Séminaire ORUS : Sébastien Mort - Outrage on the Airwaves: conservative talk radio in historical perspective from Rush Limbaugh to Charlie Kirk

Before Fox News established itself as the leading voice of conservatism in the early 2000s, and long before it forged symbiotic relationships with Donald Trump and the MAGA sphere, the popularization of radical right-wing ideas was first made possible by radio. Thanks to conservative radio talk, a genre that gained prominence in the early 1990s following the launch of The Rush Limbaugh Show in the summer of 1988, these ideas gained unprecedented visibility within the media ecosystem and the political sphere, and became firmly entrenched in the public sphere.

In this talk, Sébastien Mort will examine the rise of conservative radio, its role in engineering political outrage, and its relationships with the Republican Party, recovering its place in US political and media history since the turn of the 21 st century. He shows how, starting in the late 1980s, the successive shifts in media regimes, allowed for the emergence of a new genre of politically partisan radio, and with it, the formation of a “defensive” public sphere, which together established themselves as an interest group in its own right within the Republican coalition.

Initially, relationships with GOP elites were forged on an ideological basis but in a pragmatic and conditional manner and were fluctuating; with Trump’s political ascent and the concomitant emergence of a new generation of radio hosts (Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk), these relationships became symbiotic. A powerful instrument of conservative dissent and a reliable ally of the GOP, conservative talk radio has established itself as a leading political force, contributing to the Republican legislative landslides in 1994 and 2010 and Trump’s presidential victories in 2016 and 2024.

 
Sébastien Mort is Associate Professor of American Studies at Université Paris Nanterre, a member of Centre de Recherches Anglophones (CREA), and a Fulbright scholar. His
research focuses on the intersection of news making, politics, and culture in the USA, with emphasis on conservative talk radio, the communication and media strategies of
the GOP and the conservative movement, and the political intimidation of journalists and news makers in the Trump era.

He is the author of Ondes de choc: histoire médiatique et politique de la radio conservatrice aux États-Unis, published in October 2024 at Éditions de l’Université de
Bruxelles (EUB). His publications in English include, among others, “Tailoring Dissent on the Airwaves: The Role of Conservative Talk Radio in the Right-wing Resurgence
of 2010” in New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture (2012) and “Harnessing the Potential of the “Demotic Turn” to Authoritarian Ends: Caller Participation and
Weaponized Communication on US Conservative Talk Radio Programs,” in Ségur, C. (Ed.) (2020), French Perspectives on Media: Participation and Audiences, Palgrave Macmillan.