Ross Kaminsky has been running the morning rush hour show on TalkRadio 630 KHOW in Denver for all of two months, but he's already in hot water with many of his 50,000 listeners: They like Donald Trump, and Kaminsky doesn't.
I drove to Kaminsky's house on 16 hectares of forested mountain side in Nederland, a town in Boulder County, Colorado, where Kaminsky is one of very few conservatives, because I'm hooked on U.S. talk radio. Driving around primary states on a reporting assignment is a lonely business. So Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their local colleagues are my in-car companions, their wit and eloquence making long drives more tolerable. I don't get to argue, so in just six weeks they've taught me how to think like a U.S. conservative, though I disagree with myself when I do.
U.S. talk radio is wickedly good as an entertainment product, and I'm not convinced the tens of millions of people who listen to it are all hard-line Republicans. Every conservative talk radio host owes something to Limbaugh, who invented the format and has perfected it since his show started in 1984, dissecting the news to fit an idiosyncratic worldview. So does Kaminsky, though he says he's not a fan.
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