"Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump?" asks the headline in The New York Times shortly after the election. Weirdly, that article - and hundreds like it purporting to explain the previous 2016 election - lacked even a single mention of the roughly 1,500 right-wing talk-radio stations that saturate every corner, no matter how remote or rural, of America.

As a 2008 Pew Research poll found, 16 percent of Americans got their general election-year information about presidential candidates from talk radio, a percentage that had held constant for eight years at that point, despite the explosive growth of the Internet over the same period.