Nate Silver: Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

The latest posting by Nate addresses the trouble with John Ziegler, a former talk-radio personality, as the launching pad for his hypothesis that talk-radio helped derail conservatism. He quotes from an April 2005 article in The Atlantic, where the author describes what makes talk-radio tick:

Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you're discussing.

Nate goes on to distinguish between stimulation and persuasion, suggesting that somewhere along the way, conservative talk-radio became mostly sizzle, with little steak.