ART BELL
| ALTERNATIVE MEDIA / HOST
|
Bell served in the U.S. Air Force as a medic during theVietnam War and, in his free time, operated a pirate radio station. Bell returned to the United States and studied engineering at the Univ. of Maryland. He dropped out and returned to radio, this time as a board operator and chief engineer. In 1989 the 50,000-watt KDWN in Las Vegas, Nevada offered Bell a five-hour time slot in the middle of the night.
Bell's original Las Vegas program was a political call-in talk radio show under the names West Coast AM and Coast to Coast 2000, but he tired of the format, believing there were too many such programs, especially in the wake of Rush Limbaugh's huge success. Bell abandoned conventional political talk in favor of topics such as gun control and conspiracy theories.
According to The Washington Post, Art Bell was at the time America's highest-rated late-night radio talk show, heard on 328 stations. According to "The Oregonian", Coast To Coast AM with Art Bell was on 460 stations. At its initial peak in popularity, Coast To Coast AM was syndicated on over 500 radio stations, and it claimed 15 million listeners nightly.
|
|
