Nate Schweber Writes Home

Air America vs. John Stokes: The Battle For Montana’s Airwaves

By Nate Schweber, 7-08-05

	Caption: Stokes, top, photographed in High Country News in 2003. Franken, bottom.

I used to be a radio jock in Missoula on KBGA, the college station. All afternoon every Friday I’d scream “Baby! Baby!� flirt with callers and then kick out the jams with my favorite songs. I’d talk about local and national politics and anything else going on. I loved it, and you did too. That’s why for three straight years you stuck me near the top of the “Best DJ� category of the Missoula Independent’s annual “Best of Missoula� issue. (Thanks, by the way.)

My one regret from my “career� at KBGA is that I never got into a sparring match with John Stokes, the controversial talk-jock on KGEZ in Kalispell. For years Stokes has been the loudest and most controversial conservative voice in Montana. He’s infamous for calling environmentalists “Nazis,� and “communists,� railing against zoning and land planning in Kalispell and touting the free market uber alles His vehemence on the last point earned him a reputation as a bully by reportedly intimidating people in his community who advocate curbing sprawl.

Politically, I couldn’t disagree more with Stokes, and that’s why I wish I’d used my radio show to needle him.

That never happened, but a new on-air personality at the opposite end of the radio – and political – dial is coming to Missoula, and he could do more to combat Stokes’ message than anything I could’ve ever dreamed.

I’m talking about Al Franken, star of the new liberal talk show station Air America. The news broke last week that Mount Sentinel Broadcasting, LLC will put Air America on in Missoula this month. It will be the first station in the state not only to carry Air America, but to dedicate all of its programming to progressive talk and news. This is a state, mind you, that has eight stations that broadcast Rush Limbaugh and six that broadcast Sean Hannity.

The million-dollar question is how Air America might affect both politics and radio markets in Western Montana. I asked a guy who knows a little something about both: John Stokes.

“(Air America) will probably do pretty well because if ever there was a city full of left-wing lunatics, it’s Missoula,� Stokes said Thursday. “They’d vote for Mao Tse-Tung if they could.�

In the course of a fun and freewheeling conversation Stokes said that he didn’t think Air America, or any radio, could sway voters in Montana. Then he contradicted himself, boasting that KGEZ’s influence helped elect Constitutional Party member Rick Jore to the state legislature last year. Jore, a trout farm owner, served in the State Legislature as a Republican since 1994 before changing parties.

Stokes is also a member of the Constitution Party, which calls for religion in schools, no Endangered Species Act, no U.S. Department of Education, no immigrants, no welfare, no federally owned public lands, no gays, no U.S. participation in the UN, and no impediments to the free market.

It stands to reason that if Stokes’ station played a role in Jore’s election, Air America will play a role in electing future leaders. Won’t that be a relief?

Before we can count any votes though, Air America must meet its bottom line. When the station first took off 18 months ago it was plagued by such financial woes that some of its star jockeys missed paychecks. Why on earth would Spanish Peaks Broadcasting owner Kevin Terry, who just paid $2 million for three new FM radio stations in Missoula including the one that will broadcast Air America, take a gamble on that?

Because Air America rebounded, spread like wildfire, and doesn’t show a sign of stopping. It’s now syndicated on 64 stations nationwide and has an audience of 2.7 million. Those numbers made radio megabeast Clear Channel take note and change several of its stations to liberal talk.

Which is exactly what could happen in Montana if Air America is a success.

Radio program directors don’t have political agendas, they have moneymaking agendas. If Air America makes money in Missoula, Stevensville and Florence it could be easy to convince program directors in other Montana cities to switch over as well. In 2001 Ken Toole, Director for Programming for the Montana Human Rights Network (and Stokes’ loudest opponent) lobbied a Helena station to carry a show by Detroit liberal talker Peter Werbe. It worked, it was easy, and everyone should contact their local radio’s program director and demand more progressive shows, he said.

“The traditional response from radio programmers is that liberal talk isn’t commercially viable,� Toole said Thursday. “But if it’s successful in Missoula, we could go up to Kalispell and say, ‘Hey, it’s working out fine in Missoula.’ Then it’s not about politics, it’s about your duty as a broadcaster to be representative of your community.�

Which could mean bad things for Stokes, whose insidious influence was written about in an excellent Missoula Independent cover story (“Growing Pains� by Mark Keefe-Feldman, 5/5/2005) and will soon be the subject of the PBS documentary “The Fire Next Time,� which premiers July 12. (In his defense, Stokes called the Independent “pretty lefty� and accused the Montana Human Rights Network [“cocksuckers�] of setting up the PBS documentary – a charge that Toole [“dick�] denies).

All this talk about Stokes and speculation about Montana radio markets doesn’t even begin to do justice to one monumentally important point: just how good Air America is. For a politically concerned, left-leaning dude like me who never listened to any voice on the radio besides his own, discovering Air America was like discovering oxygen.

In addition to Franken, who is funny, insightful, well-reasoned and informative, the lineup includes fiery shows with celebrities including Chuck D (from Public Enemy), Janeane Garofalo and the inimitable Jerry Springer. The Randi Rhodes show and the Rachel Maddow show are righteous and intelligent, while the environmental reports from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are beyond compare. My favorite show is the one that country-rocker and hero-of-mine Steve Earle hosts every Sunday night where he invites a guest on air to play his or her favorite songs and talk music and politics.

In the interest of full disclosure I must confess that while I’ve known about Stokes for years, I’ve had him on the brain since reading the Indy article in May. I Googled his name and found that the Montana Human Rights Network had a clever campaign to get Stokes off the air: sending complaints to the FCC asking them to revoke his broadcasting license. I contacted the network, got a big packet of information in the mail about Stokes, and then discovered that the deadline for filing the complaints already passed by.

The Air America crew has the potential to quash Stokes’ influence simply by making more money. That’s a free-market takedown that not even Stokes himself could argue with.

So hey, Mount Sentinel Broadcasting, if you need a Missoula-born radio personality to augment your Air America broadcasts, I’m yours, baby.


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Sidenote: Waking up this morning to the awful news that busses and trains exploded in London – where my girlfriend lives – was nerve-racking and wretched. I know goodhearted sentiments don’t matter compared to mangled steel and bodies, but good god I wish people would stop blowing up others. I don’t care what the reasons are. [End of article]

Stokes is no more a representative of conservative values in Montana than is New LeftWest. Stokes is a xenophobic knucklehead deserving of immediate hospitalization with a force-feed IV of 100% common sense. . . and a serious dosage of valium.

Al Franken Missoula-bound? Listen up quickly as Air America's sagging ratings may totally bottom out soon.

Nate, great piece. Folks interested in the economics of talk radio should also check out David Foster Wallace's recent piece in the Atlantic. It's a somewhat chilling account of how anger & hate are ginned up for the sake of ratings, among other things.

There's a nice piece about Stokes in Grist (http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/07/08/kavanagh/)this week. The article makes a good point, based on Goebble's tenet that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes true, or at least accepted as true by people who are predisposed to believe the worst about their political/cultural opponents.
On a smaller scale, that's happening here in Fremont County, Wyoming. Although the Lander and Riverton newspapers are rational, there is a county-wide publication called The Advertiser. A shopper with gobs of classified and display ads, The Advertiser has a few pages of editorial content, which typically includes anti-wolf, anti-grizzly bear, anti-feds and anti-state rants that are long on emotion and short on facts.
Publisher Mike Rinehart even printed an article (See High Country News at http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=14760), which gave advise on how to poison wolves. What then happened was a spate of dog poisoning cases in Wyoming and Idaho, as dogs ate poisoned hot dogs left for wolves. (There's no evidence that any wolves died.)
Fremont County Commissioners have passed resolutions stating that grizzlies and wolves are not socially acceptable anywhere in the county. The commissioners are also agitated that the Wind River Reservation may turn out to be something of a sanctuary for wolves and grizzlies, because the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho have very different cultural perspectives than their Anglo neighbors.
Makes for a very interesting situation.
--Brodie Farquhar

It's nice to know liberal talking radio is spreading to the home base of New West. As the spanky new New West Aspen editor, I'm also happy to report my own liberal talk show "Con Games" is growing in the Aspen-Vail-Rifle market from Monday at 3 to 4 PM to Monday-Wednesday-Friday in the same time slot. Our slogan: "Making the World Safe for Liberals." As of this moment I am the only liberal talk radio alternative in the Roaring Fork Valley -- or from Vail all the way to Rifle. More good news: my show is bumping "The Sean Hannity Show" which will no longer have a home in this market.

Are you ready to apologize now, Sean?

A final note: I've tried very hard to listen to both sides on my show -- to define liberalism as a moral imperative, but also to allow EVERYONE to have a say (without shouting them down) regardless of their place on the spectrum. Callers on both sides have responded favorably to that approach or we wouldn't be growing.

I don't think the two sides are as far apart as everybody thinks.

Best, Michael Conniff!



I started a month after Franken,

Nate- Thanks for finding New West and for contributing. It is a perfect match. This news is a ray of sunshine for the valley, I've been listening to Air America since day one on the internet / the radio would be even better, the icing on the cake would be a full broadcast of Democracy Now and the Nate Weber Show.
Nothing has come close to your verve on air.
Keep it up and see / hear you soon.
Your pal,
Uncle Carl

Nice review of the changing radio market in Western Montana, although I've got a couple contentions. First, its important to note that John Stokes' day has passed.
While his firebrand style once commanded a listenership here in Montana, his rhetoric is now ignored by anyone around long enough to recognize his name. We've heard all of it before, and while he can be entertaining (and perhaps informative into the mindset of a certain, almost microscopic demographic) any person with the ability to reason has long tuned him out- just note that he's almost without advertisers anymore. Few want anything to do with his alienating message, even those that share similar libertarian principals of smaller government and more personal freedoms.
That said, I'm not calling your giving him a platform irresponsible. I'm saying that his slumping ratings, inability to get advertising dollars and current absense from the public discourse in our state are tangible indications that his role in the Montana radioscape is already a thing of the past.
Of course New West isn'the only one who missed his passing- a fauning, almost deifying article in the High Country News last year did the same. (Disclosure: I'm a photojournalist, I shot the picture of Stokes that NewWest took from the High Country News site to accompany Nate Schweber's piece- it originally appeared in The Missoula Independent many years ago when Stokes WAS a player worthy of note.)
But its worth observing that neither Schweber nor the author of the HCN piece live in the region (the HCN's Ray Ring lives in Bozeman.) Of course you don't have to live in an area to write about it. But as neither author lives within hearing range of the low-power, short-range AM-band broadcasts that Stokes uses to broadcast. So to say that

"For years Stokes has been the loudest and most controversial conservative voice in Montana."

is misleading- yes he's controversial, yes he's (by some standards) conservative, but a small, almost unnoticeable transmitter outside of Kalispell hardly constitutes the "loudest" voice in Montana.
Although the regional and online media keep telling Montanans that he's a player in our state's collective opinions, he's not, and there is really no indication that Montanans will at any point begin finding his personal rants relevant. Fortunately, Air America's launch in Western Montana comes with a larger transmitter, and more importantly a message based on something other than hate.

Want to thank you all for taking the time to read and respond to my story about radio in Montana.

Thanks in particular to you, Chad, for your thoughtful response (not to slight Jonathan or Uncle Carl!). I had some thoughts.

While Stokes' advertising base is shrinking, at least according to the folks at the Montana Human Rights Network, signs of his strong political influence continue to abound in the regional media. During my conversation with Stokes he boasted about "calling out the troops and getting them down to the meeting" when he learned that the commissioners in Flathead County were considering a moratorium on all growth until a new growth policy could be written. The 7/7/05 Independent has a news article, "Growth Smoke but No Fire" by Paul Peters, which reports that "most people who came and spoke (at said meeting) were against an absolute moratorium."

Who knows whether those anti-moratorium speakers learned about the meeting from Stokes, or perhaps from American Dream Montana, a property rights group that shares Stokes' anti-growth planning views and regularly runs ads in the Daily Inter Lake. Dream's most recent ad showed a picture of favorite whipping-boy, growth-moratorium proposing commissioner Joe Brenneman, with the words, "Your job threatened by: 'Green' Agenda."

Unsurprisingly, the moratorium idea went down.

Whether or not Stokes and Russ Crowder, founder of American Dream Montana, coordinate their media blitzes, the effect they have is like an echo chamber. This not only emboldens the minority of the population who share their views into disproportionately flexing their political muscle, it also intimidates people who disagree from flexing theirs. The problem was laid out best in Mark Keefe-Feldman's Indy cover on 5/5/05, which I linked to in my story.

So it is in Stokes' continuing capacity to inspire, synergize with, and give another media ally to like-minded groups and individuals that I say his voice is the state's "loudest." Not in the amount of watts his puny station kicks out. He doesn't sway opinions, but he helps incite a radical minority to political action. No other jockey in the state has that kind of clout, diminished as it may be from Stokes' heyday when his message was fresh.

But you're right about the media latching onto Stokes. I hope you will all join me tonight in watching "The Fire Next Time" on PBS which features Stokes. If you didn’t see the link in my story, here's a Bloomberg news article about the documentary: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000088&sid=avA3JIBCHoEo&refer=culture

Mostly I hope y'all will listen to Air America. The Missoulian's webpage has a video of columnist Jamie Kelly talking about how suh-weet this Thursday's Entertainer's article about Air America will be.

So read, then listen.