Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (review)

In her exceptional, influential history of American broadcasting, Radio Voices, media historian Michele Hilmes describes the enthusiasm accompanying the earliest appearances of radio in the United States. Not unlike the new communication technologies of today, early radio was surrounded by both utopian promise and dystopian fear. But foremost among the "prevailing expectations for this new medium of 'radio broadcasting' was that of unity, of connection, of 'communication' in its purest sense. . . . Radio would unite a far-flung and disparate nation."¹

Although such romantic and technologically determinist ideals are rife with politics and their own blind spots, less than a century later it is jarring to hold them up against current radio practices. In Echo Chamber:Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, the highly regarded scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella conclude that some of the most prominent conservative commentators in the United States regularly offer content to their audiences that contributes to distrust of the nation's mainstream media and "the balkanization of conservative media audiences' knowledge and interpretation."² Employing framing strategies that both criticize "mainstream" media as selective and deceptive and vilify "liberals," these conservative voices foster what the authors term "one-sided enclaves," further insulating listeners and viewers from alternative media sources rather than encouraging discussion among those of dissimilar political views. The conservative echo chamber to which the book's title refers is "a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal."³

In these ways, political talk radio—in this study, the Rush Limbaugh Show (syndicated, 1988-)—works with a goal of dividing, rather than unifying, a "far-flung and disparate nation," reproducing discourses of "us" versus "other" and of "in-group versus out-group."⁴ But political talk radio is hardly alone in this regard. Within a vast array of contemporary political and cultural industries, strategic approaches have been adopted that are contributing to a growing erosion of mutual dependence among diverse groups in society. This is a trend previously examined by scholars such as Joseph Turow and Cass Sunstein.⁵

Jamieson and Cappella also conclude that conservative media play roles expected of political parties, when, for example, hosts such as Limbaugh help vet candidates in the Republican primaries in order to make certain that only those true to "Reagan conservatism" receive widespread support. They write that ensuring that the "seeds [of party dissolution] do not germinate is the task of the political party and, in the case of the Republican Party, of the conservative opinion media."⁶ In addition, these media serve the traditional party functions of holding conservative candidates accountable and reinforcing ideological identity. Using experimental, survey, and content analysis methodologies, the authors give considerable attention to the framing strategies used by "conservative opinion media"—the Rush Limbaugh radio program, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News (i.e., Hannity and Colmes [1996-2009] and Special Report with Brit Hume [1996-2008])—to accomplish these tasks, with abundant discussion of the Limbaugh program and political talk radio.

This focus on political talk radio is sorely needed, and it begins to address the lack of scholarship on this important and influential contemporary radio format. Even as radio has received more attention from Media Studies scholars in recent years, there has been too little produced by those outside of Political Science and Policy Studies interrogating the broader cultural dynamics at play in the rough-and-tumble world of radio chat.

Heather Hendershot's recent What's Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest, does, however, provide a bit of pre-story for Echo Chamber, as it investigates far-right radio personalities who preceded the likes of Limbaugh. As Hendershot puts it, "We cannot draw straight lines from the Cold War extremist broadcasters [such as Dan Smoot, Carl McIntire, and...