I’m not sure what to make of this. Armed Forces Radio hired Lund Media Research to conduct surveys and focus groups of listeners (i.e., people in the US military) and make recommendations for future programming. The recommendations? Dump or dramatically ramp back Rush, Hannity and NPR. The same with country music and play-by-play sports coverage. And replace it with more hip-hop, rap and pop.
You can see more of the details in this article in Stars and Stripes. But that’s the gist of it.
Dropping sports is the easiest to explain. Lund found that most people in the military want to watch sports programming, not listen to it on the radio. So no big cultural shift there. At least not in the broad sense.
With country music, the issue seemed to be that not all that many people liked it. And those who didn’t affirmatively like it, hated it. Said Warren Lee, operations and plans officer for American Forces Radio and Television Services, “They said when we play country, we pull in the country fans but lose everyone else.”
The most interesting finding, to my lights, came in the relative unpopularity of talk radio. It wasn’t that folks in the military are turning off right wing talk radio. The skew was still heavily toward right wing talk, as opposed to left wing talk — which probably is true for the country as a whole. The key was that while older troops are still big into talk radio, that’s not the case with younger troops. The survey defined ‘younger’ as 18-34. And given the demographic structure of the the military that’s got to be the overwhelming majority of those who serve.
