talk radio
Talk radio generally refers to radio programming where listeners call in to express their opinions on air. Listeners are invited to participate and to take a stand on the topics under discussion. Talk radio shows often feature interviews with prominent people. According to media history professor Hugh Chignell, talk radio is a mainly American phenomenon that arose due to specific conditions in the U.S. radio industry.
Talk radio can be produced at a relatively low cost, with a small staff and no need to pay royalties for music. Audience participation is fundamental to talk radio, and the development and popularization of mobile technology have made it easier for listeners to call in to radio shows throughout the day. In recent years, broadcasters have been able to exploit digital technologies to improve the quality of audio captured via the phone. This entry discusses talk radio in the United States and elsewhere, the growth of talk radio beginning in the late 1980s, and talk radio topics and formats.
The topics on talk radio are varied, though the lives of celebrities and political issues are commonly discussed. Hosts sometimes have an argumentative style or adopt rhetorical strategies such as irony, jokes, and humor. Outside of the United States, the talk radio model has been adapted to local conditions. In the United Kingdom, according to Andrew Crisell, talk and music radio brings together the two typical elements of radio content in a mix of information, culture, and entertainment. In Canada, talk radio shares space in the stations’ programming with news and documentary programs, similar to some public radio stations in the United States that broadcast a handful of call-in shows along with news.
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The radio call-in format dates back to the 1950s, although in some of the first shows to feature listener calls, the calls were recorded for later broadcast, or the hosts summarized them to avoid objectionable content being aired. Soon after, a system was developed to delay the broadcast of a speaker by several seconds and enabled live call-in shows. The shows exploded in popularity in the United States during the 1990s, due largely to changes in the U.S. political environment and regulatory system.
From 1949 to 1987, the Federal Communications Commission held radio and television stations to a standard requiring them to air opposing sides of public issues of importance, a policy known as the fairness doctrine. The number of stations featuring talk radio programming in the United States increased by almost 15 times between 1987 and 2003 after the Federal Communications Commission dropped this policy. Conservative talk radio shows in particular proliferated, featuring hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, who had an estimated 13 million listeners each week in 2016. These shows spoke to white working-class audience members who felt ignored by mainstream media they saw as liberal. Liberal talk radio did not take off in the same way, though one of the most popular liberal hosts, Ed Schultz, who had a nationally syndicated talk show from 2004 to 2014, had about 3 million listeners each week at the show’s peak.
In the United States, politically oriented talk radio overlaps with the so-called hot talk, also referred to as shock jock radio, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1990s. Aimed mainly toward men between 18 and 49 years old, hot talk mixed vulgar jokes with talk about pop culture and politics and often took political positions contrary to feminism and liberalism. Among those who rose to fame in this format are Howard Stern and Don Imus.
Another popular talk radio format is sports talk. Sports talk can be found on both national and local stations, with some stations devoting all of their time to sports. Advice call-in shows, with hosts dispensing advice on everything from home repair to personal finance to sex, also have been a long-standing feature of talk radio. One of the most popular public radio shows in the United States for many years was Car Talk, which was a local show in Boston for 10 years before airing on NPR affiliates nationwide from 1987 to 2012. The show featured brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi answering listener questions about cars and car repair between cracking jokes.
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The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.