The Afternoon Radio War begins
Rush Limbaugh's death this February closed the book on the career of talk radio's iconic pioneer. Now two familiar voices will compete over his key time slot.
Even from beyond the grave the long shadow of El Rushbo looms over conservative talk radio. His archived broadcasts piped in during the month of March logged 14 million weekly listeners, third among all shows and only one million behind Sean Hannity at No. 1. In 1993 it was reported that there were even restaurants and diners where patrons could choose to sit in the “Rush Room” where his show would be piped in through speakers. I was not of a generation that truly embraced Limbaugh; as a child of the ‘90s I grew up listening to liberal pundits like Al Franken that made a career out of attacking him as the “big fat idiot”. Of course this was before I could hold a job, much less vote. In 2000 the absurd bellyaching about Al Gore being the “real president” convinced me that I was not a Democrat even if I still held many liberal opinions. By the time of Limbaugh’s death I had more in common with the Dittoheads that listened to him daily than with any of his detractors.
In the almost forty years since he first came on the radio in 1984, Limbaugh’s views did not change a lot. But the style of opinionated radio commentary that he virtually invented became such a sensation that it spawned many imitators. Among them are two that I know very well, even listening to them on a daily basis, that are assuming his time slots on the various syndication networks: Dan Bongino and Clay Travis. They could not be more different in their backgrounds, but both heirs could build on the lofty heights that Limbaugh reached while bringing the medium to a new generation. The greater question will be which one will assume the mantle as the true successor as the king of the afternoon block.
From the White House bubble to the AM dial - Dan Bongino
I first encountered the work of Dan Bongino several years ago when I read his memoir Life Inside the Bubble detailing his life in the Secret Service’s Presidential Protective Detail. He was one of the men and women in suits with ear pieces that are charged with keeping the President alive day and night whether within the familiar confines of the White House or on a visit to US troops in a war zone. Prior to that Bongino was an NYPD police officer and worked on financial fraud cases for the Secret Service. He has written four books since then, all of them progressively more focused on current events or politics. Living in Maryland when he left the Secret Service, Bongino ran for office three times unsuccessfully, twice there and once in Florida where he later moved.
The growth of Bongino’s audience started partly as a result of an hour-long weekday podcast that he continues to do since taking over the slots that Limbaugh’s show had on Cumulus Media. The Dan Bongino Show has had a YouTube presence since 2013 but began in earnest to gain steam on the video platform after 2017 as the Trump Russia collusion saga unfolded, because the host was one of the pundits most focused on dismantling much of the chatter from legacy media concerning would-be Russian espionage. At the time, many within the conservative sphere such as National Review magazine and Ben Shapiro refused to address the topic of Russian collusion as the unproven whisper campaign that it was. This is largely because within that subculture the idea that intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement could be complicit in a deception campaign was deemed to be a subversive leftist trope. While Bongino never has condemned the CIA, FBI and other agencies as a whole, his skeptical takes and surgical analysis of the players in the Michael Flynn and Carter Page scandals helped to shift attitudes within Republican and conservative circles. In 2021, thanks in part to his podcast and books like Spygate and Exonerated, Bongino has steered much of his audience away from reflexive trust in those agencies.
Bongino also serves as an on-air commentator for Fox News where he is known for clashing in viral segments with other panelists like Juan Williams, Chris Hahn and most famously Geraldo Rivera. In June 2021 Bongino started hosting a new Saturday night show on Fox News called Unfiltered. His increasing visibility could be part of the attempt by the network to regain some of the viewership it lost among Trump supporters that felt its coverage had slanted against the former president during the 2020 election.
Another reason that Bongino has gained such a large following is his aggressive campaign to build followings on social media. When that is made too difficult by corporate censorship, he has encouraged followers to embrace the Alt Tech platforms, specifically Parler and Rumble where he has been an investor. He owns the Bongino Report news aggregator that functions as an alternative to Drudge Report since 2019. In May 2021 the Bongino podcast was ranked No. 10 among US podcasts. He started with 115 station affiliates of Westwood One on May 20.
Save the Big 10 season, the 1st Amendment and . . .Boobs? - Clay Travis and Buck Sexton
The other major rival show filling the Limbaugh slot is co-hosted by Buck Sexton and Clay Travis on Premiere networks. Sexton has until now broadcast evenings on Premiere having replaced previous host Meghan McCain on her programme, and was co-host of Rising on TheHill.com with Krystal Ball until 2019. He previously served as a counterterrorism analyst for the CIA and NYPD. Like Bongino, Sexton has experience talking with hostile panelists on cable networks and stridently contested the narrative of Russian collusion from the beginning in 2016 despite a Daily Beast panelist appearing with him insisting that the reports at the time were accurate. Sexton is a host that mirrors Bongino in almost every way, apart from a more polished and reserved speaking style. He currently also hosts a show on The First, a conservative news network owned by ViacomCBS.
To make up for that, Premiere has looked to the world of sports talk radio and pulled in former Fox Sports Radio morning host Clay Travis. Originally an attorney, Travis also started on the left side of the aisle as a congressional aide to Tennessee Democrat Bob Clement, and later a campaign worker for Al Gore. Bored by the tedium of the lawyer’s workday, Travis eventually began to write and comment on the topic that remains his bread and butter to this day, NCAA football. His books on the topic focused on the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the various fanbases that he considers the most fevered in all of American sports.
One of the traits that has helped sustain Travis’s following is that unlike most national hosts that are based in New York or Los Angeles he has remained in his home town of Nashville, and accordingly has embraced a middle America attitude. He also does not behold himself to any star athletes or major professional sports fanbases. In 2017 through his show and website Outkick the Coverage Travis was one of the few that called into question LeBron James’ claims that his Brentwood, California home was vandalized with racist graffiti during that year’s NBA Finals.
Then in September he went viral when CNN’s Brooke Baldwin booted him from a segment regarding ESPN’s treatment of comments by then-anchor Jemele Hill that Donald Trump is a white supremacist because he stated that there are two things that have never let him down: “The First Amendment and boobs”. This soundbite ended up propelling him to higher peaks of fame and the sale of his subsequent book Republicans Buy Sneakers Too. In it Travis laid out a case that he has hammered at since then; that the world of sports is being ruined by political commentary in part because the sports media is even more slanted to the left than the media at large. While Travis was not at the time a self-identified conservative and presents himself as a classical liberal believing in both social and market freedoms, sports fans that agree with his take on sports media culture have flocked to his website and show. By this year Outkick had become a major sports web news and podcast site to the point that Travis sold it to the Fox Corporation.
In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic Travis earned a new level of notoriety due to his daily criticism of how the media was amplifying public fears without the data to back them up. He coined a new term for sports journalists that supported lockdowns and suspension of play: “Coronabros”. Using this term Travis feuded with Sports Illustrated’s Peter King and The Action Network’s Darren Rovell, claiming that they would sensationalize predictions that the return of live sports would lead to lethal consequences and then once games had commenced would go back to covering them in person as if everything was normal. Travis took the opposite approach, prominently championing such luminaries as SEC President Greg Sankey who forged on and committed to a 2020 football season. When Big Ten Conference commissioner Kevin Warren decided to not have football games played Travis initiated a nationwide letter writing campaign to the governors and other elected officials in the Big Ten states involved to urge them to force the Big Ten to reverse course. He then arranged a call between Warren and President Donald Trump that would lead to the eventual decision to bring the Big Ten back for an abbreviated season.
As the worlds of sports and politics have continued to mesh. It seems that Travis was unable to maintain the ideal he held as optimal that the two should remain separate. Indeed, particularly as racial and gender identity controversies have clouded sports stories and major leagues like the NBA and MLB have seemed to become more activist in their approach, Travis now represents the right wing of sports media even if he personally is not a conservative. A two-time Obama voter and Clinton-era Democratic staffer, it is hard to believe that Clay Travis now finds himself poised to fill the time slot of the man who in the 1990s was the arch-villain of the liberal media. In this respect Travis represents not the bona fide conservative heartland resident that Limbaugh’s listener base was composed of, but rather the disaffected liberal that now seems more at home with Republicans after a lifetime of voting for Democrats.
The Travis and Sexton Show will debut on June 21, giving Bongino a one month head start on establishing a listening audience in many competitive markets. It remains to be seen whether the rivalry will be friendly, since Bongino has stated that he thinks Sexton is a great commentator while he is not familiar with Travis. It should be noted that while they are very different in their backgrounds, Bongino and Travis have shown remarkable commonality on many recent issues: COVID-19 restrictions, cancel culture in entertainment and media, and opposing the woke agenda in sports and education. As someone who has listened to both of their shows for several years, I have a hard time deciding which show to listen to regularly during my already limited daily schedule. The decision for many may come down to pure taste. Bongino is a Queens native who uses a more casual style to his speech and focuses on criminal justice and economics, whereas Travis is a born and raised Tennesseean with a trial lawyer’s cadence who can still have fun talking about pro or college sports but can pivot to serious issues. There’s certainly variety even with the similarities.
Sidebar: Why is talk radio dominated by conservatives?
The popularity of AM political talk radio was enabled by the elimination of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987. This regulation required broadcast license holders to present both sides of an issue discussed on the air in an honest, equitable and balanced manner. While this conceivably opened the airwaves to political pundits of all persuasions, conservative talk radio has overwhelmingly succeeded whereas liberal and progressive competitors have with few exceptions failed. In 2011 two Tufts University political scientists released a widely read study making the case that talk radio’s success was not a result of the popularity of conservative politics. But this was belied by the degree to which the liberal pundit sphere was focused on countering it over the previous decade. In the early 2000s the influence of these shows was considered a major vulnerability for Democrats who saw them as a challenge to the narrative presented on TV news and newspapers.
Sheldon and Anita Drobny, a wealthy liberal couple from Chicago, attempted to create a progressive alternative known eventually as Air America Radio. For six years Air America featured the likes of comedians Marc Maron and Al Franken, legal analyst Lionel, and commentators Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes on its syndicated broadcasts. Rachel Maddow got her national start cohosting But it was a commercial failure, dogged by middling listenership in many markets and financial scandals involving its second owner Evan M. Cohen who comingled funds from a non-profit he managed into AAR’s coffers. It declared bankruptcy in 2006. Under its last owners, brothers Stephen and Mark Green, Air America began to move toward the new internet age of political commentary. But that industry’s time had not come, and the network fell apart by 2010.
Along the way much of the network’s talent peeled away for various reasons. Marc Maron's show was cancelled due to creative differences with network management. Franken ended up quitting to run successfully for US Senate in Minnesota. Janeane Garofalo, the actress/comedienne who brought star power to the network at its inception, left in 2006 to focus on her other careers. Her cohost on The Majority Report Sam Seder continues to host that show independently as a podcast. Another controversy that clouded AAR’s existence was the departure of Randi Rhodes, caused by disparaging comments she made about Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro. Air America was plagued by the same issue that much of progressive media was suffering from: Rather than keeping the Democratic establishment in line, it fell into formation in order to maintain access to leading politicians. Such a pattern would continue with Seder and another show that appeared on AAR for many years that later continued in other formats, The Young Turks. This was not true for their conservative rivals. Right-wing talk radio hosts were instrumental in ousting Republican incumbents deemed too moderate during many cycles such as the 2010 “Tea Party” wave election, and helped propel Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 over more established candidates.