...with my Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera.
The signs went up shortly after Salem Communications acquired the station in 2004 and flipped it from Spanish-language programming to all-conservative/all the time, talk radio.
Salem was on a buying spree at the time. Between 2000 and 2008, its all-conservative programming footprint grew by roughly twenty net stations, though the gross number of acquisitions was higher because Salem frequently sold, swapped, and consolidated signals during the same period.
The result was that, at almost any time, anywhere in the contiguous 48 United States, you could find an AM powerhouse station slandering the Left, 24/7. Depending on the time of day, you'd hear degenerate gambler and author of the "Book of Virtues" Bill Bennett, Laura "Eva Braun-Nose" Ingraham, Dennis "Prager U" Prager, Michael "Irrelevant Jabbering Mustache" Medved, Michael "The Savage Weiner" Savage or Hugh "Cyborg Sent From the Future to Destroy America" Hewitt.
That means Salem's portfolio grew by about 20 stations net between late 2000 and late 2008. However, the actual number purchased was higher because Salem also sold, swapped, and consolidated some stations during that period.
And mind you, Salem wasn't even the most prominent dispenser of wingnut poison across this Land of the Free. Tired of Michael Medved running his mouth but still need your fix of Libtard hating? Spin the dial just a little and you'll find the Premier Networks ready to fill your skull with incandescent rage against imaginary enemies.
At the time, the Premier Networks was syndicated to around 650 stations from coast to coast and it's main lineup was (surprise!) Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and, later, Glenn Beck.
We're your tastes a little more boutique and regional? ABC/Citadel had you covered. They didn't own stations, but they syndicated their conservative programs to several hundred stations and featured the likes of Charlie Sykes, Mark Levin, Larry Elder and Mike Gallagher.
And if that wasn't enough to slake your thirst for hatin' on the Left, there was the feisty, independent Talk Radio Network.
Against that absolute blitzkrieg of well-financed, nationwide saturation Conservative programming (and Fox News, and all the well-funded conservative magazines and rapidly multiplying websites) the Left had this pea-shooter: the financially unstable, multiply bankrupted and incompetently managed Air America. Which, at its peak, could be found on a mere 50–70 affiliate stations.
It had terrific on-air talent -- no doubt about that -- and when I lived in Chicago I was an Air America listener, but it was a tricky business. Frequently I had to walk my radio around my condo until I found a spot where I could pick up the signal. It had the staticky intermittence of a French underground pirate radio sending German troop movement intel across the channel -- hardly a match for the million megawatt megaphone the Right had built for itself.
Anyway, that was the state of play more than 20 years ago here in the Home of the Brave. So the next time someone tells you the Republican base went suddenly and inexplicably berserk with rage, racism, and grievance after Donald Trump showed up and put the whammy on them, spit in their eye and show them this post.
Nothing about this was sudden. It was financed, distributed, syndicated, and broadcast -- everywhere, day after day -- for decades.
