RADIO DAZE.(AnShell Media plans to offer liberal alternative to conservative domination of political talk radio in New York City)

New York City is the home base of Fox News, National Review, and "The Rush Limbaugh Show." We're in our tenth straight year under Republican mayors. And we're the world headquarters of heartless, rapacious, crush-the-workers Finance Capitalism. But none of that makes our town Nirvana for conservatives. Politically, we're blue through and through. Al Gore's margin over George W. Bush here was four to one, and the city's congressional delegation consists of twelve Democrats and one Republican. New York has its share of paleocons and more than its share of neocons (neoconservatism having been invented on the Upper West Side, circa 1968), but what we mostly have is noncons--that is, nonconservatives. We even have liberals.

You'd be hard put to notice that, though, from listening to the radio. As in the rest of the country, political talk radio here is dominated by the hard right. On the AM band, whose low-fidelity signal is perfect for shrill jabber, no fewer than four powerful stations feature "conservative talk." Two of them, WMCA and WWDJ, are "Christian" and heavily salted with attacks on homosexuality, abortion rights, and stem-cell research and support for school prayer, President Bush's judicial nominees, and Israeli maximalism. The other two pump out a steadier flow of viscous, untreated political sewage. WOR carries four hours daily of Bob Grant and Bill O'Reilly, reliable voices of irritable reaction. The biggie is WABC, which claims the largest talk-radio audience in the country. The station features fifteen hours a week of Limbaugh, fifteen of Sean Hannity, and ten of Mark Levin ("one of America's preeminent conservative commentators"). It recently dropped the malignant ranter Michael Savage, not because he told a "sodomite" caller, "You should only get aids and die, you pig"--that happened a little later, on Savage's short-lived MSNBC cable-television show--but over a contract dispute. (Savage's photograph remains on the home page of the WABC Web site, like Banquo's ghost.) As its call letters indicate, WABC carries the respectable imprimatur of the American Broadcasting Company, which owns it and provides its hourly newscasts, and, by extension, of ABC's parent company, Disney.

A generation ago, when WABC was New York's No. 1 Top Forty rock station, talk radio, here and elsewhere, was both smaller and more varied. In 1980, only seventy-five stations in the United States used the all-talk format, and most of them were politically anodyne. Conservative hosts were novelty items. Now there are more than thirteen hundred talk stations, the vast majority of which are relentlessly right-wing. New York, like a few other big coastal cities, has a squeaky voice or two on the marginal left. WBAI broadcasts Chomskian harangues, and WLIB, which carries mostly Caribbean pop music, dips an occasional toe into protest politics. On the whole, though, the New York lineup mirrors the far right's near-monopoly on political broadcasting nationwide. There is no real liberal or even just noncon counterpart to the radiocons, as we might as well call them. On (mostly) the FM dial, National Public Radio is an alternative but not an equivalent. NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," like "The Rush Limbaugh Show," are carried on some six hundred stations, and their audience is roughly the size of El Rushbo's--somewhere around fifteen million people per week. But these NPR programs are news-feature broadcasts; they adhere to the practices of journalistic professionalism, including the aspirational ideal of objectivity. Their sensibility may fairly be said to be "liberal" in the sense that liberal education is liberal--that is, open-minded ...