Local Airwaves, National Impact: Conservative, rural talk radio in the US—and why we need to study it
Date:
Invited talk at the CuCo Lab, University of Luxembourg.
Abstract:
Talk radio in the US has been an enduring player in the media landscape for decades. It tends to be highly partisan (largely conservative) and rife with varieties of misinformation; it is often framed as alternative ‘infotainment’ on a dying (i.e., not digital) medium. There is thus a comparative dearth of research into talk radio in contemporary media studies and adjacent fields. Yet conservative talk radio—and the stations that carry it—can play outsize sociopolitical and even quasi-journalistic roles today, particularly in rural contexts. I substantiate these arguments via a mixed method, ongoing project focused on several rural talk radio stations in the US. These stations are based in a region with a high density of broadcast media and majority conservative population. In this presentation, I describe how these stations contextualize and normalize topics for their distinct audiences, produce local news as hybrid digital-broadcast actors, and facilitate local and national politics. I will also touch on methodological challenges, including on-the-ground ethnography in partisan environments, as well as capturing and archiving radio data at scale. I end with a brief discussion of why a better understanding of talk radio—and conservative media more generally—is also invaluable to current policy interventions, e.g., to mitigate news desertification.