Talk radio is not a new phenomenon, but the nature of the medium has changed in recent years in two regards--there are more talk radio stations, and more of them are devoted to hosts who could be described as right-wing than left-wing. Politicians noticed the shift especially with the rise in popularity of Rush Limbaugh. A report by the Wall Street Journal found that there were 200 talk radio stations in the U.S. in 1988 and some 1,000 today. One out of six Americans now listens to talk radio regularly, and half the country tunes in at least once a week for an hour or more. According to a 1993 Times Mirror poll, 44 percent of Americans report that talk radio is their primary source for political news. Political leaders noted these figures and the fact that Rush Limbaugh had a weekly audience of 20 million people on 660 stations across the country, and they changed their attitude toward appearing on his show and on the shows of other hosts:
He used to be mocked and dismissed. While his critics still carp, he has been busy appearing as a panelist on NBC's very establishment "Meet the Press," the oldest program on TV, as well as ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley." Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently called Limbaugh to explain the Mexican peso bailout to him so he might promote it to his listeners as well as viewers of daily syndicated TV show (Murdock PG).
The success of the new right-wing talk shows brought out a variety of critics who commented especially on what they saw as the generally confrontational nature of these shows, something that links them with the less political Howard Stern:
The true masters are motormouths like Hamblin, Boortz, Hannity and the supremo, Rush Limbaugh. . . Talk radio trails only country music as the nation's most pervasive format; it commandeers more than 15 percent of the fragmented audience (Corliss and Dickerson 22).
The reason talk radio has created some conc...