Obama’s War On Talk Radio

By Dick Morris, Townhall.com

Obama’s liberal philosophy dictates that when the news is bad, shoot the messenger. The newest data from Arbitron, the company charged with measuring the size of radio audiences, suggests that listenership to hip hop, inner city, and minority radio has been overstated in the past and that the popularity of conservative talk radio has been under-reported.

This conclusion – ideologically inconvenient for Obama – comes from the company’s decision to dispense with the Stone Age way it has been measuring radio audiences – by hand written diaries based on listener memory – with modern machines which automatically record what the person is listening to and for how long.

The opening barrage in Obama’s efforts to reign in talk radio was fired by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week when its acting Chairman Michael J. Copps announced an investigation of Arbitron’s radio measuring technology called the Portable People Meter. (Not to be confused with the Purple People Eater celebrated in song in the 1950s).