top of mind for a lot of listeners.

(29:07) I’m wondering, if we go back to that era in the 1990s. Now you’ve become an expert on everything that happened with conservative and liberal talk radio, how could Democrats have effectively fought back? Were they just doomed from the start because the demographics of their audience, it wasn’t as attractive to advertisers or some of the kind of points that they wanted to make were just too cerebral and they weren’t going to resonate with an audience that was looking for entertainment?

Or, you know, if you could go back and advise some of those Democrats from the 1990s, what would you have told them to do a little bit differently? What do they say they would have done differently?

Gregory Svirnovskiy: Yeah, I think some of the Democratic strategists and sort of folks in high places at the time, you know, it’s like we were talking about earlier, they understood what the dynamics were. Um, there was no liberal Rush Limbaugh. And so I think on the congressional side, on the White House side and on the DNC side, you know, in 1996 and 1995, they had the right idea (30:08), um, hiring Jon-Christopher Bua, you know, training volunteers to get on the air with sort of a unified set of talking points.

Um, you know, critics at the time called, um, some of the memos of his that were out there, you know, “overwhelmingly basic,” and they said that it dumbed down the point. But, you know, to a major degree, it worked. Democrats closed the gap in 1996, according to some of the research that we found. And, you know, what we saw was—and, you know, they win the 1996 election. You know, Clinton beats Dole, and everything sort of stops, according to our research.

You know, Bua gets a job with the Small Business Administration. You know, you’re four years away from the next general election, right? And it just, you know, it feels you’ve got to take your foot off the gas campaigning and do politics again and obviously a lot happened in Clinton’s second term.

(31:09) Um, and so I think, you know, the miss was—you know, Cuomo and Wilder and Hart and Koch, like, that was never the solution. And I think Democrats at the time understood that, too, or a lot of them did. So, I think the miss was, you know, they win the 1996 election. There’s evidence that this radio strategy, this absolute, resolute focus on radio, is working. Gephardt doing twelve calls a day, you know, or a week. Um, and, and then it all sort of stops. You know, it almost feels like they forgot.

And I think that’s when, maybe, Limbaugh was able to sort of reassert dominance. So, yeah. Yeah, that would be—that would be my advice is maybe they should have kept it going in the ’90s.

Nick Hirshon (31:58): And now with the fragmentation of media, it seems hard to believe that anyone could achieve that kind of listener base that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy or Don Imus was getting in the ’90s when terrestrial radio was dominant and really the only game in town. Um, so now with—there are, obviously, lots of liberal podcasts out there, but they are probably appealing to people who already strongly believe in those opinions and are just going to get them reinforced or to kind of hear similar-minded people instead of, you know, maybe people who would be more, like, motivated by those shows to go out and vote, and to actually change the course of an election as was happening there.

So, as we wrap up here, and thank you so much for your time here, Gregory, we always end with the same question on the Journalism History podcast: Why does journalism history matter?

Gregory Svirnovskiy (32:53): Hm. Gosh, that’s a tough one. I don’t know. I think ’cause, you know, and it’s an interesting question to answer as a journalist. You know, I feel one of the things I like most about being a reporter is, you know, this notion that journalists are writing history and the things that you write immediately become a part of the historical record. And so why not, you know, spin that on yourself and collect records on the work that you’re doing, too.

I’m not sure if that’s a coherent answer or not. But I also think that, like, journalism history is in itself just history, too, and the lessons that come out of the research that Jon Marshall and I did, you know, I think extend beyond being valuable for journalists and really can be applied in a number of different ways.

Nick Hirshon (33:47): I think that the research that you and Jon Marshall did here really—even for people who find themselves, maybe think themselves very politically attuned and have a good knowledge of history, might learn a lot from going into the particular personalities that were involved at the time and how the Democrats tried to win back the radio game a little bit here. So, I think that there is a lot of insights and, of course, some of the personalities who you’re talking about in this piece are still around today or the ramifications of what they did in the ’90s is still playing out in a lot of ways.

Um, so, it’s certainly relevant and we really appreciate you taking the time to go through—it’s a difficult thing to research. We talked about talk radio is not as simple as going through newspaper archives, so the fact that you were able to hunt down all of these folks three decades later, really get them to open up about what went wrong and put this all together through trade magazines and newspaper articles. And I know you did some work at the Wilder archives and the Bill Clinton Library and putting that all together I think is, is really valuable for folks.

So thanks, Gregory, for your research, and thanks for joining us on the Journalism History podcast.

Gregory Svirnovskiy (35:00): Well, yeah. And, you know, thanks so much, Nick, and, you know, it was exciting to contribute to the conversation, the historical record. Obviously, it’s research that got started a long time ago, but I think I’m still, you know, it had been a few months since I’d gone back and reread the piece and it’s fun to get a chance to look back on it and to sort of draw ever-newer conclusions. So, thanks, Nick, for having me on.

 

Nick Hirshon: Thanks for tuning in, and additional thanks to our sponsor, Lehigh University. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Until next time, I’m your host Nick Hirshon, signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow: “Good night, and good luck.”

Featured photo: “Speak into the Mic,” Alan Levine via Flickr, March 26, 2011. Creative Commons.