Civic Media is betting on local pro-democracy radio. Will it work?

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In an office space overlooking Wisconsin’s state Capitol sits the command center of a talk radio experiment that has grown rapidly, at a surprisingly affordable cost as far as media empires go, but with a number of high-profile stumbles in recent months.

This is the story of Civic Media, a network of 20 Wisconsin radio stations purchased over the last two years with the goal of promoting democracy and local news.

The nascent radio empire built by tech entrepreneur Sage Weil and veteran radio host Mike Crute now covers nearly half the state, from WBZH-AM in northwestern Wisconsin to WRJN-FM in the southeast.

Funded primarily by Weil, the company spent more than $9 million acquiring stations in an effort to challenge the dominance of conservative talk radio and provide center-left programming in underserved media markets. The signal range of all Civic stations now reaches an estimated 2.6 million Wisconsin residents, according to Jorge Reyna, Civic’s vice president of marketing.

Civic considers its work vital in strengthening civic engagement, particularly in a time when media feels increasingly polarizing. Most of Civic’s programming, Weil says, is “not just supporting democracy,” but “improving the practice of democracy.”

Despite previous failed attempts to grow left-of-center talk radio across the country, Civic’s leaders hope to build a sustainable business that can serve as a national model.

But it’s yet to be determined if Wisconsin residents are tuning in to Civic’s brand of talk radio. The network has found itself embroiled in a series of controversies this year, from a host being fed questions ahead of a high-profile interview with President Joe Biden, which was subsequently edited at the campaign’s request, to a bitter breakup between Weil and Crute.

Talk radio as a key political tool

Civic Media stands out amid a radio environment dominated by conservative talk, whose wide reach still plays a major role in American politics, according to journalist Katie Thornton, who has reported extensively on conservative radio.

“Radio is influential across demographic groups, across urban and rural groups, across age groups, and so it really is influential the country over,” Thornton says. “It is still one of the most influential mediums, and it’s consistently ranked at the top of the list of most trustworthy media alongside newspapers.”

In 2022, The Pew Research Center reported that 82% of Americans listen to the radio, and 47% “get news from radio at least sometimes.”

Despite conservative media’s dominance, small pockets of liberal media could be found on the air, including The Devil’s Advocates, a show previously hosted by Crute and his longtime friend and college roommate Dominic Salvia.

Crute and Salvia started broadcasting in February 2012 to bring their political debates to a larger audience — Crute leans left, while Salvia presents a libertarian point of view. 

“When we would go to a bar on Friday night and talk politics, we would have half the bar joining us,” Crute says. He approached a contact at Madison-based WXXM-FM and bought airtime on The Mic 92.1: $1,000 per month for an hour of airtime every Saturday. 

Eventually, the show expanded to three hours and became a highly rated progressive talk show nationally during the 2016 presidential election cycle, according to Crute.

But on Oct. 25, 2016, The Mic, owned by iHeartMedia, which owns WISN-AM, the state’s largest conservative radio outlet, told Crute it wouldn’t renew the show’s contract. Crute says the station owner told him the decision was financial, not political.

Station ownership key to success

That shakeup prompted Crute to buy WRRD-AM, covering Milwaukee and parts of Madison, in January 2017 “all in the name of trying to keep lefty talk radio on the air,” he says.

Station ownership has been a critical factor in the failure of liberal talk radio efforts, like Air America, which launched in 2004 and shut down in 2010. “They were having to ask established stations and established networks, many of whom had already sort of gone to an almost round-the-clock conservative format,” Thornton says. 

Conservative talk has had no such problem. The Salem Media Group, which describes itself as the “largest commercial U.S. radio broadcasting company providing Christian and conservative programming,” owns 115 stations across the nation and syndicates conservative shows to more than 3,000 stations.

Salem doesn’t own any stations in Wisconsin. But iHeartMedia — which owns 860 stations nationally — owns 19 in the state and airs shows from conservative hosts Dan O’Donnell, Vicki McKenna and Mark Belling.

“There’s a structural problem with media ownership in the country where all the traditional media properties tend to have right-wing owners,” Weil says.

That’s starting to change. WTMJ-AM, once the home of conservative hosts like Charlie Sykes, is now owned by Good Karma Brands, whose owner has donated to Democrats. And earlier this year the FCC approved the acquisition of more than 250 stations, including seven in Wisconsin, by a company connected to liberal billionaire George Soros.

‘The most strategic investment to fix the political situation’

Weil’s background is not in radio. In 1995, when he was 17, he built WebRing, a web script that links related sites to one another. He built other web-based platforms including InkTank, which sold for $175 million in 2014. He has donated over $3 million to the Wisconsin Democratic Party since 2010.

In 2021, Crute attempted to acquire another radio station, the Waukesha-area WAUK-FM. But he didn’t have enough money to cover the cost outright, so he asked Weil at a donor call to borrow $250,000. Weil agreed “like, 10 minutes later,” Crute says.

Weil says he was looking at “what is the most strategic investment to fix the political situation,” and he wanted to do it in Wisconsin, where he had moved because of his wife’s job. He says many conservative radio stations “tend to be huge, problematic sources of misinformation and disinformation with skewed news content and skewed coverage.”

But the plan at the time wasn’t to buy more stations. It wasn’t until a few months later, Crute says, when Weil suggested that the duo “go big” and buy radio stations all over the state.

How Civic works

Two-thirds of Civic’s stations are news-talk, including sports, while the rest air music, Weil says.

The network aims to produce pro-democracy radio that promotes civic engagement, faith in elections and other democratic institutions, and the bridging of political divides. Crute says Civic is “not trying to beat the drum for the blue team,” but rather “just trying to give them facts.”

But the network’s lineup includes plenty of Democrats. 

Pat Kreitlow, a former Democratic state senator, hosts UpNorthNews Radio from Chippewa Falls. His show partially serves as a platform for Democratic politicians and progressive activists to spread messages that may not otherwise find a place on the radio.

“They will hear not just what the right-wing media ecosphere is telling them ought to be the case on every issue, but they’re hearing alternative voices saying, ‘if we were in charge, this is the bill that we would put forward,’” Kreitlow says. “And it’s that variety on the radio dial that we think people are going to respond to.”

Civic’s lineup excludes Trump-aligned Republicans who otherwise dominate the airwaves, which Weil says reflects a commitment to strengthening democracy. Its hosts include former Republican political aide Todd Allbaugh and former Republican state Rep. Joel Kleefisch.

Last month the station broke news that Republican Sen. Rob Cowles endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. 

Concerns about the network’s leftward lean came into focus earlier this summer when Biden gave an exclusive interview to Civic’s Earl Ingram. Soon after the show aired, Ingram told ABC News he was fed a list of questions from Biden’s campaign, which he asked during the interview. 

Weil released a statement days after the news broke, revealing the interview had been edited after the campaign asked for two cuts to be made to the recording before it aired.

“The production team at the time viewed the edits as non-substantive and broadcast and published the interview with two short segments removed,” Weil wrote in the July statement.

“It was a failure of management and leadership in terms of providing the appropriate oversight and guidance,” Weil tells Wisconsin Watch. 

Disagreement leads to departure 

Crute left his leadership role at Civic Media at the beginning of the year after reaching a negotiated buyout of his stake in the company. He and Weil characterized their split as ideological, disagreeing about the goal of the organization.

“I think that it’s fair to say that we have somewhat different opinions about what the most effective messaging approach is and who our audience should be and who we’re talking to,” Weil says.

Crute continued hosting The Devil’s Advocates with Salvia on Civic stations until August, when Crute announced the show was to end immediately after a disagreement with Civic.

“I’m done subsidizing the rich guy’s programming. I asked for a job and apparently this product does not merit pay,” Crute said on the Aug. 29 show. “We are not equal to those that get paid, and that is an inequitable circumstance that I find untenable.”

Weil says Civic was clear about preferring that Crute finish up the contract through the end of the year instead of ending the show immediately like he did. 

“All things considered, I think it’s probably best,” Weil says. 

Tipping the presidential scales in rural areas

Confirming Civic’s long-term sustainability could take years. Reyna says terrestrial listenership data from the most recent Nielsen survey “wasn’t super encouraging,” but digital listenership has been increasing.

Civic’s leaders don’t expect to reach all 2.6 million Wisconsin residents living within their signal range. The company has identified about 400,000 residents to target, based on internal calculations that exclude non-radio listeners, “unreachable” conservative talk radio listeners, and those who only tune in to music stations, Reyna says. 

Civic is still far from that benchmark, but reaching even a tenth of that audience can have significant implications for politics in a state as evenly divided as Wisconsin, Reyna says.

Radio may be risky, but it’s a relatively cheap medium for testing Civic’s model. Weil spent approximately $9.65 million to purchase 20 stations (19 currently on the air). During the 2024 Super Bowl, a PAC paid $7 million to run a 30-second ad supporting presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“The challenge so far is just that it’s unproven, and so people don’t like putting up tens of millions of dollars to go buy a bunch of radio stations when that hasn’t happened yet,” Weil says. “But I think once we can show success, then that’ll be easier.” 

Wisconsin Watch reporter Hallie Claflin contributed to this report.

This story is part of “Change is on the Air,” a six-part series on the talk radio landscape in Wisconsin. Read the series at wisconsinwatch.org.