FT.com / Arts & Weekend - Drowned out: "The governor hasn’t accepted this: the ban on the Sun reporters remains. The main reason for this, Sun people believe, is that he doesn’t need them. It may be the only paper in town, but it’s not the only medium. There’s also talk radio, and talk radio - on the WBAL channel - is on the right, and for the governor. A lot of people listen to talk radio; fewer people than before read the Baltimore Sun.

Talk radio jocks tend to adopt a posture of anti-liberal-elitist rage, rarely coming in at less than full, jet-powered whine. And they have real political effect. An example from elsewhere, brilliantly reported in Atlantic Monthly by David Foster Wallace: John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of the KFI station in Los Angeles, who bill themselves as ‘the Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio’, over a period of months violently attacked Gray Davis, the Democratic governor of California succeeded by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. One on-air comment was: ‘We just happened on our own to decide that Davis was a rotting stool that ought to be flushed.’ With the aid of such nuanced comment, they are credited with being a major influence in stimulating the 2003 campaign to recall Davis, which ended with the election of Schwarzenegger. It is a form of politics: the politics of the rant. But its power gives Ehrlich the confidence to face down the Sun."

(Via Financial Times.)