(Getty Images)
Lindsey Scott, a resident of the small city of Meadville in northwest Pennsylvania, knows the value of reaching voters however she can. Scott, the secretary of the Rural Caucus for Pennsylvania’s Democratic State Committee, said candidates need to think creatively about how they communicate.
“Really being out there, that’s what it takes to win some of these races,” Scott said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
It’s important to get messages in front of as many eyes as possible. But as for reaching ears, Scott is at a loss. That’s because political talk radio, which can be a big source of information for people who live in rural areas, isn’t a medium Scott finds especially encouraging for Democratic candidates.
“It would just be an unfriendly environment,” she said.
Talk radio holds the attention of many rural Americans, reaching even the most remote parts of the nation. Some listeners in the swing state of Pennsylvania told the Daily Yonder that they tune in as an alternative to an urban-focused national news landscape. But no matter what talk-radio station Pennsylvania listeners choose, the programming is overwhelmingly conservative, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.
Talk radio is also part of an increasingly polarized media environment. In July, when a would-be assassin shot at former President Donald Trump just an hour south of Meadville, conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity blamed the shooting on the left’s “dehumanization” of Trump. Alternatively, in 2021, the New York Times reported that it was conservative talk radio’s “stoking of anger” that led to the siege on the capital in January of that year.
Attitudes surrounding talk radio shed light on this media polarization. A 2020 study by the Pew Research Center revealed former talk radio host Rush Limbaugh to be “the third-most trusted source among conservative Republicans,” contrastingly, “tied for the second-most distrusted source among liberal Democrats.” Geographical analysis of the data revealed rural conservatives as the group with the largest decreases in media trust over the past 40 years.
Kathy Kemp Jensen (Submitted photo)
Kathy Kemp Jensen, who serves as chair of the Warren County, Pennsylvania, Republican Committee, has listened to talk radio since the days of Rush Limbaugh, whose conservative call-in show was nationally syndicated in 1988. Jensen sees talk radio as an alternative to a media environment she finds focused on tidbits, not substance.
“It’s tough. It’s gotten to the point where you don’t know what to believe,” she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “What I think a lot of people like about talk radio is that you get more than just the headlines. You get the full story, the full understanding of what’s going on.”
Listeners like Jensen appreciate that the long-form programs give hosts a chance to talk about an issue extensively. The programs create a bond between charismatic host and entertained listener. The call-in feature of talk radio programs fosters another pillar of trust; listeners hear voices like their own asking questions they find compelling.
“[Call-ins] make me feel more connected to people with my views,” Colleen West of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, told the Daily Yonder. She turns to talk radio as a format that discusses issues in a manner more attuned to her concerns. Feeling ignored by larger, urban-centric media outlets, West sees talk radio as more representative of rural values.
Media historian Brian Rosenwald compares the conversation found in the programs to those you would find at a conservative dinner table or a favorite dive bar. “People, especially rural people, are feeling marginalized and maligned. Talk radio is the local bar for that, so to speak. It’s a digital kind of place where they can go and feel like, hey, people share my values,” Rosenwald said in a phone interview with the Daily Yonder.
Jensen says that traditional media coverage of talk radio unfairly paints the format as one that is rooted in hateful messaging. “You need to listen to them and understand what is being said,” she said. “At the core of their message is something that’s not rooted in hate.”
Many disagree. “It feels energizing, right? To tap into an anger, an anger about something lost, an anger about something that you lack or you feel like should have been yours,” said Scott, the secretary of the state’s Democratic Rural Caucus. Scott believes that conservative hosts capitalize on this anger, turning frustrations into talk points. “That kind of anger is overly simplistic. It’s really more nuanced, these reasons that stretch over eons of time, like lazy policy that doesn’t protect rural people.”
A map of Pennsylvania’s broadband access at the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority display at the Butler County Farm Show. (Photo by Molly Egan)
Talk radio remains popular in rural areas due in large part to the reliability of free AM airwaves, compared to the expense of reliable broadband. For West, the unfeasible $30,000 cost of running a fiber optics cable to her home means that the radio stays on. “We don’t have TV at all and we have to rely on the internet that we get through satellite. So, AM radio has always been pretty popular with rural people because you can always reach them,” West said.
As smaller stations struggle to keep accounts in the black, many have been purchased by conservative media corporations. Nationally syndicated programming has replaced much of the local content, often flattening the character of the station. “We don’t have the flavor that we used to have,” said Jensen.
According to David Norlin of The Kansas Reflector, “Networks found that investing in one big host, piped nationwide by satellite, was far cheaper than paying local hosts in every city. Profitability pushed them into safe, tested formats.” Profitability also pushed them into provocative conservative content— like Limbaugh and Hannity.
For western Pennsylvania station KDKA, favored by the region’s rural residents, this change in content has resulted in a changing tone to the station. After being purchased by radio conglomerate Entercom in 2017, KDKA’s talk programming has grown increasingly conservative, with less air time dedicated to reporting on local stories. In 2020, longtime co-host John Shumway left the station after refusing his producers’ request to act more “combative.”
Phil Boyce, program director of radio conglomerate Salem Media Corporation, has associated his mission more with profit than ideology. At a radio industry conference, pointing to a picture of Trump, Boyce stated, “This guy right here is a game-changer for our format. We call him the gift that keeps on giving.” He defends the notion that it is not his hosts’ job to inform, but rather entertain. “My hosts are not particularly journalists, although they sometimes will use journalistic tactics to tell their stories. My hosts are storytellers, they’re opinion makers, they are thought leaders,” Boyce said.
Brian Rosenwald (Submitted photo)
Rosenwald, the media historian, is concerned that talk radio hosts don’t make this distinction sufficiently clear to listeners.
“It is not particularly encouraging how news and opinion has been blurred,” he said, pointing to broadcasts that advertise themselves as alternative truth-tellers. “You can argue about values, you can argue about policies. But, people are on different planets because they’re seeing different facts.”
Rosenwald sees reinvigorating local media as the path to finding this lost common ground. “My answer is always we need to invest in local media because local media is something that people still trust. There’s not the same polarization,” he said.
In many cases, conglomerates have taken advantage of this enhanced trust in local media. “I’ve seen instances of local news shows reading one-sided scripts that are word for word the same across areas. So they seem local, and they have maybe some specific local news, but are actually extremely biased,” Scott said.
Some rural-facing stations have remained community-owned by building coalitions among broadcasters. In the Mountain West, The Rocky Mountain Community Radio (RMCR) operates 20 non-commercial stations throughout various rural communities. By supporting local and diverse coverage, the stations provide an alternative to corporate-backed programming.
Still, in areas where conglomerate-backed reporting remains the predominant option, the task falls on individuals to navigate a tumultuous media landscape. “You have to look at one source and then look at the other,” West of Slippery Rock said. This navigation is anything but straightforward, “Usually, one’s more extreme than the other. So you just have to pick and choose what you believe between those two.”
Rosenwald makes a metaphor of this muddling of facts. “There’s a lot we can do to disagree agreeably. But if I say to you, ‘it’s a gorgeous sunny day out, isn’t it lovely?’ And you say, but ‘no, it’s rainy.’ One of us has to be wrong and we can’t really argue about that,” he said. “We can’t get to the point of whether a sunny day is a good or a bad thing — we don’t even agree on what is coming down from the sky.”
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.