Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly dominate America’s talk radio while white liberal voices are mere squeaks on the airwaves. But now syndicated black radio hosts like Tom Joyner, Bev Smith, Michael Baisden and Warren Ballentine and other African-American radio personalities are not only increasingly audible to a wider audience but visible and influential as well. Says April Ryan, White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks (AURN): “My phone has been ringing off the hook with Fox News and MSNBC wanting interviews with me. Black radio has always been here, covering the important issues from a black perspective, but it wasn’t until Barack Obama, emerged as the first black man to prove himself to be a viable presidential candidate that the mainstream media wanted to hear what we had to say. It’s another example of how his candidacy has broken the mold.”
 
Indeed, the contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination has provided black radio with several center stage moments. “When you need the black vote you deal with black radio, and that’s what happening,” says Ronald Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland at College Park.
 
After the Iowa primary, for example, Hillary Clinton seemed to give President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed civil rights legislation into law, more credit for progress than Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream” — a perceived stand-in for Obama’s “hope.” When that drew negative attention among black voters…