Beyond Outrage

What do you do when someone steals your act?

Talk radio needs an answer, but, then again, so does all of radio, and any other medium that's grappling with how to maintain its reason for existence when newer media have taken over. Let's focus on one thing, though: outrage.

Yeah, outrage is what talk radio, specifically political talk radio, rode to great success. The formula went back to the angry guys of early talk radio, the Joe Pynes and Bob Grants of the business: inflate an issue into a crisis, paint someone or something as the responsible party, and rail against them with almost comic invective. Every issue was made black-and-white, never a gray area, and there was always a bad guy (or bad guys). Come to think of it, that could describe a lot of entertainment options: superhero movies, police procedural dramas, you get the idea. And it worked for a long time.

Now, outrage is everywhere. Cable news is full of it; turning molehills into mountains has been lucrative for the prime-time "opinion hosts." Social media is all about outrage. You can find fire-breathing hot takes everywhere. And that has left talk radio's version of the art form seeming quaint, a relic of the days when talk radio was relevant to a larger percentage of the population. By the time a listener gets into the car and the radio goes on, they've had their full of outrage, and whatever a talk radio host is getting lathered up about has already been hashed and rehashed and re-rehashed on Twitter. Things move faster now, and talk radio can't quite keep up with everything.

Again, then, what do you do when someone steals your act? You could complain, but that won't do any good. You can't sue the internet for becoming the public's preferred place to vent. You can, however, adapt.

I've tried to get that across since I got into the business too many years ago. There are a lot more things to talk about besides today's political outrage, and a lot of ways to talk about them. Yes, manufactured outrage sells -- ask Fox News -- but so do many other topics, many other forms of entertainment and information. Talk radio has, for years, served up outrage and crisis and panic and anger and little else, but that's far from the only way to do this job. It would be as if television or streaming or movies did one thing (probably superhero movies) because it's successful, and offered nothing else. No comedy, no drama, no news, nothing but superheroes. They'd be leaving a huge chunk of audience and revenue on the table.

That's what talk radio has done. There's an "only one way to do it" mentality among programmers and management that positions anything that isn't a clone of what's been done already as too risky to try. But the outrage formula is no longer exclusive to talk radio, and here's how you know it's a problem: When there's any discussion of the media's effect on the current political landscape, it's mostly about Tucker Carlson and social media. Talk radio gets an occasional shout out, but when was the last time you heard a talk radio show be referred to as influential, for good or bad? We are not at the same point as we were twenty or even ten years ago, when you'd read lengthy dissertations on how Rush Limbaugh was influencing battalions of voters. Talk radio isn't on that level now.

The audience has other options and is using them. You can circle the wagons and just try to preserve as much of what you have as it shrinks, or you could look beyond your present state and try to grow by doing something different. Outrage is not the only thing that works on talk radio, and we've seen that from time to time, whether it was quirky personality (Howard Stern, Neil Rogers) or advice or celebrity and gossip talk (myTalk in the Twin Cities). Public radio manages to do well without raising people's blood pressure. Many successful podcasts manage to handle all kinds of topics in all kinds of different ways. It CAN be done.

What do you do when someone steals your act? You find a new act. A radical idea, I know, but it just might work.

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Whatever act you want to do, you'll find material for it at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page, where outrage is directed only at the deserving. Find it by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well.

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In talking about acts being stolen, I am not, of course, referring to the time-honored tradition of radio people "borrowing" bits and formats and even identities from other radio people. Radio wouldn't have been radio if there weren't guys named "Johnny Dark" in every market.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon