Larry O’Connor (b. 1967) built a career that tracks the conversion of American conservative media from talk radio and opinion magazines into a layered network of podcasts, livestreams, digital publishing, and national broadcasting. He hosts O’Connor & Company on Washington’s WMAL, edits Townhall.com, and since May 2026 anchors a national morning program carried across the Salem Radio Network and the Salem News Channel. He reached that position by an unusual route. He did not start in politics, journalism, or law. He started in the theater.
Born in Detroit on June 23, 1967, O’Connor grew up in Plymouth Township, between Detroit and Ann Arbor. In 1980 his family moved to Newport Beach, California, where he attended Corona del Mar High School. He entered the entertainment industry rather than the political class, and he spent more than a decade inside it. From 1986 to 1999 he worked for the Shubert Organization, first on Broadway in New York, briefly at Lincoln Center Theater, then in Los Angeles. From 1991 to 1999 he served as general manager of the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles, the 2,100-seat house that the company renovated for the American premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s (b. 1948) Sunset Blvd., starring Glenn Close (b. 1947). He oversaw operations during runs of Ragtime and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and numerous touring productions.
The work taught him how a large cultural enterprise runs. He handled budgeting, marketing, labor relations, and venue management. He sat on the boards of four union benefit plans and presided over Theatre LA, the city’s league of theaters. He helped create the Ovation Awards, the Los Angeles equivalent of the Tony Awards, and produced the ceremony in 1994 and 1995. After he left Shubert in 1999, he kept producing as an independent general manager. His credits include Sweeney Todd with Kelsey Grammer (b. 1955), A Knight Out with Ian McKellen (b. 1939), and Ten Commandments: The Musical with Val Kilmer (1959–2025) and a then-unknown Adam Lambert (b. 1982). The Shubert came down in 2002, three years after he left it.
That theater background shaped everything he did next. He had spent years inside the entertainment business, not outside it firing rocks at Hollywood. He knew how the industry allocated money, managed talent, negotiated with unions, and courted audiences. When he turned to media criticism, he wrote as a veteran of the trade.
His entry into conservative media came in January 2009, when he began writing for Andrew Breitbart’s (1969–2012) Big Hollywood under the pseudonym “Stage Right.” He presented himself as a closeted conservative working among liberal colleagues on Broadway, and he produced a steady stream of posts, many of them about a National Endowment for the Arts conference-call scandal. His theater résumé gave him standing that few political commentators could claim.
The partnership with Breitbart marked the turn of his life. Breitbart taught him to read media institutions as political actors and to treat the distribution of information as a field of combat. In June 2011 O’Connor became editor-in-chief of Breitbart.tv, an early effort to build a video-driven alternative news operation on the Right. Under his watch the network broke videos that moved national events, including footage that contributed to the ouster of Representative Bob Etheridge (b. 1941) from Congress.
O’Connor stood near the center of the early Tea Party media wars. He helped distribute and amplify the undercover ACORN videos recorded by James O’Keefe (b. 1984) and Hannah Giles in 2009, footage that triggered congressional action and hastened the collapse of ACORN. He defended O’Keefe after O’Keefe’s arrest at Senator Mary Landrieu’s (b. 1955) New Orleans office, and he exposed errors in a Salon article by Max Blumenthal (b. 1977) that led the magazine to issue corrections. He also took part in Breitbart’s coverage of Representative Anthony Weiner (b. 1964) during the 2011 social-media scandal that ended Weiner’s House career.
Not every episode favored him. In July 2011 Shirley Sherrod (b. 1948), a former Agriculture Department official, sued O’Connor, Breitbart, and a third defendant for defamation over a selectively edited video clip. The parties settled out of court in October 2015 for an undisclosed sum. The case sits in his record as a reminder that the methods of digital insurgency carried legal and reputational risk.
Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. O’Connor stayed on for a time, then left the organization in 2013. He moved through a sequence of editorial posts that mapped the growth of conservative digital publishing. In June 2014 he joined Independent Journal Review as editor-at-large, a role he held through April 2016. He then served as editor-at-large at HotAir.com through December 2016. Since 2016 he has written for Townhall and HotAir under Townhall Media, a subsidiary of Salem Media Group.
His broadcasting career began online, not on a local AM dial. In January 2010 he launched a daily program on BlogTalkRadio that mixed monologue, interviews, listener calls, and live chat at a time when internet radio sat at the margins. The show drew an audience and led to guest-hosting slots on syndicated programs. He has filled in for Mark Levin (b. 1957), Dennis Miller (b. 1953), and Hugh Hewitt (b. 1956), among others.
WMAL in Washington gave him a foothold in heritage talk radio in the mid-2010s. By 2016 he held his own afternoon program on the station, and he later moved to the morning drive slot as host of O’Connor & Company, heard from six to nine a.m. Broadcasting from the capital set his show apart. His listeners include congressional staff, administration officials, lobbyists, journalists, and policy hands, and he often serves as a conduit between conservative voters and the people who govern.
Television widened his reach. He appears on Fox News, including Fox & Friends and Greg Gutfeld’s (b. 1965) Red Eye, and on Fox Business, Newsmax, and Sky News Australia, with occasional turns on ABC News, the PBS NewsHour, and MSNBC. He married the journalist Meredith Dake in 2015.
Media criticism runs through all of it. Following Breitbart, O’Connor argues that news organizations are participants in political conflict rather than neutral observers. He made the case at book length in Shameless Liars: How Trump Defeated the Legacy Media and Made Them Irrelevant (2025), which frames the clash between the press and President Donald Trump (b. 1946) as a crisis of institutional trust. He contends that the decline of confidence in legacy journalism traces less to technological disruption than to perceived bias and lost credibility.
Two promotions in 2026 confirmed his standing. In January, Salem named him editor of Townhall.com, an opinion platform with roots reaching back decades, giving him authority over written journalism, audio, video, and the site’s daily output. He continues to host his noon streaming show, LARRY, on Townhall and YouTube. Then, on April 30, Salem announced that O’Connor & Company would become the company’s flagship national morning program beginning May 4, airing across more than 140 affiliate stations on the Salem Radio Network with a simulcast on the Salem News Channel, while keeping its longtime slot on WMAL. His executive producer, Heather Hunter, stayed with the program through the expansion. O’Connor is a regular morning host for Mark Halperin’s 2Way show along with Democratic strategist Kevin Walling.
O’Connor represents a type that the conservative movement now produces in volume. He rose through entertainment management, internet journalism, and media entrepreneurship rather than through party committees, think tanks, or universities. His path traces how the Right’s media moved from a scattering of radio shows and magazines into a vertically integrated operation that spans radio, television, websites, podcasts, streaming video, and social platforms. His biography links four worlds, the theater, the digital insurgency of the early Breitbart years, talk radio, and national political journalism, and shows how new distribution technologies redrew the map of political influence in the United States.
The Voice
Larry O’Connor carries the theater into the studio. He spent the 1986 to 1999 stretch inside the Shubert Organization and ran the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles, where he oversaw the renovation of the house to stage the American premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd. with Glenn Close. A man learns timing in that world. He learns the value of a held beat, a build, a button at the end of a scene. You hear that training in his radio voice. The instincts come from the wings, not from the newsroom.
His own account of how he works tells you most of what you need. On his Townhall video show he aims for about twenty minutes per topic of straight monologue or playing off clips, building the story arc and the narrative without a break. That is the core of his manner. He thinks in long form. He treats a segment as a unit with a beginning, a turn, and a payoff. Most talk hosts chop the hour into reactions. O’Connor wants the slow construction. He says the long-form muscle opened up the way he presents a story on the radio too.
The diction sits in the conversational middle. He came up writing for Breitbart’s web properties and editing video, so his references run through pop culture, sports, and the Catholic and Navy worlds he claims on his own bio. He says Go Blue and Go Navy and means them. The register is a Detroit Catholic who moved to Newport Beach as a boy and then made his living around Broadway and Hollywood theater. That mix gives him a wider cultural vocabulary than the standard movement-conservative host. He can talk Sondheim and he can talk shutdown politics in the same hour.
His rhetoric leans on narrative and grievance against the press. The 2025 book Shameless Liars lays out the thesis: the legacy media lie, and Trump beat them at their own game. On air he works that frame hard. He builds a case the way a producer builds a show, laying clip on clip, then delivering the verdict. The persuasion runs through story rather than through data dumps. He wants you to feel the arc close.
When WMAL stripped the show down to him alone, reviewers turned on the format. One longtime listener calls the solo version boring and monotonous and says the banter with guest hosts made it entertaining. That tells you something true about his instrument. O’Connor is a strong second voice and a fine builder of a planned segment. He sharpens against another person. Alone, across three live hours, the same measured theatrical delivery can flatten into a drone. The skill that serves the twenty-minute video monologue works against him over a full morning drive without a partner to push.
