Hugh Hewitt Boosts Talk Radio

RADIO TALK-SHOW hosts come in different colors and sizes. There are the former Dee-jays like Rush Limbaugh. There are the guys that starting doing it for free on weekends. There are the guys that used to be construction workers, like Sean Hannity. Then there are the former political staffers, like Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, and Bill Bennett.

But they all share one thing, according to Hugh Hewitt. Soaring ratings. It all started last fall, according to Hugh.

Salem’s new talk station in New York City, AM 970 WNYM, debuted in August and has burst out of the blocks with a quarter million listeners. Audience growth in more conservative parts of the country is even stronger.

Michael Medved is up 83 percent in Sarasota, Florda. Dennis Prager is up 47 percent in Denver. Medved is up 150 percent in Honolulu among the “money demo” of 35-64 year-olds.

Why is talk radio doing so well? Is it just that conservatives are energized by Democrats in the White House? Hewitt claims that talk radio is the only place you can find non-MSM analysis:

Talk radio is prospering because it is the last place for extended, serious discussions with policy experts who are not part of the MSM’s dominant worldview. I spent a decade as a news anchor with the PBS affiliate KCET in Los Angeles, so I know as well as anyone about public television’s strong leftward tilt...

The variety and quality of talk-radio programming, combined with the liberal-Left domination of the political and media elites, is powering talk radio’s growth — and that’s something not just conservatives but the entire country ought to be glad for.

Last fall, everyone was counting the conservative movement out. It had lost its way.

But that completely misses the point. You cannot do political organizing when your side is in power. Liberal or conservative, government is a mess of incompetence and corruption. So you can’t get people excited about conservative ideas when conservatives are in power.

In fact you can’t get people excited about anything unless there’s a problem. You can’t get people to reform Fannie and Freddie until they are broken. You can’t get people to vote against government programs until gigantic bureaucracies are breaking the back of America.

Now that the Obamanoids are in power and determined to governmentize everything in America, people are starting to get the point about conservatism, about limited government, and about the incandescent beauty of the “little platoons.”

The frustrating thing about Democrat Bill Clinton was that he was so smart that you could never lay a hand on him for being a liberal.

But the Obamanoids are fed up with hiding in the tall grass. They just want to be liberals and do as much liberal stuff as they can before the American people change their minds.

Talk-radio hosts like Hugh Hewitt will be a big part of the mind-changing process.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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