Critics of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on both the left and the right are calling for a crackdown on conservative media after the election, especially on talk radio and the Web.
“The Republican base … remains largely unreachable, locked away in a space in which only figures like talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Fox News host Sean Hannity, and Internet titan Matt Drudge hold the keys,” Business Insider politics editor Oliver Darcy and senior reporter Pamela Engel wrote in a Monday op-ed for their publication.
The column explained that Republicans hostile to Trump were beginning to share a sentiment long held by Democrats that conservative media is becoming too influential.
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The GOP “has appeased [conservative media], they’ve sucked up to it, they’ve been afraid of going up against it,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative radio host in Wisconsin. “I think that you have seen that played out this year. Has there been any willingness on the part of any mainstream conservative to call out this alt-right media? I’m not seeing it.”
Darcy and Engel reported that some conservatives hope consumers will eventually turn away from institutions like Limbaugh, Drudge and Breitbart in the event Trump is defeated. But if they fail to do so, some feel more extreme measures may need to be taken.
“We sort of operate under the idea that the audience is filled with rational people,” said Stu Burguiere, a co-host for the virulent anti-Trump media titan Glenn Beck. “I think the play is that in the long term the audience rewards you for telling the truth. If your host is doing things that are acting specifically as a booster for a candidate, you have to call them out on that stuff.
“If you sense that from someone you are watching or listening to, you should never go there again,” he added. “If we came on the air and said, ‘Hey, by the way, these online polls are showing that Trump is going to win big,’ it makes the people who pay our salaries look like morons in front of their friends.”
Matt Mackowiak, Republican president of the Washington-based Potomac Strategy Group, advocated for more proactive measures. “You can put pressure on advertisers and corporations that run them. You can directly or indirectly limit the access of elected officials to them.
“We need to get to a point where Hannity only has paid contributors on. He doesn’t need to have elected officials on,” Mackowiak said. “Someone needs to be making sure that if you want to go open $50,000 [in ads] on Breitbart, that there is, that you get a phone call that follows that up and makes clear you’re not helping.”
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Mackowiak noted that as long as conservative luminaries “have an audience, there’s a limit to what you can do.”
The report comes at the end of a year in which regulators battled fiercely over regulations aimed at restricting conservative media. Democrats on the Federal Election Commission voted to punish Fox for holding a GOP debate, and failed in several attempts to regulate conservative candidates on social media.
John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, said President Obama understood what he called the “problems” with conservative media, and called for accountability after the election. “When I was watching the president, I was struck by how he seemed to understand the problems with conservative media more than any Republican does. It was frustrating to see him be the voice of reason,” he said.
Ziegler expressed frustration that consumers were not losing interest in the conservative media titans he disdained. “I find it rather ironic that most Republicans claim to be ardent capitalists, because if politics was like an investment issue, on Nov. 9 there would be a whole lot of people who would lose their jobs and careers forever … Drudge, Breitbart, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, [Laura] Ingraham, those people are completely invested in another false narrative to cover up the first false narrative.”
