What Was On in the Cab: Talk Radio, 1989–2001

Listen: Deep dive conversation

https://meridian-archive.com/feed.xml

Open in your app, or paste the link above into any other:

Apple Podcasts Overcast Pocket Casts Castro Podcast Addict RSS

The Cost of Doing Business

The Federal Communications Commission kept a running account on Howard Stern’s morning show, and it kept it the way any regulator keeps a ledger of repeat violations. Between November 1990 and September 1995 the agency issued a sequence of formal Notices of Apparent Liability against WXRK 92.3 FM (“K-Rock”) and two sister stations: a $6,000 fine tied to a December 1988 broadcast, then two penalties in 1992 totaling $105,000 and $600,000 — the largest indecency fines the agency had imposed to that point — and finally, in September 1995, a single $1.715 million settlement that Infinity Broadcasting, Stern’s parent company, paid to close every outstanding case against him at once.¹ The agency did not pull WXRK’s license or refer a case for prosecution. It billed the show, notice by notice, case number by case number, and Infinity paid each one as an operating expense and kept the show on the air. Nothing about the sequence was hidden or scandalous by the standards of the agency issuing it: an indecency fine against a syndicated morning host was a category of federal paperwork with its own docket, its own settlement precedent, and, by September 1995, its own lump-sum closing rate.

How a Rule Change Built AM Talk Radio

None of it touched the show’s growth. National syndication had begun in August 1986, and Stern entered GALLEY’s period four years into a K-Rock run that already made him, at seven each morning, the most-heard voice in the city’s outer boroughs and suburbs — a status the city’s prestige press did not review, did not profile, and rarely mentioned by name in print.² His cast — Robin Quivers anchoring news as his foil, Fred Norris on sound effects, Jackie Martling supplying jokes — ran bits built on Dial-a-Date setups, the Wack Pack of recurring obsessive callers, and celebrity pranks, structured chaos that construction sites, delis, and cabs kept running from six to ten each morning. An FM click away on the dial, Don Imus, who had moved with WNBC’s old 660 AM dial position to the newly renamed WFAN in October 1988, ran something stranger: satirical bits — Bernie McGuirk’s running caricature of a racist Irish priest, Rob Bartlett’s impressions, Charles McCord reading news — interleaved with twenty- to forty-minute interviews conducted at the seriousness of a Sunday broadcast, guests who by the late 1990s included Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell, and Cokie Roberts as near-regulars.³⁴ The two shows did not compete for the same listener so much as divide the morning between the audience the magazine world’s own writers belonged to and the audience it wrote about without addressing. The music dial the same hours occupied — what WPLJ played against WNEW-FM, what Hot 97 did to the format map after 1993 — belongs to the radio dial’s own account elsewhere;⁵ this is the talk dial, the one carrying voices rather than songs, and it was not silence the floor drove past. It was argument, joke, and interview, running continuously, in a register almost nobody at Meridian would have named if asked what was on the radio that morning.

Stern: The Show That Kept Costing Money

Stern’s politics ran libertarian rather than conservative — anti-drug-war, pro-abortion-rights, hostile to the same censorship apparatus the Moral Majority and Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center represented — and in 1994 he ran for governor of New York on the Libertarian ticket, withdrawing before the race concluded rather than comply with the state’s financial-disclosure requirements.⁶ He was not assembling the same ecosystem Limbaugh was building three stations away on the AM band. He ran parallel to it, indifferent to the same institutions in a different direction, and the magazine world encountered him the way it encountered weather — not by seeking him out but by getting into a cab at seven in the morning and finding him already on.

Imus: The Show the Establishment Prepared For

The distinction that mattered inside Meridian’s world was not that Imus was more polite than Stern — his own bits ran plenty crude — but that Imus was the show the people the floor covered actually went on. Al D’Amato had recognized early what the microphone offered a senator courting the outer-borough and suburban male vote and became one of Imus’s first regular political guests; Bill Clinton appeared during the 1992 campaign.⁴ By the late 1990s the guest chair rotated through Washington’s press corps as a matter of course, and an appearance on Imus had become, for a journalist promoting a book, close to an obligation rather than a choice. Westwood One had carried the show to roughly a hundred stations by the late 1990s, and its audience skewed older, better educated, and more politically centrist than any AM conservative-talk host could claim.⁴ The frequency itself had a second life after Imus signed off each morning: WFAN had launched in July 1987 on 1050 AM as the country’s first all-sports station before moving to 660 the following year, and its afternoon drive belonged from July 1989 to Mike and the Mad Dog, Mike Francesa and Chris Russo, the highest-rated sports-radio program in the country by the mid-1990s.⁷ A senior editor at Meridian who published a book might sit in Imus’s guest chair. The magazine world could describe that show because its own people had been inside it — a different relationship to the medium entirely than the one it held with Stern’s studio or with the AM band three stations further down the dial, where a different kind of talk radio had been growing since 1988 without any of the floor’s people ever sitting in its chair at all.

The Doctrine That Vanished

On August 4, 1987, FCC Chairman Dennis Patrick and a Republican-appointed majority voted to abolish the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 rule requiring broadcast license holders to cover controversial public issues and to do so with some balance of opposing views.⁸ Congress had passed a bill to write the doctrine into statute that same year; Ronald Reagan vetoed it, and the repeal stood. Under the old rule, three hours a day of unambiguous one-sided commentary — the format a national conservative talk host would need — carried an equal-time obligation that made the format’s economics implausible; a station running Rush Limbaugh without offering comparable time to an opposing view invited a complaint the doctrine was built to uphold. Once the rule was gone, the obligation went with it. The mechanism by which the repeal produced conservative talk radio specifically, rather than a general expansion of political radio in every direction, remains genuinely contested among media scholars, but the most persuasive account holds that AM radio — having lost its music audience to FM through the 1970s — was cheap, structurally desperate, and looking for any format that could hold an audience without expensive production; a motivated, underserved, and vocal conservative audience filled three hours a day more reliably than a format built to challenge its own listeners.⁸ By 1997 conservative talk dominated AM nationally; by 2001 even FM stations had begun carrying Limbaugh. A comparable liberal talk format never assembled a national audience of similar size in the period.

Limbaugh: What Grew in the Space

The Rush Limbaugh Show launched nationally on August 1, 1988, on 56 stations; within three months it was on 100; by 1990, 200; by 1992, when The Way Things Ought to Be was published, more than 600 stations carried it to an estimated 20 million listeners a week, a growth curve no radio program in American history had matched.⁹ In New York the show ran on WABC 770 AM, the same frequency where Bob Grant had occupied afternoon drive since 1984 and where Limbaugh himself had also carried a separate morning slot beginning July 4, 1988, under his syndication contract.¹⁰ WABC’s audience ran to Staten Island, the Bronx, Long Island, and New Jersey — civil servants, tradespeople, police officers, firefighters, the constituency that had elected Ed Koch and, in 1993, elected Rudy Giuliani — a New York the Midtown magazine world did not commute through. The Way Things Ought to Be spent 24 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1992; See, I Told You So debuted at number one the following year, the fastest-selling nonfiction titles in publishing history at the time. The vocabulary Limbaugh supplied his audience — “dittoheads” for the loyal, “feminazis” for the abortion-rights left, “drive-by media” for the press, “environmental wackos” for his opponents on ecology — traveled beyond the show itself and into ordinary conservative speech.¹¹ When Republicans took both houses of Congress in November 1994 for the first time in forty years, the incoming freshman class invited Limbaugh to a Washington dinner and made him an honorary member of the class, presenting him with a pin reading “Majority Maker”; former Representative Vin Weber of Minnesota told the press afterward that Limbaugh “really probably is as responsible for what’s happened here as any other person.”¹² That sentence was not offered as metaphor. Three hours a day, five days a week, on a station the Meridian world’s commute never crossed, a show had functioned as organizing infrastructure for a national political movement, and the floor had a paragraph’s worth of accurate description for it and nothing more.

The rest of the ecosystem assembled itself through the same years and drew the same shrug on first appearance. The Weekly Standard launched September 17, 1995, funded by Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol — small circulation, outsized influence inside conservative intellectual circles, read at a place like Meridian, if at all, as a curiosity. Fox News Channel, built by Roger Ailes, launched October 7, 1996, on 17 million cable subscribers nationwide but could not initially be seen in New York or Los Angeles, since the cable carriage deals for the country’s two largest media markets had not yet been made; critics who wanted to watch the launch had to do so inside Fox’s own studios.¹³ Murdoch paid cable operators to carry the channel rather than charging them for it, inverting the industry’s usual arrangement, and within three years the channel had passed CNN in the ratings. The Drudge Report, begun in 1996 as a Hollywood-gossip email newsletter, became nationally decisive in January 1998 when it ran the Monica Lewinsky story that Newsweek had killed, an outlet outside the mainstream press carrying a story the mainstream press had declined and forcing a response from it. Sean Hannity joined WABC in 1997, first in the late-night slot and then, by 1998, in afternoon drive after Bob Grant’s April 1996 firing over comments following the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown; Hannity moved into national syndication on September 10, 2001, one day before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.¹³

What the Magazine World Wrote, When It Wrote Anything

The prestige press did not ignore talk radio so much as arrive late and write it up as anthropology. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and comparable Midtown monthlies began treating conservative talk as a sociological phenomenon in the mid-1990s, well after it had become politically decisive, and the framing tended toward curiosity edged with condescension — who are these people, and why are they so angry — a diagnosis of resentment and dislocation rather than an account of a media product filling a real and specific need.¹⁴ The editorial culture of Midtown magazines through the period ran reflexively liberal, assuming a specific New York cosmopolitanism as simply correct rather than as one available position among several, which made an accurate account of Limbaugh’s audience — its size, its grievances, its reasoning — structurally difficult for a staff that had never spent three hours inside the broadcast to produce. Medium snobbery compounded it: print culture assumed text was the serious form and radio the medium of driving and distraction, an assumption that kept the plain arithmetic out of view. The New Yorker’s circulation in the period ran around 700,000; Limbaugh’s audience ran to some 20 million a week. The math sat there, uncontested and unabsorbed, for most of the decade.

Thesis

Two Manhattan radio institutions — Stern on FM, Imus on AM — ran the morning drive for the city’s commuters and its own magazine writers alike, familiar enough that either might describe a guest chair he had personally sat in; a third institution, three stations down the AM band and reaching an audience an order of magnitude larger than any Midtown monthly, ran on a repeal that had removed the one legal mechanism requiring broadcasters to balance what they aired, and it built, over twelve years and without needing anyone at Meridian’s address to notice, the organizing infrastructure for a political movement that took Congress in 1994 and, by the decade’s end, sat at the center of the country’s remade media landscape. The gap between the show the floor could describe and the show it could not was not a gap in information. It was a gap in what three hours a day, sat inside a broadcast rather than glimpsed through a cab window, would require of anyone on staff who actually listened.

At the Magazine

Stern’s first FCC fine, in November 1990, would have run in The Front as a paragraph of media-business arithmetic, a number attached to a name the floor already knew from the cab window. His gubernatorial run four years later would have taken the same pages the same way, a novelty item on a man running to lose. The Majority Maker dinner would have been an articles editor’s find for The Essay, an anecdote about a freshman class rather than an argument about what had produced it; Fox News’s debut, reaching seventeen million subscribers nobody at Meridian’s address could yet watch, would have claimed that same section as a launch item the following year. Drudge’s Lewinsky scoop, once it became a story about journalism rather than about a president, would have been The Essay’s again — three uses of one section across a decade, the floor’s ceiling for how seriously any of this ever got taken.

Limbaugh’s book would have gone differently. The pitch to profile him at the length and patience the form demanded would have surfaced on the floor repeatedly and died each time, not for want of readers — twenty-four weeks on the bestseller list argued otherwise — but because granting him that seriousness would have meant admitting how little the floor’s own reading habits had prepared anyone to take him seriously. The Back, that spring, would have made do with an unsigned paragraph folding the book into a roundup of the year’s bestselling political nonfiction, one paragraph among five, no author interview, the reasoning behind the book never rendered in anyone’s voice but a summarizer’s. The Weekly Standard’s launch, arriving a few years later, would have belonged to that same Back-of-book company, a small-circulation item filed and closed without argument.

Hannity’s move into WABC’s late slot would have gotten no further than a line on somebody’s list of stations worth watching, and the editor keeping that list would have left for a rival masthead before the item came up again — the thread simply uncarried by whoever inherited the desk. His national syndication, four years on, would have reached the room the week of September 10, 2001, and by the time anyone reconvened to argue whether talk radio’s growth still belonged on that month’s docket, the question would have been overtaken by everything else already happening in the world.