A companion to Louisiana Airwaves
Television money follows population. Radio money follows audience — and that makes a radio ledger the closest thing in the public record to a campaign admitting who it was talking to. Louisiana committees have put $13.2M into the state's radio stations since 2000, about a ninth of what they spent on TV. Where it went says more.
Filings through October 27, 2026 · rebuilt nightly from the state's disclosure data
On the air now
The dial
Group the stations by what they broadcast and one bucket leads: urban, gospel and Black talk formats take of all radio spending — just ahead of news/talk (27%), the next largest. On television no comparable split exists, because a TV station sells one undifferentiated audience to everybody. Radio sells specific audiences, and Louisiana campaigns have spent a quarter-century buying one in particular.
“Black-audience” groups the formats the radio industry itself markets as reaching Black listeners — urban contemporary, urban adult contemporary, gospel, and brokered Black talk. It is a description of programming and of how airtime is sold, not of any station's or listener's politics.
The fingerprint
Break each committee's spending down by format and the strategy is legible without a single poll. John Bel Edwards put 59% of his radio money into Black-audience stations; Kathleen Blanco 70%; Walter Boasso 99%. Jeff Landry put 48% into news/talk, and the conservative Citizens Fighting Crime PAC split its money 40/40 between talk and country. The exception proves the rule: Bobby Jindal bought all of it — 26% talk, 24% country and 24% Black-audience — the radio signature of a candidate assembling a landslide rather than a base.
Each bar is one committee's radio spending, divided by format. Party comes from the filing, corrected where Louisiana files a PAC as OTH or a filing states the wrong party — the same corrections as the TV page. Hover a segment for the dollar figure.
Retail politics
For the median station here, a buy runs — against $4,222 on television. At the bottom of the scale sits something television has no equivalent of: KVPI in Ville Platte, a classic-country-and-Cajun-French AM station, has taken money from 62 different committees at an average of $246 a spot. Sheriffs, assessors, school-board candidates and constables buy this radio. It is the layer of Louisiana campaigning that never shows up in a television ledger at all.
Average dollars per filed buy, for stations with at least twenty filings. The Cajun and Christian stations at the cheap end are also the ones reaching the most separate committees — many small buyers, not a few big ones.
The ledger
Sixty-seven stations, grouped by what they play. WWL in New Orleans — Audacy's news/talk “WWL 870 AM / 105.3 FM” — leads the state at $1.52M, ahead of WYLD ($948K).
AM and FM sisters sharing a call sign are one line; the filings rarely distinguish them and campaigns buy the cluster. Amounts are nominal dollars.
Ownership
The Gray-and-Nexstar duopoly that collects 78% of Louisiana's political TV money has no presence here. Radio's money goes to iHeartMedia, Audacy, Townsquare Media and Cumulus Media — and, unlike television, 17% stays with locally owned stations that answer to nobody's national programming department.
Owner as of September 2026. Stations operated under local marketing or brokerage agreements are credited to the operator.
Method & sources
Built by build_radio_spend.py from Louisiana Ethics Administration expenditure rows, 2000–2026 — the same filings behind Louisiana Airwaves. Radio needs a stricter matcher than television did, for one reason:
Radio has ten times as many call signs as television, and a plain pattern match over these filings returns WINE (Total Wine), KING (Smoothie King Center), WORD (Last Word Strategies), WEST (Ryan West) and KYLE (Kyle Ardoin) as radio stations — of phantom spending. So nothing is matched on shape alone: a row counts only if its call sign is in a hand-verified station reference, or carries an explicit -AM/-FM marker. Rows failing that test are excluded and the amount is reported in the output.
of the dollars here sit on the 67 stations whose format, city and owner were verified individually against published sources. The remainder — across roughly smaller call signs — is identifiable as radio but not yet classified, so it appears as its own bucket rather than being dropped or guessed into a category. The largest single station in that tail is about $55K. Format shares are quoted against the full total, so the unclassified tail dilutes them rather than disappearing from the denominator.
WWL and KTAL share call signs between a television and a radio station. The Airwaves page counts their bare-call rows as television; this page counts only rows explicitly marked radio (WWL-AM, KTAL-FM), so no dollar is claimed twice. That radio-marked total is .
2008 is missing from the upstream data release, as on the TV page, so it is absent from every figure here.
Radio does not use the DMAs the TV page is built on. Nielsen Audio rates only a handful of Louisiana metros, and much of this money goes to stations in unrated territory — Mamou, Crowley, Berwick, Ville Platte, Moreauville. A parish map would leave a large share of the spending homeless, which is why format, not place, organizes this page. City of licence is in the ledger for anyone who wants it.