Talk radio

Read David Foster Wallace's entertaining dissection of the talk radio industry in the Atlantic on my plane ride back from Atlanta yesterday. Some excerpts:

Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservativeness that dominates today's AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.

Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the past decade, the industry's revenues have increased by more than 10% a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow.

Also, here is an interesting story about a rather clever show:

... the Phil Hendrie Show which is actually a cruel and complicated kind of meta-talk radio. What happens every night on this program is that Phil Hendrie brings on some wildly offensive guest - a man who's leaving his wife because she's had a mastectomy, a Little League coach who advocates corporal punishment of players, etc. - and first-time or casual listeners will call in and argue with the guests and (not surprisingly) get very angry and upset. Except the whole thing's a put-on. The guests are fake, their different voices done by Hendrie with the aid of mike-processing and a first-rate board  op, and the show's real entertainment is the callers, who don't know it's all a gag - Hendrie's real auidience, which is in on the joke, enjoys hearing these callers get more and more outraged and sputtery as the "guests" yank their chain.

Later on in the piece, Wallace goes on to speculate that perhaps the callers are also fakes conjured up by Hendrie and his crew, so that the "initiates" are also the butt of the joke. Rather funny.

Also learnt about Arbitron which is something like Nielsen ratings for radio. It is referred to as "Arbitraryon" by insiders because "it is 100 percent diary-based, and diary surveys are notoriously iffy, since a lot of subjects neglect to fill out their diaries in real time (especially when they're listening as they drive), tending instead to wait till the night before they're due and theen trying to do them from memory." Leading, no doubt, to inaccurate ratings numbers that are fed to gullible advertisers.