When Laura Schlessinger announced she was ending her radio show, my reaction was: She’s still on the air?
A fair assumption. Schlessinger claims 9 million listeners but her website’s station-finder lacks such major markets as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, Atlanta and Phoenix. In her home state of California, she airs only in Los Angeles and San Diego.
Schlessinger’s stock in trade – pushing an overarching conservative agenda through the funnel of callers’ personal problems – lost relevance with the rise of more blatantly political shows. And her Conservative Values Queen of Mean schtick has been usurped by younger, flashier, nastier blondes.
Schlessinger is as quaint and extraneous a media relic as the VCR.
Which might help explain why she recently blew herself up, aided by illogical PR sensibilities.
Schlessinger is lots of things but “stupid” isn’t one of them. Particularly during her 1990s heyday, she had a knack for keeping herself in the spotlight despite countless challengers.
But I’ve always believed that a misguided publicity idea blew up her TV show and cost her permanent image damage. And I now think a similar misstep killed her radio show.
In late 1999, Schlessinger signed with Paramount for a daytime talk show. Despite her radio success, she was entering one of TV’s most competitive battlefields.
Some talent publicize the start of a season by publishing a book, launching a merchandise line, having a high-profile romance. It seemed that Schlessinger’s promotion strategy was to attack LGBTs.
In the mid ‘90s, Schlessinger began renouncing her support of gay lifestyles; over the years, she’s done likewise with feminism and Orthodox Judaism. But in the lead-up to the show’s September 2000 premiere, she ramped up her statements, calling homosexuality “a biological error” and claiming gay parenting led to pedophilia.
Were the comments’ timing a coincidence? Maybe. But it’s always felt like a calculated move to guarantee visibility.
Which it did. A powerful national grassroots movement – one of the first to strategically use the internet for such a purpose – was launched by activists. It convinced advertisers to pull out, got stations nervous, organized protests across the country and caused big corporate headaches. (Paramount even allegedly settled a publicist’s worker’s comp claim for emotional stress.)
The show lasted less than one season. The publicity surrounding Schlessinger’s comments also cost her radio advertisers and made her a permanent object of negative attention among people who’d never even cared about her before.
Which brings us to last week.
If my response was any barometer, Schlessinger’s visibility has slipped in past years. She certainly had reasons to seek renewed attention: the paperback release of her 2009 book is now out and a new hardcover’s begun pre-orders. It’s likely her current contract, the one distributing the show through 2010, had a negotiating window coming up.
So the PR tactic of doing something audacious wasn’t out of the question.
