Robert E. Brown writes in 2017:
Remove the content from Limbaugh and what is striking is the anger. Anger is the sex of talk-radio, and sex sells. In the jargon of talk radio, there are monsters—tabloidhot news monsters. The author David Foster Wallace described how the terrorist torture of a captured prisoner functioned as a news monster to stoke rage and crystallize opinion:
“The Nick Berg beheading and its Internet video compose what is known around KFI as a “Monster,” meaning a story that has both high news value and tremendous emotional voltage. As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic
glee.” (Wallace, 2005)
Before Limbaugh’s paper Big Bang of 1988, a fiery talk-show host named Ray Briem dominated talk radio in Southern California from the latter years of the 1960s through and after the eras of the Vietnam War. Berating counterculture values, especially of war-protesting youth, as anti-American, pro-Communist, immoral, and treasonous, Briem consistently drew the highest ratings of any host in Southern California with 15% of the available audience. (Edwards, 2016)
