There is another factor here – everybody listens to talk radio these days, and from what I hear most talk radio consists of the host insulting other people – politicians they don’t like, celebrities they don’t like, the “government,” whoever their personal choice of “bad guy” is, and of course the poor people who actually call in and disagree with the host.
The level of old-fashioned civility on radio is in the negative numbers, and so many of us listen to talk radio because it’s not television – so it must be OK, right?
I’m not so young, and I remember when one mark of a frum yid was eidelkeit, and kids were taught that only the ignorant were offensive. Looking back, I can see that the change started about the same time that talk radio became popular. We’re always being told about how what we hear influences us, so why are we listening to the type of talk that my parents would never have tolerated?