Talk radio proves right makes might.

Michael Curtis, a Wake Forest University law professor, has spent untold hours researching the balance between free speech and fairness in the media. What he has found are forces that foster demagoguery more than democracy. There's plenty of free speech, but fairness seems a passing fancy.

"The media can report anything without verifying the facts," he says. "Clearly the number of corporations--and individuals--with influence over what is reported has shrunk through mergers. Concentrated media control can be used for deleterious purposes and is prone to manipulation."

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Dan Rather's blunder notwithstanding, most media distortions go unreported and unexposed. "The absence of coverage on this issue means that the public is missing much of what is going on in the country," says Duke law professor Walter Dellinger III, who was acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. A Washington lawyer whose client list includes Martha Stewart, he has urged major newspapers, with limited success, to cover this trend.

To get an earful of what Curtis and Dellinger are talking about, tune in to talk radio. A decade ago, there were fewer than a half-dozen stations in North Carolina hewing to that format. Now there are nearly 50. Most of the programming skews to the right politically, with some stations broadcasting up to 12 hours a day of right-wing chatter. "Facts" are tossed out like seeds sown in the wind, with almost no weight given to whether they're true.

"It is a disturbing trend," says Ardie Gregory, president of the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters and general manager of WRAL-FM in Raleigh. "While consumers have a responsibility to figure out the truth of what they are hearing, I don't know how healthy it is to the public."

This, however, is not the "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary Clinton talked about. It might not be good journalism, but it's good business--having much more to do with maximizing profit than pushing a particular political point of view.

"I don't think that most station owners had any grand scheme to become right-wing voices," says Jon Coleman, president of Coleman, a national media-marketing research company based in Research Triangle Park. "They just responded to the market. It is fairly cheap to provide, which makes it more profitable. Conservatives who listen think they are getting objective points of view, but most agree with and believe what they are hearing. We have proved [through research] that listeners are aligned politically with the talkers, who preach mostly to the choir. I wonder if this serves the public well."

Right-wing talk radio burst onto the scene with Rush Limbaugh, who began syndicating his New York-based three-hour weekday gabfest in 1988 and within five years had the nation's largest radio audience. More than 600 stations nationwide, including 21 in North Carolina, carry the program.

Limbaugh's success spawned legions of wannabes, and their growing numbers made it less expensive to buy on-air talent. Most Tar Heel news/talk stations have local news staffs but rely on syndicated voices around which they can sell airtime. "These kind of conservative personalities tend to breed on each other," Coleman says. "It used to be expensive for station owners, but not so much anymore. The competition among commentators means they all cost less."

Three of the state's best-known AM stations with the strongest signals--WBT in Charlotte, WPTF in Raleigh and WSJS in Winston-Salem--are news/talk. All carry Limbaugh, and all bring in big bucks.

"We had the most profitable year ever last year," says Tom Hamilton, vice president of 74-year-old WSJS, part of CBS' Infinity chain, owned by New York-based Viacom. "It was not our original intent to be a right-wing station. But our listeners are loyal, and we give them what they want."

"We were not designed to be a right-leaning broadcast medium," says Rick Jackson, general manager of WBT, which has been on the air 82 years and is owned by Greensboro-based Jefferson-Pilot Communications. "But we found the hosts to do that, and they have been successful. It is popular and is working well."

Don Curtis, whose Raleigh-based Curtis Media Group owns 80-year-old WPTF and 14 other stations in North Carolina, recently converted a Burlington FM country station into news/talk WZKT to tap into the Triad. Most of the commentators veer to the right. Curtis, who describes himself as a social liberal, based the move on market research. "It's just one of the formats that work," he says, because listeners get attached to the voices they hear. It becomes personal, he says.

"These personalities beat the drum that listeners want to hear," says Charlie Tuggle, who teaches broadcast journalism at UNC Chapel Hill. "They verify the beliefs of those who hear them. Eighty percent of the radio hosts are politically conservative. There once was one of these stations in a medium-sized market. Now there are two in those markets and one in small markets."

One reason for the rise of conservative talk radio is the perception that liberals control the media. "It came about from the anger of the right-wingers who felt they had no voice," says Jim Heavner, president of Chapel Hill-based VilCom, which owns WCHL.

Last spring, the AM station began airing The Al Franken Show and The Majority Report, two programs from New York-based Air America Radio, which bills itself as the nation's "Progressive Talk Radio Network." Launched this year as a foil to conservative talk radio, Air America programming is carried by only 36 stations nationwide.

It should be no surprise that one of those places is Chapel Hill. But what about Asheville? WPEK, a daytime-only AM station, switched Sept. 13 from Adult Standards--hits of the '40s and '50s and more recent nonrock fare--to left-leaning talk, including Air America shows. It was the fourth format change in 18 months: The station had pulled a zero share in the last ratings sweep, says Brian Hill, director of news/talk programming for Clear Channel Asheville.

He's also program director of WWNC, the market's top news/talk station, which airs Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators. San Antonio, Texas-based Clear Channel Communications owns both stations--and about 2,000 others, making it the nation's largest owner of radio stations.

Clear Channel's Web site says it owns 9% of 13,000 U.S. stations and rakes in 18% of the revenue, clearly the kind of concentration that worries Professor Curtis. But, as the Asheville scenario shows, it's money, not politics, that talks loudest in the radio industry.