One of America’s largest talk-radio companies has informed their on-air personalities that they will face termination if they continue to suggest that the Democratic party stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.
Cumulus Media, which owns 416 radio stations in 84 regions nationwide, is “a medium that has been dominated by a conservative point of view for decades,” The Washington Post reports.
Last Wednesday, the company issued a directive just as the violent attack on the U.S. capitol took place by Pro-Trump supporters.
“We need to help induce national calm NOW,” Brian Philips, executive vice president of content for Cumulus, wrote, according to Inside Music Media. Cumulus and its program syndication arm, Westwood One, “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved, and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ”
To those who ignore the new rule, “you can expect to separate from the company immediately.”
The Atlanta-based company has remained quiet since President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory over Trump, while a few of their well-known hosts, including Mark Levin, chose to encourage Trump lies that the votes were “rigged” in the states that he lost.
The day before domestic terrorists stormed the Capitol in hopes of stopping Congress’s certification of electoral votes for Biden, Levin took to the air to criticize the decision of the lawmakers as “an act of tyranny.”
“You think the framers of the Constitution . . . sat there and said, ‘Congress has no choice [but to accept the votes], even if there’s fraud, even if there’s some court order, even if some legislature has violated the Constitution?’ ” Levin said.
Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, revealed that there are talk-radio hosts who did not think that their views of the election would “get out of hand” in the way that it did last Wednesday. He noted that many broadcast companies, including Cumulus, “recognize they’re in the hot seat right now because the national eye is on them.”
When asked how hosts can change their narrative into accepting the election results, Harrison provided this advice.
“I would hope they put their personal feelings aside and come clean with their listeners,” he said. “I encourage them to pursue the truth and to tell their audience something that Trump may not like.”
