RADIO: Progressive talker Miller finally makes it to Yale

By Joe Amarante
Register Staff
4/29/05

Syndicated radio host Stephanie Miller is funny, smart, single and easy to look at. But just a second, Rush Limbaugh fans. She’s also a progressive, as in liberal, which she deftly displayed this week in a week-long tour of the Northeast that began in New Haven at the Omni Hotel.

Miller is the daughter of the late William Miller, whom Barry Goldwater picked for his running mate in 1964 because, it is said, the guy got under Lyndon Johnson’s skin.

But Stephanie’s no Goldwater conservative; she is the up-and-coming star of Democracy Radio, a friendly competitor of liberal radio channel Air America. Both "progressive radio" outlets are heard on Clear Channel station WAVZ, which hosted the Miller tour Monday and Tuesday mornings.

Democracy Radio, which also includes "The Ed Schultz Show" heard on WAVZ ("The Voice," 1300 AM), was begun "to combat the rightward tilt of talk radio," said Todd Webster of Democracy Radio. "It’s bad for democracy when radio is dominated by one ideology."

Miller, with her agile voice man Jim Ward at her side and an alert producer cueing sound effects back in LA, ripped through headlines, observations and even local interviews in New Haven, chatting up State Attorney Gen. Dick Blumenthal and State Rep. Pat Dillon.

"We are a wall of sound," Miller said after the show Tuesday, before making a Phil Spector joke and going on to a Robert Blake joke. Miller admits she’s been doing standup comedy for 20 years, and it shows. The LA-based show on Wednesday moved on to Springfield, Mass., and is in Boston today.

What did she think of New Haven (splayed out in springtime glory in views from the 18th-floor restaurant at the Omni)?

"It’s great; I love it. Yale was the one college that rejected me. (She went to USC.) I’ve been trying to get to Yale for 20 years."

Webster said progressive is the fastest-growing radio format. (OK, it did have practically no presence compared to Limbaugh and imitators.) He points out that radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications has reformatted 25 stations to progressive talk.

"WAVZ may not be a 50,000-watt blowtorch," said Webster, "but Rush Limbaugh was on tiny stations at first, too. Clear Channel has seen success in Portland, Ore., and other places … and is flipping larger stations to this format."

After the show Tuesday, the Buffalo, N.Y., raised Miller scurried nearby to pick up a ratings sheet that showed her program indeed earning a 2.6 share for adult men last fall on WAVZ, up from another program’s dismal 0.01 in the summer 2004 ratings book. Her program has shown similar explosive growth in places like Asheville, N.C.

Ron Hartenbaum of the show’s WYD Media Management said Clear Channel may have begun the move to liberal shows as a reaction to "heat" in Washington over airing so much conservative radio programming.

"But then the marketplace, as it will do, responded," he said.

Says Miller, "Clear Channel figured out that half the country was disenfranchised (with talkers on the right). Why are they doing it? Money. … It’s working. And a lot of these stations are tiny. There’s no promotion. Obviously nobody had any idea who I am."

The conservative talkers (Limbaugh, Sean Hannity) still dominate in ratings on large AM stations across the country, Miller admits, but "We’ve been on three months!" (That’s nationally; the show started in LA before that.)

Miller, 40-something but looking a decade younger, seems to have the spunk to push her "Operation Take-Back America." And she better have a thick skin. Limbaugh and the neo-cons have a full backpack of weapons, and they’re not shy about using them.