IT ALL WAS GETTING CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
the Milwaukee Business Journal ran a story suggesting that it made way for “a more moderate WTMJ-AM.” Reporter Rich Kirchen pointed out that station manager Tom Langmyer had dropped syndicated national conservative talk shows, and was developing an afternoon show that focused more on news and less on politics. This while Wagner took over Sykes’ morning show – Wagner’s a conservative who continues to give Walker and others a forum, but who is not as unrelentingly political as Sykes was. In a February interview, Langmyer said, “We’re not being defined by a political position, but more broadly programming to look at both sides of issues.” Late in February, he announced the hiring of Oak Creek Mayor Stephen Scaffidi to co-host Wagner’s former afternoon show with news guy Erik Bilstad. Scaffidi describes himself as a conservative, but he has some more moderate views, especially on guns – he was mayor when a white supremacist killed six people at Oak Creek’s Sikh temple in 2012 – and he says he didn’t vote for Trump.
At WISN, meanwhile, program director Jerry Bott in December doubled down on conservative talk, adding Dan O’Donnell, a newsman and fill-in host, to its local conservative show hosts – and Bott said then he expected to pick up listeners from TMJ if Sykes wasn’t replaced by another conservative.
And as Talkers’ Harrison noted nationally, Milwaukee’s conservative talkers seemed to be solidifying their backing of Trump during his first month in office, while the “mainstream media” portrayed a dangerously chaotic White House. WISN’s McKenna was typical of them when she told me in February: “I am more enthusiastic now than I was in December. And of course I was more enthusiastic in December than I was in July. I like that he is a disruptive force to the status quo.” Belling responded in a similar vein, and even WTMJ’s Wagner, never-Trump until the election, was defending the president and attacking the press and intelligence agencies over leaks about Trump’s aides talking with Russians. He told me in February that he separated Trump’s personality from his policies.
On Feb. 1, a liberal news-talk station appeared on the scene, to the delight of progressives and activists – but facing a long uphill climb if it hopes to compete in this market. A Madison liberal
talker named Michael Crute and two partners bought WRRD, a station with a transmitter in Waukesha. Crute and his broadcast sidekick, Dominic Salvia, had a show in Madison called Devil’s Advocate Radio, which went off the air there last fall after a format change. But they continued in national syndication, and now do that and a Wisconsin-centered show on WRRD. They also recruited Earl Ingram, a talker on the central-city-oriented WMCS-AM before it changed format in 2013.
The deal for WRRD was put together with the help of a group of Milwaukee-area progressives calling themselves Radio-Active, who had organized in 2016 to monitor conservative radio in Milwaukee and hold stations “accountable” for what talkers said on air. The group raised enough money to pay an organizer, Terri Williams, who says as of February it had 12 volunte ers monitoring conservative radio and another 25 helping WRRD sell advertising.
AALL OF THESE changes made the talk scene in Milwaukee a little disorienting – though certainly not as disorienting as the changes in Washington that began with Trump’s inauguration. In fact, Trump’s unpredictable tweets, and his attacks on the “dishonest media,” almost seemed to usurp the role of conservative talk radio and take on the mantle of shock jock in chief. And the chaos after his order limiting immigration sparked demonstrations across the country that The New York Times likened to the tea party movement of 2009 and 2010. It all was getting curiouser and curiouser.
A flip across the Milwaukee radio dial (and through live-stream feeds) one Wednesday in early February reflected that, and provided a wider range of opinions than we’ve been used to for many years.
Belling was engaged in one of his patented rants – this one about a riot at the University of California, Berkeley, that had shut down a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, then senior editor at Breitbart News. “The left has always been a pain in the butt, but we’ve never seen them this out of control,” he said. “Almost all the university professors in the United States now are lefties, and many are outright socialists or anarchists ... [That] has also happened in the media. It’s certainly happening in Hollywood. It’s happening in the public schools. There are certain institutions in the United States that are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals, and in order to get their way they are trying to stop anybody who has a contrary point of view from being able to express themselves.”
Over on 1510, Crute and Salvia were indignant about something else entirely: U.S. Senate Republicans shutting off Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts when she tried to read a letter from Coretta Scott King that criticized attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama – but then not stopping a couple of male senators from reading the same letter. “It’s a woman thing,” said Salvia.
Later that night, I dialed up WNYC online and listened to Sykes’ “Indivisible” hour, which was the most curious of all. Sykes had gotten into the routine of flying to New York each Tuesday night, and doing the WNYC show and his MSNBC duties on Wednesday. On NPR, for the first three weeks, he’d interviewed never-Trump conservatives and taken calls from listeners far more liberal than his followers back home.
This night he interviewed David Frum, author of an Atlantic magazine cover story titled “How to Build an Autocracy,” about how Trump seemed headed toward an autocratic “kleptocracy.” Sykes opened the hour by recounting news from Washington: The president had tweeted an attack on Nordstrom department stores for being unfair to his daughter for not carrying her clothing line, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee had described the president’s attacks on judges as “demoralizing” and “disheartening;” and Warren had been silenced inexplicably because, Sykes said, “apparently there must be a contest in D.C. these days for the worst possible political optics.” And he said: “We live in absolutely remarkable times.”
He and Frum then discussed building a broad coalition against Trump but worried Trump could benefit from violent protests because he’d be able to paint his critics as out of control. A guy named George from New Jersey called in and suggested that demonstrators should throw out members of Congress who were doing nothing to stop Trump. “We’ve got to go in there and literally grab these people and literally throw them out,” said George. Here was a caller of a different type than Marge from Menomonee Falls ripping Sykes for abandoning Trump.
Which launched Sykes into recounting Wisconsin’s Act 10 protests of 2011 in which he said Walker was “under water” on his anti-union initiatives until demonstrators in Madison went too far. “Protesters became so overwrought and so addicted to their melodrama,” he said, “that they flipped the script. I’ve actually seen how you can take a winning issue and turn it into a losing issue if you don’t restrain the more extreme elements.”
During the discussion, Frum said something that summed up the brave new world people like he and Sykes now inhabit: “You and I find ourselves in similar situations,” he said. “We’re very conservative people. We’re now sort of in a new neighborhood surrounded by new associates. It’s not our first language, and a lot of things they do are very puzzling.”
I guess we’re all in a new neighborhood these days. And if you believe Charlie Sykes, the people in this story – and guys like them around the country – put us here. Or perhaps it was the Russians, but that’s another story. I guess we’ll all just have to stay tuned.
Tom Tolan is a copy editor at the magazine. He worked with Sykes for short times in the 1970s and 1980s, including at The Milwaukee Journal.