Talk radio is a platform which is often overlooked during media analysis, but articles show that talk radio has a large influence on the lives of hard-working Americans. We set out to explore the influence of talk radio by building the world's most expensive radio receiver.
We built an immersive talk radio experience, where you can fly over America and select talk-radio stations to listen to live. The experience gives you an astronaut's view of the Earth, while at the same time allowing you to be immersed in multiple channels of talk-radio. While listening to stations, we realized that there were many subjects that were heavily discussed in talk-radio shows which we had never heard of.
We also overlayed information about congressional districts and how they voted in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 election. By selecting a station, you could also see who the congress-people for that district are.
As a follow-up, we began studying the reach of the most popular shows. We utilized Neilsen rating data from 260 markets to compare the distribution of Rush Limbaugh (conservative) and NPR (liberal):