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Friday, December 20, 2013
New York City just elected its most progressive mayor in a generation -- and its only liberal talk radio outlet is closing up shop. What gives?
Readers of this blog know that I've been a big booster of progressive talk radio ever since March 31, 2004, when an unemployed Mr. Brilliant sat in his man cave at noon-oh-six to hear the first words out of Al Franken's mouth on the very first O'Franken Factor on the new Air America Radio's New York affiliate, WLIB. The next day we discovered the great Morning Sedition, and for a few brief and wondrous months, there was nonstop progressive talk radio in New York City. We all know about the financing fiasco, with Evan Cohen turning out to be a crook, and general mismanagement by just about all involved.
Air America burned brightly on the airwaves for a very short time, and then crashed and burned with the help of some of the most astonishingly bad upper management not named "Carly Fiorina." From The Lionel Show to The Satellite Sisters to Springer on the Radio, the name Air America is now remembered only for schlocky programming and ineptitude. But in its heyday, when one could sit with the dial or button tuned to WLIB from 6 AM, when Morning Sedition came on with Marc Maron exhorting, "Good morning, geniuses...philosopher kings and queens...working class heroes...progressive utopians with no sense of humor..." until one went to sleep at night, there was something brilliant happening out there in the airwaves, something that promised to be a very real alternative to the bellowings of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and Michael Savage and the other hatemongers of right-wing talk. One of its rising stars was a young broadcaster from Massachusetts who had a show with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. Her name was Rachel Maddow. You may have heard of her.
I was no stranger to prog-talk. I'd stumbled upon the IE America stream about a year or so earlier, when I'd listen to Mike Malloy and Randi Rhodes and the few other voices of progressive talk out there. But to have them right there for the taking on terrestrial radio was like finding an oasis in a desert. But in 2006, the contract with WLIB ended, the station went "praise and inspiration" and Air America moved from its 1190 spot on the AM dial, to the much weaker signal of WWRL at 1600, where after 5 PM you can't hear a thing out here in the hinterlands of New Jersey. And that was the beginning of the end for Air America. Today, WWRL has up until now been a home for the last vestiges of talk radio, with the intrepid Mark Riley, late of Morning Sedition fame, running a polyglot call-in show mixing local issues with national ones; syndication of Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, and Randi Rhodes in between African-American interest broadcasting and infomercials for nutritional supplements.
But as of the end of the year, these last traces of prog-talk will be gone, as WWRL is going Spanish. Aside from the final nail in the coffin of prog-talk on AM radio in New York, this now means that there are basically only three genres on terrestrial AM radio now: Spanish, sports talk, and news, plus the AM public radio affiliate, just to make you think you have a choice. It may be that the last generation of AM radio listeners is dying out, and future generations will be all about internet radio, which could give podcasters like Air America veteran Sam Seder a larger voice (at no pay other than donations). But there is a loss when the most accessible PUBLIC airwaves only feature one point of view, and it is one of nonstop hate shouted by people with no sense of obligation to reality.
Before Air America began, my afternoon drive time choice was an odd one, and it was on the home of wingnut talk in New York, WABC. At afternoon drive time, the soft-spoken, mainstream liberal, Richard Bey (known best for a trash-TV show in the 1980s) went head-to-head with hysterical right-winger Steve Malzberg. It was engaging programming which gave me the opportunity to yell at the radio and work off the frustrations of the day. Bey was fired in 2003 for opposing the Iraq War and hasn't worked steadily in radio since. Today is his last day subbing for Mark Riley from 6-9 AM. You might want to give him a listen.
Oh, there are those who will say that there's still liberal radio, after all there's NPR (largely corporate-funded, and increasingly showing it), and WBAI, the endlessly-struggling Pacifica station. But Pacifica has always seemed kind of stuck in 1968 and its impotent sloganeering has long since grown tiresome. The early Air America programming was lively, if uneven, and had the gonzo energy of pirate radio, a sense of fun, of "Hey, kids, let's put on a radio show!", of throwing shit up against the wall to see what sticks. It was exhilirating and infuriating and perfect for the Bush years. Maybe as the Bush years settled into the perennial disappointment of the Obama years, we all just grew tired of the whole thing, tired of fighting a battle in which our own side couldn't be bothered to join us, instead preferring to take the scraps from the Koch brothers' table after the Republicans got done gorging themselves. Or maybe because unlike the right, we just don't draw our life energy from rage and fear and loathing 24 hours a day. What I do know is that as of January 1, New York will have its most progressive mayor in a generation, and no real radio voice for those who want to support him. WBAI is still going to be focused on freeing Mumia, the sports talkers will be screeching about how awful the Knicks are, and you'll be able to hear all the salsa you want.
Elvis Costello was on to something back in 1977 when he defied Lorne Michaels and insisted on playing his scathing ode to corporate radio on Saturday Night Live:
Air America burned brightly on the airwaves for a very short time, and then crashed and burned with the help of some of the most astonishingly bad upper management not named "Carly Fiorina." From The Lionel Show to The Satellite Sisters to Springer on the Radio, the name Air America is now remembered only for schlocky programming and ineptitude. But in its heyday, when one could sit with the dial or button tuned to WLIB from 6 AM, when Morning Sedition came on with Marc Maron exhorting, "Good morning, geniuses...philosopher kings and queens...working class heroes...progressive utopians with no sense of humor..." until one went to sleep at night, there was something brilliant happening out there in the airwaves, something that promised to be a very real alternative to the bellowings of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and Michael Savage and the other hatemongers of right-wing talk. One of its rising stars was a young broadcaster from Massachusetts who had a show with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. Her name was Rachel Maddow. You may have heard of her.
I was no stranger to prog-talk. I'd stumbled upon the IE America stream about a year or so earlier, when I'd listen to Mike Malloy and Randi Rhodes and the few other voices of progressive talk out there. But to have them right there for the taking on terrestrial radio was like finding an oasis in a desert. But in 2006, the contract with WLIB ended, the station went "praise and inspiration" and Air America moved from its 1190 spot on the AM dial, to the much weaker signal of WWRL at 1600, where after 5 PM you can't hear a thing out here in the hinterlands of New Jersey. And that was the beginning of the end for Air America. Today, WWRL has up until now been a home for the last vestiges of talk radio, with the intrepid Mark Riley, late of Morning Sedition fame, running a polyglot call-in show mixing local issues with national ones; syndication of Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, and Randi Rhodes in between African-American interest broadcasting and infomercials for nutritional supplements.
But as of the end of the year, these last traces of prog-talk will be gone, as WWRL is going Spanish. Aside from the final nail in the coffin of prog-talk on AM radio in New York, this now means that there are basically only three genres on terrestrial AM radio now: Spanish, sports talk, and news, plus the AM public radio affiliate, just to make you think you have a choice. It may be that the last generation of AM radio listeners is dying out, and future generations will be all about internet radio, which could give podcasters like Air America veteran Sam Seder a larger voice (at no pay other than donations). But there is a loss when the most accessible PUBLIC airwaves only feature one point of view, and it is one of nonstop hate shouted by people with no sense of obligation to reality.
Before Air America began, my afternoon drive time choice was an odd one, and it was on the home of wingnut talk in New York, WABC. At afternoon drive time, the soft-spoken, mainstream liberal, Richard Bey (known best for a trash-TV show in the 1980s) went head-to-head with hysterical right-winger Steve Malzberg. It was engaging programming which gave me the opportunity to yell at the radio and work off the frustrations of the day. Bey was fired in 2003 for opposing the Iraq War and hasn't worked steadily in radio since. Today is his last day subbing for Mark Riley from 6-9 AM. You might want to give him a listen.
Oh, there are those who will say that there's still liberal radio, after all there's NPR (largely corporate-funded, and increasingly showing it), and WBAI, the endlessly-struggling Pacifica station. But Pacifica has always seemed kind of stuck in 1968 and its impotent sloganeering has long since grown tiresome. The early Air America programming was lively, if uneven, and had the gonzo energy of pirate radio, a sense of fun, of "Hey, kids, let's put on a radio show!", of throwing shit up against the wall to see what sticks. It was exhilirating and infuriating and perfect for the Bush years. Maybe as the Bush years settled into the perennial disappointment of the Obama years, we all just grew tired of the whole thing, tired of fighting a battle in which our own side couldn't be bothered to join us, instead preferring to take the scraps from the Koch brothers' table after the Republicans got done gorging themselves. Or maybe because unlike the right, we just don't draw our life energy from rage and fear and loathing 24 hours a day. What I do know is that as of January 1, New York will have its most progressive mayor in a generation, and no real radio voice for those who want to support him. WBAI is still going to be focused on freeing Mumia, the sports talkers will be screeching about how awful the Knicks are, and you'll be able to hear all the salsa you want.
Elvis Costello was on to something back in 1977 when he defied Lorne Michaels and insisted on playing his scathing ode to corporate radio on Saturday Night Live:
I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial
doing anything my radio advised
with every one of those late night stations
playing songs bringing tears to me eyes
I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
when the switch broke 'cause it's old
They're saying things that I can hardly believe.
They really think we're getting out of control.
[Chorus:]
Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don't give you any choice
'cause they think that it's treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.
I wanna bite the hand that feeds me.
I wanna bite that hand so badly.
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me.
> Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up;
they don't wanna hear about it.
It's only inches on the reel-to-reel.
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel
[Chorus]
Wonderful radio
Marvelous radio
Wonderful radio
Radio, radio...
doing anything my radio advised
with every one of those late night stations
playing songs bringing tears to me eyes
I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
when the switch broke 'cause it's old
They're saying things that I can hardly believe.
They really think we're getting out of control.
[Chorus:]
Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don't give you any choice
'cause they think that it's treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.
I wanna bite the hand that feeds me.
I wanna bite that hand so badly.
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me.
> Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up;
they don't wanna hear about it.
It's only inches on the reel-to-reel.
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel
[Chorus]
Wonderful radio
Marvelous radio
Wonderful radio
Radio, radio...
Labels: Air America, Morning Sedition, Rachel Maddow, talk radio
Sunday, February 10, 2013
The rise and fall of prog-talk radio
One of the ways I know I'm an old fart is that I still listen to terrestrial radio. I don't listen much, usually only when I'm driving to or from work. On the way TO work, I often find myself listening to Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton's morning sports talk on WFAN. I don't know why I do this. It isn't that I'm such a sports junkie, and after Carton's ignominious firing from his previous radio show following unconscionable remarks he made about former New Jersey Acting Governor Richard Codey's wife's postpartum depression, no self-respecting feminist should ever listen to this man again. And yet I do, and I'm not the only one (though I think this woman's Carton fetish is a little bit weird -- the man may be an entertaining asshole, but he's still an asshole).
It's probably because in the morning, what you need is a zoo. I'm really not up to learning the minutiae about what's going on in Turkey, and the NPR morning crew isn't exactly designed to get you going when you're on the road at 6:15 AM in the dark on the way to a 7:00 teleconference. It's like drinking chamomile tea when what you really need is dark roast with an extra shot of espresso. And Carton is that extra dose. Sometimes I listen to Mark Riley on WWRL, the last voice of progressive talk radio in New York, but frankly, I'm really not that interested in the New York City school bus drivers' strike, and Riley's show is more often than not about topics of interest primarily to New York city residents. So it's to WFAN I turn, for Carton shrieking about the Jets, or Al Dukes' off-key songs, or Boomer Esiason trying to inject some gravitas into a show that isn't about gravitas at all. And all of this is punctuated by commercials for ex-NFL-er Brad Benson's Hyundai dealership, which are so dumbassedly funny that they almost make me want to shlep down there to buy an Accent. It's sort of like listening to The Odd Couple with crazy sports callers. Clearly the formula works, because "Boomer and Carton" is the #1 show among men in the age group 25-54.
How the mighty (meaning me) have fallen.
The "Felix Unger and Oscar Madison" dynamic just plain works on morning talk radio. There was a time when I could turn on the radio at 6 AM and listen to three hours of smart comedy, incisive interviews, and just plain lunacy. That time lasted from April 1, 2004 until December 2005, when the then-current suits at Air America Radio pulled Morning Sedition off the air. I've spilled plenty of keystrokes here about Morning Sedition, and if you'd like to read them, just type "Morning Sedition" into the search box in the left-side menubar and you'll find plenty of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go here and start listening. This brilliant radio show, misunderstood and mismanaged by the people who were supposed to bring progressive talk radio into the mainstream, has just an early canary in the coal mine for what has transpired since then.
Peter B. Collins, a long-standing prog-talk guy, laments the devolution of progressive talk radio at Truth-Out:
So the question is: Is this a BAD thing? Or is it just a natural evolution of communications media? Right-wing talk radio and even sports talk radio thrive because its audience skews old -- the people for whom terrestrial radio is omnipresent. For younger generations, AM radio isn't even on their radar.
A few years ago, when Air America was still viable and still had a reasonably strong signal, I went to a meeting at the campaign headquarters of Dennis Shulman, a blind rabbi who had embarked on a quixotic quest to unseat our wingnut Congressman, E. Scott Garrett. Shulman had a compelling personal story, and I suggested to the campaign manager that they try to get him on some Air America shows. The campaign manager, a kid in his 20s, had no idea what I was talking about.
Thom Hartmann is still out there, Randi Rhodes is still fighting the good fight, albeit on ever-fewer stations, Stephanie Miller is getting harder to find (and will be even harder to find after Current TV leaves the airwaves) and Ed Schultz somehow manages to do three hours of radio every day and an hour of television. But when I think of the days when I could turn on WLIB and listen to Morning Sedition, followed by Unfiltered (which gave birth to the phenomenon that is Rachel Maddow), followed by The O'Franken Factor, then Randi Rhodes, then The Majority Report, and never once change the station, it reminds me just how much has disappeared.
In the short run, I suppose the wingnuts can crow about how they once again "own the airwaves." But the airwaves that don't have video attached to them have become increasingly less important. Yes, the call-in format is dying on the progressive side, but once you get past Morning Schmoe, MSNBC boasts a pretty impressive prog-news lineup. Taken in conjunction with the phenomenal success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, it becomes clear that progressive media isn't dying, it's just changing form. Sam Seder is still out there with The Majority Report. Cenk Uygur has been from podcasting to terrestrial radio to podcasting to TV and back to podcasting. We Act Radio has a full lineup and is available on TuneIn Radio. And with Blog Talk Radio, anyone who has the time can create a podcast (even my cousin Dan).
Just as self-publishing is making the publication of reading materials no longer the province of rich publishing houses, so is podcasting making terrestrial radio obsolete. Until we have ubiquitous wifi, podcasting and internet radio doesn't have the "turn it on and it's there" immediacy of terrestrial radio. But in the not-too-distant future, it won't matter.
It's probably because in the morning, what you need is a zoo. I'm really not up to learning the minutiae about what's going on in Turkey, and the NPR morning crew isn't exactly designed to get you going when you're on the road at 6:15 AM in the dark on the way to a 7:00 teleconference. It's like drinking chamomile tea when what you really need is dark roast with an extra shot of espresso. And Carton is that extra dose. Sometimes I listen to Mark Riley on WWRL, the last voice of progressive talk radio in New York, but frankly, I'm really not that interested in the New York City school bus drivers' strike, and Riley's show is more often than not about topics of interest primarily to New York city residents. So it's to WFAN I turn, for Carton shrieking about the Jets, or Al Dukes' off-key songs, or Boomer Esiason trying to inject some gravitas into a show that isn't about gravitas at all. And all of this is punctuated by commercials for ex-NFL-er Brad Benson's Hyundai dealership, which are so dumbassedly funny that they almost make me want to shlep down there to buy an Accent. It's sort of like listening to The Odd Couple with crazy sports callers. Clearly the formula works, because "Boomer and Carton" is the #1 show among men in the age group 25-54.
How the mighty (meaning me) have fallen.
The "Felix Unger and Oscar Madison" dynamic just plain works on morning talk radio. There was a time when I could turn on the radio at 6 AM and listen to three hours of smart comedy, incisive interviews, and just plain lunacy. That time lasted from April 1, 2004 until December 2005, when the then-current suits at Air America Radio pulled Morning Sedition off the air. I've spilled plenty of keystrokes here about Morning Sedition, and if you'd like to read them, just type "Morning Sedition" into the search box in the left-side menubar and you'll find plenty of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go here and start listening. This brilliant radio show, misunderstood and mismanaged by the people who were supposed to bring progressive talk radio into the mainstream, has just an early canary in the coal mine for what has transpired since then.
Peter B. Collins, a long-standing prog-talk guy, laments the devolution of progressive talk radio at Truth-Out:
Despite the sharp decline in the progressive radio business, we all hoped that the end of the Bush presidency and the 2008 elections would produce new growth in lib talk. With the protracted primary battle between Obama and Clinton, and Obama's inspiring campaign against McCain, we expected to see a spike in ratings and affiliates and hoped the Obama campaign and other Democrats would spend money to reach our listeners, their voters. There was no measurable audience growth and only a precious few campaign dollars were spent on our programs and our affiliate stations.
In August of 2008, all of the progressive shows converged on the Obama coronation in Denver, but we were ignored by the Obama campaign. We were assigned a radio row in the basement of the convention hall, under an escalator. All the delegates and dignitaries whisked past us on the escalator, and when they reached the main floor, the first radio booth they saw was FOX News. Team Obama mostly declined our requests for interviews and we ended up mostly talking with Team Hillary. Schultz was so pissed that he pulled out after the second day and returned to his base in Fargo.
By March, 2009, I had to make the difficult choice to end my syndicated show. There was no path to profitability and the Bush recession didn't help. Indeed, it lowered the tide for all radio boats, and it also sharply cut the revenues to my personal business that had helped subsidize my radio show. After several years of financial losses, I signed off and launched my net-only podcast in June 2009 which now attracts more listeners than I was reaching with ten AM affiliates. The roster of surviving liberal and progressive talk radio shows is facing a similar set of dynamics, even more dire. With Monterey and Eureka as the only remaining full-time progressive outlets on the West Coast, progressive talk does not have national distribution and can't compete for most national ad buys. A year ago, Clear Channel renamed the San Francisco station KNEW and bumped Stephanie Miller in favor of Glenn Beck, Thom Hartmann in favor of money-talker Dave Ramsey. At about the same time, the company dropped Hartmann in Los Angeles for a local show that was intended to defuse community protests of racist comments by "John and Ken" on co-owned KFI.
Ratings range from flat to flat-lined: in 2012, Clear Channel-owned KPOJ in Portland and CBS-owned KPTK in Seattle showed audience numbers so low that they were not listed by Arbitron; Clear Channel's WDTW in Detroit barely showed a pulse at .1 percent, and the once-powerhouse, now-struggling media conglomerate recently agreed to donate WDTW to a local community group. In his second attempt at WVKO in Columbus, Ohio, Gary Richards was forced to sign off just before Christmas 2012. Progressive talker Jeff Santos waged a valiant four-year struggle in Boston, and I was a consultant in his effort last year to add eight new markets in battleground states; we had no choice but to lease air time, and once again the Democrats who had the most to gain failed to support the effort. The only exception I've found is Madison, Wisconsin, market #100, where Clear Channel's WXXM-FM, "The Mic" jumped a full share point to a respectable 3.3 this fall. Back in 2006, a local group led by activist Aldous Tyler rallied support, and a planned format change was halted. Similar efforts are underway in Seattle and in Portland, where longtime KPOJ morning host Carl Wolfson has just launched a live webstream show weekday mornings 7-9 AM Pacific. It's worth noting that Arbitron has switched to a "people meter" system that has produced lower numbers for talk programming in general and progressive talk in particular. Al Franken is in the Senate, Ed Schultz appears to be doing well on MSNBC, Thom Hartmann has a nightly TV show on the RT network, Bill Press and Stephanie Miller are simulcast on Current TV (which has just been sold to Al Jazeera). But their radio shows face tough sledding and possible elimination in 2013. Dial Global, the company that syndicates these programs (along with NFL football and a variety of music formats), is in deep financial trouble, and its stock was recently voluntarily delisted from the NASDAQ when the share price dropped below $1. Ironically, the company blames the progressive-driven advertiser boycott in 2012 aimed at Rush Limbaugh for his misogynist comments about attorney and birth-control advocate Sandra Fluke, which appears to have caused many national advertisers to stop advertising on all talk radio programs - both right and left - to avoid controversy.
Some observers see the long arm of Mitt Romney's Bain Capital (which took Clear Channel private in 2008) and other right-wing forces as the causes of lib talk's travails. While it's true that progressive programs were consigned to weaker stations in many markets - often programmed by conservatives who didn't believe in the product - and never got the kind of advertising support needed to develop the brand properly, it's clear that the progressive community and its political leaders have simply not supported the format in the same way that the right has. This includes listeners, (who seem to prefer the measured tone of NPR to the rough and tumble of AM talk, in markets where they are able to hear both) advertisers owned by progressives, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Some labor unions have advertised on progressive shows, but their financial support is no match for the profits of conservative stations and programs. As someone who took substantial personal risk in syndication and station ownership, I can tell you that progressive talk has not panned out as a viable business. Clinton's 1996 deregulation of broadcasting and the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 didn't help. I do think the FCC should require some balance of viewpoints on the stations it regulates, through the license renewal process, but there is simply no interest on the part of Obama and his appointees in regulatory reform - even as the president is pilloried by right-wing radio on a daily basis. Air America's parade of management blunders produced the downward spiral that brought us to this tipping point for progressive talk radio, and most station owners, rightly or wrongly, see that failure as an indication that audiences won't support liberal talk radio.
In radio, we always like to end on an upbeat note. Here's the best I can muster: if you want to help keep the surviving progressive talk shows alive, subscribe to the podcasts of your favorite progressive hosts - it's a critical stream of revenue as these programs fight for survival.
So the question is: Is this a BAD thing? Or is it just a natural evolution of communications media? Right-wing talk radio and even sports talk radio thrive because its audience skews old -- the people for whom terrestrial radio is omnipresent. For younger generations, AM radio isn't even on their radar.
A few years ago, when Air America was still viable and still had a reasonably strong signal, I went to a meeting at the campaign headquarters of Dennis Shulman, a blind rabbi who had embarked on a quixotic quest to unseat our wingnut Congressman, E. Scott Garrett. Shulman had a compelling personal story, and I suggested to the campaign manager that they try to get him on some Air America shows. The campaign manager, a kid in his 20s, had no idea what I was talking about.
Thom Hartmann is still out there, Randi Rhodes is still fighting the good fight, albeit on ever-fewer stations, Stephanie Miller is getting harder to find (and will be even harder to find after Current TV leaves the airwaves) and Ed Schultz somehow manages to do three hours of radio every day and an hour of television. But when I think of the days when I could turn on WLIB and listen to Morning Sedition, followed by Unfiltered (which gave birth to the phenomenon that is Rachel Maddow), followed by The O'Franken Factor, then Randi Rhodes, then The Majority Report, and never once change the station, it reminds me just how much has disappeared.
In the short run, I suppose the wingnuts can crow about how they once again "own the airwaves." But the airwaves that don't have video attached to them have become increasingly less important. Yes, the call-in format is dying on the progressive side, but once you get past Morning Schmoe, MSNBC boasts a pretty impressive prog-news lineup. Taken in conjunction with the phenomenal success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, it becomes clear that progressive media isn't dying, it's just changing form. Sam Seder is still out there with The Majority Report. Cenk Uygur has been from podcasting to terrestrial radio to podcasting to TV and back to podcasting. We Act Radio has a full lineup and is available on TuneIn Radio. And with Blog Talk Radio, anyone who has the time can create a podcast (even my cousin Dan).
Just as self-publishing is making the publication of reading materials no longer the province of rich publishing houses, so is podcasting making terrestrial radio obsolete. Until we have ubiquitous wifi, podcasting and internet radio doesn't have the "turn it on and it's there" immediacy of terrestrial radio. But in the not-too-distant future, it won't matter.
Labels: Air America, Cenk Uygur, Morning Sedition, podcasts, Randi Rhodes, Sam Seder, talk radio
Thursday, May 05, 2011
A post that will interest only about ten people in the world
A treasure from Jim Earl in the form of a video of part of the last broadcast morning of the late, great Morning Sedition.
For the uninitiated, Brendan MacDonald (guy in navy shirt) is now the producer of Marc Maron's hit podcast, WTF. Give it a listen. The guy with the scruffy beard is Dan Pashman, now of The Sporkful, whose writings can also occasionally be seen in Vanity Fair. You've seen Kent Jones on The Rachel Maddow Show.
I still miss this show every day of my life.
For the uninitiated, Brendan MacDonald (guy in navy shirt) is now the producer of Marc Maron's hit podcast, WTF. Give it a listen. The guy with the scruffy beard is Dan Pashman, now of The Sporkful, whose writings can also occasionally be seen in Vanity Fair. You've seen Kent Jones on The Rachel Maddow Show.
I still miss this show every day of my life.
Labels: Marc Maron, Morning Sedition, talk radio
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Welcome back, Sammy!
It's almost starting to feel like old times again. Not quite, but as close as we're ever going to get, given that here in the New York area, WWRL's signal is virtually nonexistent after 5 PM once the first frost comes. But when you drive a fair distance to and from work as I do, there's something comforting about having the voices of Mark Riley (6-9 AM), Thom Hartmann (3-6 PM) and Randi Rhodes (6-8 PM) on terrestrial radio. And of course the shining star from the old Air America firmament is Rachel Maddow, demonstrating night after night that opinion journalism doesn't mean pulling stuff out of your ass.
And thanks to the magic of podcasting, many of our other old Air America friends are back on the air. Marc Maron's WTF podcast, which is in the top 10 comedy podcasts at iTunes, has him doing what he does best (ranting and interviews) in the comfort of his own garage, as well as expanding the audience for his standup gigs. With former Morning Sedition co-producer Brendan McDonald providing the technical expertise and a welcome dose of leavening sanity, the man seems actually contented with his life. Dan Pashman, another Morning Sedition producer and NPR veteran, writes occasionally for Vanity Fair and has his own podcast with co-host Mark Garrison, The Sporkful, about "the most ridiculous food-related minutiae". And now, the one old Air America show to be actually revived in its original form as a podcast (since with no Air America even in existence anymore, there's no corporate entity that actually owns these things), is back with Sam Seder again hosting The Majority Report.
The advantage to terrestrial radio has always been that it's always there when you just turn it on. And perhaps for another decade or so, terrestrial radio will have an advantage with the Luddites and older listeners who tune into Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh every day. But over time, as WiFi becaomes more ubiquitous, and more people have smartphones, and internet-based broadcasting becomes just as easily accessed as terrestrial radio (and in the case of low-signal stations like WWRL, more so), podcasting is going to be better able to replace terrestrial radio in the lives of more people.
Since advertising sponsorship only offsets part of the costs of operating a podcast for those who are trying to make a living doing it, more podcasts are going to be operating on a subscription basis. WTF is on a voluntary subscription basis, and for now so is The Majority Report. Subscribers receive additional content and other goodies that act as incentives. In the music industry, there's an increasing sense that "content wants to be free." But in progressive talk radio, where we've "known" people like Marc Maron and Sam Seder through their struggles with the Air America debacle, there's a closeness to the performer that you don't have with, say U2 -- and so subscribing to their content feels more like helping out a buddy, or playing a nominal cover charge at your local dive bar so they can continue to do an open jam on Thursday nights.
So click the links above, give a listen, and if you like what you hear, consider subscribing via iTunes and toss some money in the hat. These guys are good at what they do, and they deserve our support.
Labels: Marc Maron, podcasts, Sam Seder, talk radio
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Air America: The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous
It's bad enough that my new Droid Incredible opens up entirely new vistas of wasting time, but it appears that much of Netroots Nation is available via online video for the watching. I don't know when I'll plow through everything I want to see, but this panel featuring former Air America employees and personalities is enlightening -- and frustrating as hell for those of us who turned on WLIB at noon on March 31, 2004 and didn't turn it off until they moved up to a weaker signal up the dial. I'll bet you never knew that "The Majority Report" with Sam Seder and Janeane Garofalo had better ratings in New York than the wingnuts. I didn't either, which is a good chunk of the problem.
Labels: Air America, talk radio
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Allegedly??????
That's the word the news crawl on the New York CBS affiliate is using to describe James W. von Brunn, the angry old man who shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust museum yesterday.
Allegedly.
I'd like to know with what groups the person who prepares that crawl is affiliated, and whether this person uses the word "allegedly" when a black man is arrested for a crime..
The New York Times doesn't doubt that the guy who had the gun is the guy who did it:
Working the crazy hours that I'm doing means that by the time I catch up with a story like this, everyone else has already said whatever needs to be said.
I just wonder how long it's going to take before conservatives start apologizing for their outrage about the DHS report on domestic terrorism -- a report which has shown not to slur loyal American patriots unjustly, but has instead been shown to be spot-on.
The screeching nutballs of right-wing talk radio and wingnut "news" who use the public airwaves to spout hate, racism, and exhort their minions to violence are spinning as fast as they can that people like Scott Roeder and James W. vun Brunn have nothing to do with them, that the vast majority of their listeners DON'T take a gun and kill doctors and security guards. That is true. But when you think about how Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are STILL claiming that Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and is ineligible to be President, combine it with the economic mess that began under the previous administration (when guys like Roeder and von Brunn were curiously quiet) and the first African-American president, it's hard to argue that this kind of talk isn't pushing these guys over the edge.
Anyone who thought that the election of Barack Obama meant that we are now a postracial society obviously forgot about people like Scott Roeder and James W. von Brunn lurking in the shadows, just waiting for someone who wasn't a white male spouting We Are A Christian Nation rhetoric to take office again before ratcheting up their mayhem.
Where is Eric Holder on this? Where the hell is the Justice Department? These people spent the Bush years prosecuting political opponents while these lunatics amassed their arsenals. I know that Barack Obama wants to play nice with fetophiles and other wingnuts, deluding himself that there is common ground between sanity and insanity, but these two terrorist acts are a shot across the bow that there are people on the fringe, egged on by right-wing talk show personalities and even Washington Republicans, who have declared war on this country.
For eight years we saw Quakers put under surveillance for meeting in living rooms, eating cookies and talking about how we can put an end to the war in Iraq. We saw college kids receiving visits from the Secret Service for having a poster on the wall that someone didn't like -- a poster that simply depicted the number of people executed in Texas while George W. Bush was governor. The poster did NOT advocate violence against him, it simply depicted a documented fact. We saw 1800 people arrested during the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 for peacefully protesting, most of whom were released or acquitted of all charges. We saw the President's press secretary say "People have to watch what they say, watch what they do." We saw mass surveillance of American citizens. And the right-wing groups were utterly silent, because the man in the White House was white, professed himself to be a Christian, and shared their drive to preserve a nation of white male patriarchal privilege at any cost. The minute he was out of office and someone whose pigmentation they deemed to be unseemly took up residence in the White House, they started up again. All George Bush had to do was give lip service to TEH BAYBEEEEEZZZZZZZZZZ and he could trash the Constitution as much as he wanted.
Nice fucking patriots, these guys.
More:
Talk2Action
Joan Walsh, who has the money quote of the day: "And who will apologize to the family of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the brave security man at the Holocaust Museum shot by von Brunn. How von Brunn, a felon who'd used a gun in his earlier crime, still had the right to carry a gun, I'll never understand. He killed a black man who'd spent six years protecting a monument to the triumph of love and brotherhood over hate and division."
Some people don't know about the Wayback Machine.
Perhaps it's time for all of us to read David Neiwert's book.
Bob Johnson.
Sara Robinson tells it like it is.
Allegedly.
I'd like to know with what groups the person who prepares that crawl is affiliated, and whether this person uses the word "allegedly" when a black man is arrested for a crime..
The New York Times doesn't doubt that the guy who had the gun is the guy who did it:
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point waged a personal war with the federal government.
Working the crazy hours that I'm doing means that by the time I catch up with a story like this, everyone else has already said whatever needs to be said.
I just wonder how long it's going to take before conservatives start apologizing for their outrage about the DHS report on domestic terrorism -- a report which has shown not to slur loyal American patriots unjustly, but has instead been shown to be spot-on.
The screeching nutballs of right-wing talk radio and wingnut "news" who use the public airwaves to spout hate, racism, and exhort their minions to violence are spinning as fast as they can that people like Scott Roeder and James W. vun Brunn have nothing to do with them, that the vast majority of their listeners DON'T take a gun and kill doctors and security guards. That is true. But when you think about how Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are STILL claiming that Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and is ineligible to be President, combine it with the economic mess that began under the previous administration (when guys like Roeder and von Brunn were curiously quiet) and the first African-American president, it's hard to argue that this kind of talk isn't pushing these guys over the edge.
Anyone who thought that the election of Barack Obama meant that we are now a postracial society obviously forgot about people like Scott Roeder and James W. von Brunn lurking in the shadows, just waiting for someone who wasn't a white male spouting We Are A Christian Nation rhetoric to take office again before ratcheting up their mayhem.
Where is Eric Holder on this? Where the hell is the Justice Department? These people spent the Bush years prosecuting political opponents while these lunatics amassed their arsenals. I know that Barack Obama wants to play nice with fetophiles and other wingnuts, deluding himself that there is common ground between sanity and insanity, but these two terrorist acts are a shot across the bow that there are people on the fringe, egged on by right-wing talk show personalities and even Washington Republicans, who have declared war on this country.
For eight years we saw Quakers put under surveillance for meeting in living rooms, eating cookies and talking about how we can put an end to the war in Iraq. We saw college kids receiving visits from the Secret Service for having a poster on the wall that someone didn't like -- a poster that simply depicted the number of people executed in Texas while George W. Bush was governor. The poster did NOT advocate violence against him, it simply depicted a documented fact. We saw 1800 people arrested during the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 for peacefully protesting, most of whom were released or acquitted of all charges. We saw the President's press secretary say "People have to watch what they say, watch what they do." We saw mass surveillance of American citizens. And the right-wing groups were utterly silent, because the man in the White House was white, professed himself to be a Christian, and shared their drive to preserve a nation of white male patriarchal privilege at any cost. The minute he was out of office and someone whose pigmentation they deemed to be unseemly took up residence in the White House, they started up again. All George Bush had to do was give lip service to TEH BAYBEEEEEZZZZZZZZZZ and he could trash the Constitution as much as he wanted.
Nice fucking patriots, these guys.
More:
Talk2Action
Joan Walsh, who has the money quote of the day: "And who will apologize to the family of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the brave security man at the Holocaust Museum shot by von Brunn. How von Brunn, a felon who'd used a gun in his earlier crime, still had the right to carry a gun, I'll never understand. He killed a black man who'd spent six years protecting a monument to the triumph of love and brotherhood over hate and division."
Some people don't know about the Wayback Machine.
Perhaps it's time for all of us to read David Neiwert's book.
Bob Johnson.
Sara Robinson tells it like it is.
Labels: double standards, right-wing hatemongers, talk radio, wingnuttia
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Come on, isn't there plenty of REAL crap to pin on Sean Hannity?
Far be it for me to defend Sean Hannity in any way, shape, or form, but I'm not sure that this kerfluffle about Sean! Hannity! Endorses! Scammer! Stanford! is really what we want to be hanging our hat on in impugning Sean Hannity's integrity.
I mean, we're talking about a guy who when he has nothing to rebut someone who appears on his show well-prepared, resorts to calling him a fool and an idiot. We're talking about a guy who's spending these days on a fainting couch terrified about the Red Dawn of socialism in this country, forgetting about how things like roads and bridges and even the wars he so unquestioningly supports are paid for with collective money. This is Media Matters' 2008 Misinformer of the Year. It isn't as if there isn't enough Hannity spew out there to mock mercilessly.
But if you listen to AM radio, as some of us who have Creative players instead of iPods and don't want to hassle with the little FM reciever, or who have cars old enough to lack CD players, or who can only listen to so much Ray LaFontaigne kvetcherei on WFUV, or who drive New Jersey highways to work and need traffic reports every three minutes do, you know that the ad for snake oil read on the air by the talking head is a staple of AM radio. And our side isn't above pretending to be endorsers of advertisers' products either. Thom Hartmann has recorded an ad for a New York dentist that also runs on the news radio stations. Ron Kuby reads ads for Pajamagrams, ProFlowers, and Vermont Teddybears. Rachel Maddow shills for face cream allegedly created by a plastic surgeon. And if Rachel is shilling for face cream, you know damn well that she doesn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter and I would guess none of the radio talking heads really controls who advertises. I also know that these days, you have to take whatever ads you can get, which is why Cash4Gold is now advertising on MSNBC and CNN and you can see ads for the Snuggie just about everywhere.
In the interest of at least trying to not talk completely out of my ass, for while the various soap operas of progressive talk radio and its Children of the Future slouching toward Bethlehem to be born are a source of some fascination, and while I've experienced an hour on the air as a Real Guest on a Real Show in a Real Radio Studio (albeit at Sirius studios in New York, where I felt like the host's mom in for a visit), I'm not all that versed in just how this all works. But a quick Google search revealed this press release, announcing, among other things, that Premiere networks is the outfit selling ad time on Sean Hannity's Hours o'Swill. Stanford Gold has been advertising on Hannity's show for years, which means that Citadel Broadcasting has been selling this ad time before now, and I know from the days before the late and still-lamented Morning Sedition, when I used to listen to (yes, really) Ron Kuby and Curtis Sliwa in the mornings on occasion, that when Sliwa read ads for Chamonix face cream and other preposterous products, the guy reading the copy is doing just that.
I realize that it's highly entertaining to blast Hannity for his "association" with Stanford, since he is arguably one of the ten dumbest fucking people on the planet. And his his false piety would indicate that he certainly ought to at least own up to the fact that he just reads what his bosses tell him. The problem is that if guys like Hannity and Limbaugh admit that they are just answering to their corporate masters, they lose a certain amount of Brave Cowboy Wingnut street cred. But still, I think we tubthump this to death at our peril. Because Hannity still has a voice in the public discourse that's ill-informed and destructive, and it's far more important to focus on what he says on his own than what he reads from a piece of ad copy.
I mean, we're talking about a guy who when he has nothing to rebut someone who appears on his show well-prepared, resorts to calling him a fool and an idiot. We're talking about a guy who's spending these days on a fainting couch terrified about the Red Dawn of socialism in this country, forgetting about how things like roads and bridges and even the wars he so unquestioningly supports are paid for with collective money. This is Media Matters' 2008 Misinformer of the Year. It isn't as if there isn't enough Hannity spew out there to mock mercilessly.
But if you listen to AM radio, as some of us who have Creative players instead of iPods and don't want to hassle with the little FM reciever, or who have cars old enough to lack CD players, or who can only listen to so much Ray LaFontaigne kvetcherei on WFUV, or who drive New Jersey highways to work and need traffic reports every three minutes do, you know that the ad for snake oil read on the air by the talking head is a staple of AM radio. And our side isn't above pretending to be endorsers of advertisers' products either. Thom Hartmann has recorded an ad for a New York dentist that also runs on the news radio stations. Ron Kuby reads ads for Pajamagrams, ProFlowers, and Vermont Teddybears. Rachel Maddow shills for face cream allegedly created by a plastic surgeon. And if Rachel is shilling for face cream, you know damn well that she doesn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter and I would guess none of the radio talking heads really controls who advertises. I also know that these days, you have to take whatever ads you can get, which is why Cash4Gold is now advertising on MSNBC and CNN and you can see ads for the Snuggie just about everywhere.
In the interest of at least trying to not talk completely out of my ass, for while the various soap operas of progressive talk radio and its Children of the Future slouching toward Bethlehem to be born are a source of some fascination, and while I've experienced an hour on the air as a Real Guest on a Real Show in a Real Radio Studio (albeit at Sirius studios in New York, where I felt like the host's mom in for a visit), I'm not all that versed in just how this all works. But a quick Google search revealed this press release, announcing, among other things, that Premiere networks is the outfit selling ad time on Sean Hannity's Hours o'Swill. Stanford Gold has been advertising on Hannity's show for years, which means that Citadel Broadcasting has been selling this ad time before now, and I know from the days before the late and still-lamented Morning Sedition, when I used to listen to (yes, really) Ron Kuby and Curtis Sliwa in the mornings on occasion, that when Sliwa read ads for Chamonix face cream and other preposterous products, the guy reading the copy is doing just that.
I realize that it's highly entertaining to blast Hannity for his "association" with Stanford, since he is arguably one of the ten dumbest fucking people on the planet. And his his false piety would indicate that he certainly ought to at least own up to the fact that he just reads what his bosses tell him. The problem is that if guys like Hannity and Limbaugh admit that they are just answering to their corporate masters, they lose a certain amount of Brave Cowboy Wingnut street cred. But still, I think we tubthump this to death at our peril. Because Hannity still has a voice in the public discourse that's ill-informed and destructive, and it's far more important to focus on what he says on his own than what he reads from a piece of ad copy.
Labels: Sean Hannity, talk radio
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Well, that didn't take long
As the indispensable Liberal Talk Radio blog (which you should read instead of that wingnut Maloney if you are interested in such things; after all, how can you trust someone who defends a man who wants the economy to collapse because he thinks that will make people vote Republican?) is reporting, Sheldon and Anita Drobny's second experiment in progressive talk radio, NovaM, is no more. And if you go to the network's web site, you'll see that already there's a new banner for "On Second Thought: Talk Radio for Independent Minds" and a message from "Chief Technical Officer" Ben Burch, which makes him sound a bit like one of the guys in red shirts from Star Trek.
From what I can gather, after searching through various and sundry screeds (it seems there are a lot of people who don't like this guy), Ben Burch runs the White Rose Society, which archives progressive radio shows and he seems to have had some kind of volunteer connection to NovaM. What this means for subscribers, I have no idea, but I hope they aren't planning to automatically renew memberships until we know exactly what the product is going to be.
The full update and straight poop about the Randi Rhodes/NovaM situation is here.
UPDATE: Well, it looks like Mike Newcomb, who started out as CEO of NovaM and apparently left after a falling out with the Drobnys, has come back to take over the scraps. The entire lineup now consists of Newcomb, Nancy Skinner, who was subbing for Randi Rhodes, and Mike Malloy. So unless they were to do something like bring Maron and Seder into the fold, means I won't be renewing my subscription.
At one time I would have been begging for an upstart broadcasting outfit to hire these two guys, but they seem to be doing fine right where they are. Sam is in a fight-to-the-death battle with Cenk Uygur, now also "banished" to the Web, lobbying for the 10 PM MSNBC slot (and I can think of worse things than for the two of them to work together, with Maron as roving correspondent), but Break Room Live is starting to get its sea legs, and is even getting some press attention:
Here's Maron flying solo in yesterday's show. He's GOOD at this. It isn't every day you see cogent political commentary about Afghanistan coming from a guy who looks like the homeless man on the subway distributing 9/11 truth tracts.
Webcasting allows people like Maron (and I would guess someday, Randi Rhodes), who have this peculiar kind of genius, to have an outlet that doesn't involve trying to satisfy guys in suits who have to worry about whether the SelectQuote guys are going to continue feeding Dan Tullis and Joel Clark to us.
The problem with Web-based broadcasting, however, is that it isn't Right There yet. If I want to watch or listen to a radio broadcast or video, I have to turn on the PC, launch the browser, and navigate to the site. If I'm on our desktop PC, I'm confined to our home office. If I want satellite radio, I have to buy a receiver, pay a subscription fee, and if I want to listen in the house, it's highly likely that I'll need an antenna, which takes us back to the days of analog TV. Terrestrial radio, however, is Right There. And until Web radio is Right There, it's always going to be the Designated Family Shithead of radio, despite the ads for Select Quote, and listening to Thom Hartmann shill for some dentist, and Rachel Maddow selling face cream, and various penis enlargers and anti-anxiety tape courses, and the rest of the snake oil that does its marketing on AM radio.
However, Melina sent me this post by Darren Murph at Engadget, pointing out that $7.2 billion in the stimulus package is dedicated to expanding broadband internet access, with the FCC being instructed to create a national broadband plan to ensure that everyone in the U.S. has broadband access. The question about this, however, is how this access is going to be delivered. Of course what I would like to see is a the economies of scale that would come with ubiquitous, taxpayer-financed wireless access, but somehow I don't think the telecom and cable companies are going to allow Congress to go along with that idea, and as we know, money talks and we as citizens don't. But ubiquitous Wifi and internet radios on every kitchen countertop would certainly make AM radio, and the limited access that alternative voices have to it, the equivalent of a black-and-white set with rabbit ears after the whole thing goes digital.
From what I can gather, after searching through various and sundry screeds (it seems there are a lot of people who don't like this guy), Ben Burch runs the White Rose Society, which archives progressive radio shows and he seems to have had some kind of volunteer connection to NovaM. What this means for subscribers, I have no idea, but I hope they aren't planning to automatically renew memberships until we know exactly what the product is going to be.
The full update and straight poop about the Randi Rhodes/NovaM situation is here.
UPDATE: Well, it looks like Mike Newcomb, who started out as CEO of NovaM and apparently left after a falling out with the Drobnys, has come back to take over the scraps. The entire lineup now consists of Newcomb, Nancy Skinner, who was subbing for Randi Rhodes, and Mike Malloy. So unless they were to do something like bring Maron and Seder into the fold, means I won't be renewing my subscription.
At one time I would have been begging for an upstart broadcasting outfit to hire these two guys, but they seem to be doing fine right where they are. Sam is in a fight-to-the-death battle with Cenk Uygur, now also "banished" to the Web, lobbying for the 10 PM MSNBC slot (and I can think of worse things than for the two of them to work together, with Maron as roving correspondent), but Break Room Live is starting to get its sea legs, and is even getting some press attention:
Fairly Aggressive Jews
Radio’s next great duo isn’t on the radio at all
[snip]
Along with Maron and Seder, the film’s cast reads like a who’s who of alternative comedy, including Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo and Jon Benjamin. Like most of Seder’s forays into the entertainment industry, however, the movie’s destiny was ill-fated.The words, “This film was entirely written and shot by June of 2001” grace the back—a sad but necessary disclaimer. Three months later, few would be jumping at the chance to distribute a comedy that opened on its protagonist aiming a rocket launcher at a New York skyscraper.
Both men also did time in Air America’s radio studio during the station’s heyday. Maron co-hosted Morning Sedition with radio vet Mark Riley. Seder, meanwhile, did The Majority Report with Garofalo. After a fair deal of shifting, Seder and Maron ultimately left the station. And now, five years after first helping the station get off the ground, both men have returned to Air America—or Air America’s kitchen.
[snip]
After introductory statements, which find Maron declaring his hate—and then love—for Seder (“let’s not rebound too far to the other side,” retorts Seder), things take a turn for the serious.The interplay between the somber and the comedic is another balancing act in the hour-long show. For a new program, however, Break Room Live has done a good job maintaining stasis. “A lot of people are active and a lot of people are progressive, but a lot of people don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Maron explains to me after the show. “And I think our dynamic speaks to that.”
Here's Maron flying solo in yesterday's show. He's GOOD at this. It isn't every day you see cogent political commentary about Afghanistan coming from a guy who looks like the homeless man on the subway distributing 9/11 truth tracts.
Webcasting allows people like Maron (and I would guess someday, Randi Rhodes), who have this peculiar kind of genius, to have an outlet that doesn't involve trying to satisfy guys in suits who have to worry about whether the SelectQuote guys are going to continue feeding Dan Tullis and Joel Clark to us.
The problem with Web-based broadcasting, however, is that it isn't Right There yet. If I want to watch or listen to a radio broadcast or video, I have to turn on the PC, launch the browser, and navigate to the site. If I'm on our desktop PC, I'm confined to our home office. If I want satellite radio, I have to buy a receiver, pay a subscription fee, and if I want to listen in the house, it's highly likely that I'll need an antenna, which takes us back to the days of analog TV. Terrestrial radio, however, is Right There. And until Web radio is Right There, it's always going to be the Designated Family Shithead of radio, despite the ads for Select Quote, and listening to Thom Hartmann shill for some dentist, and Rachel Maddow selling face cream, and various penis enlargers and anti-anxiety tape courses, and the rest of the snake oil that does its marketing on AM radio.
However, Melina sent me this post by Darren Murph at Engadget, pointing out that $7.2 billion in the stimulus package is dedicated to expanding broadband internet access, with the FCC being instructed to create a national broadband plan to ensure that everyone in the U.S. has broadband access. The question about this, however, is how this access is going to be delivered. Of course what I would like to see is a the economies of scale that would come with ubiquitous, taxpayer-financed wireless access, but somehow I don't think the telecom and cable companies are going to allow Congress to go along with that idea, and as we know, money talks and we as citizens don't. But ubiquitous Wifi and internet radios on every kitchen countertop would certainly make AM radio, and the limited access that alternative voices have to it, the equivalent of a black-and-white set with rabbit ears after the whole thing goes digital.
Labels: Marc Maron, Mike Malloy, now with slightly less FUBAR, Randi Rhodes, Sam Seder, talk radio
Monday, February 16, 2009
Why are the people who run progressive talk radio such nimrods?
There are few people who have been bigger supporters of progressive talk radio than I am, and few blogs that have been more supportive than this one. Here at Casa la Brilliant, we started listening to Air America Radio from the very first day. Mr. Brilliant tuned in at noon on March 31, 2004, and we both started in with Morning Sedition the very next day. The trials and tribulations of Air America are now legendary, from the petty and preposterous Danny Goldberg first cancelling Unfiltered, which featured the creator of The Daily Show and some lesbian who'd never amount to anything named, uh, RACHEL MADDOW; and then Morning Sedition. The latter show will someday be listened to by radio cultists the way Jean Shepherd and Bob & Ray are today. I don't think Air America ever got its bearings back after that, as it has spent the last three years futzing around, first losing Al Franken to the then-unknown purgatory of running for Senate in Minnesota, screwing over the talented and loyal Sam Seder seventeen ways to Sunday, barely noticing as Rachel Maddow began her tiptoe out the door towards the greener pastures of MSNBC, and finally letting the one person who started out with actual radio experience walk over a contract dispute, deciding that William Kunstler's old protégè was somehow an improvement over the maddening, moody, but passionate and always prepared Randi Rhodes.
I'm not sure what's been going on over at NovaM the last few weeks, but one day I was downloading Randi's podcast and the next day she was gone. There's been much speculation as to exactly what happened, but it is now clear that Sheldon & Anita Drobny, co-founders of AAR who were forced out early on, and Randi Rhodes, have parted ways. And still none of Randi's listeners knows what happened. And the Drobnys and Rhodes are locked in a battle of "we said...she said."
I'm not one of the Randi worshippers that hang out on her messageboard and call her show and call her goddess, though I found that in the months since returning to Florida and syndicating through NovaM, she had returned to the form I used to listen to back in the days when my old job hadn't blocked streaming audio and I would listen to Mike Malloy on the now-defunct ieAmerica and Neil Rogers and Randi Rhodes over internet streams. Randi was tough, funny, and while not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, always ferociously prepared. And apparently even more self-destructive than Marc Maron, who has managed to get himself fired from Air America twice and is only back in the fold now due to the inescapable reality of his own fiercely loyal fan base -- a fan base for which he has nothing but contempt, as this is a man who does not want to be part of any club that would have him as a member. But at least for the time being, until the suits at Air America decide that some lightweight, droning sleep-inducer needs to be paid instead, they've decided to run with the experiment that is Break Room Live, or as I wish it were called, Two Live Jews.
But back on the radio tubes, all is still crappy in the land of progressive radio. I had taken a Founders Club membership with NovaM after Randi landed there for the sole purpose of downloading her podcasts, since Mike Malloy has become unlistenable now that his show consists entirely of ranting about Israel as if nothing else in the world was going on. NovaM has alienated the only property they had in wide release, while Air America is, I suspect, more reliant than ever on the eyeballs that Marc Maron and Sam Seder are bringing to the company's Web site.
So what is the problem with progressive talk radio?
I'm not sure what's been going on over at NovaM the last few weeks, but one day I was downloading Randi's podcast and the next day she was gone. There's been much speculation as to exactly what happened, but it is now clear that Sheldon & Anita Drobny, co-founders of AAR who were forced out early on, and Randi Rhodes, have parted ways. And still none of Randi's listeners knows what happened. And the Drobnys and Rhodes are locked in a battle of "we said...she said."
I'm not one of the Randi worshippers that hang out on her messageboard and call her show and call her goddess, though I found that in the months since returning to Florida and syndicating through NovaM, she had returned to the form I used to listen to back in the days when my old job hadn't blocked streaming audio and I would listen to Mike Malloy on the now-defunct ieAmerica and Neil Rogers and Randi Rhodes over internet streams. Randi was tough, funny, and while not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, always ferociously prepared. And apparently even more self-destructive than Marc Maron, who has managed to get himself fired from Air America twice and is only back in the fold now due to the inescapable reality of his own fiercely loyal fan base -- a fan base for which he has nothing but contempt, as this is a man who does not want to be part of any club that would have him as a member. But at least for the time being, until the suits at Air America decide that some lightweight, droning sleep-inducer needs to be paid instead, they've decided to run with the experiment that is Break Room Live, or as I wish it were called, Two Live Jews.
But back on the radio tubes, all is still crappy in the land of progressive radio. I had taken a Founders Club membership with NovaM after Randi landed there for the sole purpose of downloading her podcasts, since Mike Malloy has become unlistenable now that his show consists entirely of ranting about Israel as if nothing else in the world was going on. NovaM has alienated the only property they had in wide release, while Air America is, I suspect, more reliant than ever on the eyeballs that Marc Maron and Sam Seder are bringing to the company's Web site.
So what is the problem with progressive talk radio?
Labels: Al Franken, Marc Maron, Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, Sam Seder, talk radio
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Who says Jews can't have a cease-fire?
Maybe they can't have one in Israel, but our favorite Jews, after some certainly staged sniping at each other before the holidays, have returned to their groundbreaking webcast with a brandy new show name and a brandy new web site.
Usually Sam Seder and Marc Maron are Melina's beat, but since she is taking care of some family stuff this evening, I'll sit in and fill you in on at least the outside story, if not the inside story.
I knew that "Maron v. Seder" was going to have to be a working title. For one thing, Sam and Marc are practically doppelgangers of each other, with Sam the "good son" who got married, had a child, and despite his warped sense of humor and priceless righteous outrage, no doubt still gives his parents some naches. Marc is clearly the Designated Family Shithead, the repository of all the family neurosis and pain, who has somehow managed to turn what makes most of us just depressed and anxious on a regular basis into a career as one of the smartest, most incisive standup comics in the business.
It's no secret that we here at B@B were devotés of the late and still lamented Morning Sedition. But by some miracle, the current crop of suits at Air America seem to have realized that no matter how much advertising for John Cummuta's get rich quick schemes, or fake penis enlargement products, or annoying life insurance quote ads you sell, you simply cannot replace the kind of ferociously loyal (and patient) listener/fan base these two guys have.
In its first few months Maron v. Seder has been the kind of experimental endeavor we haven't seen since Marshal Efron nearly put Banquet out of the frozen cream pie business in 1971 on The Great American Dream Machine. But after some truly weird efforts in the Air America break room last month involving people like Mark Green, who still hangs around despite no longer being such a big macher in the company, some shadowy visionary at Air America Media, who may very well have been Sam himself, may have stumbled upon a formula that could catapult these Two Live Jews into the kind of cult following that has many of us still listening to old Morning Sedition podcasts from 2005.
The show is now called "Break Room Live with Maron and Seder", which is the next evolution towards an identity which if we are extraordinarily lucky, will recapture the kind of lunatic intelligence which brought us interviews with Mick Ware before he went nuts, Middle East expert Borzou Daragahi, who has managed to keep his sanity, and guest hosting by pro wrestler Mick Foley, who was smarter than anyone ever thought; not to mention Lawton Smalls, the Milfingtons, Sammy the Stem Cell, and the Presidential Palm Pilot -- all of which are immortalized for eternal listening here.
The show's web site describes this new identity as follows:
Of course when it comes to Air America, as well as these guys, you never know what the truth is. But the story we're told about how all this happened is basically this:
So, if you're home during the day, or if you work for a company that doesn't block streaming video, check it out, 3:000 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, at Break Room Live.
And no, the fact that they put us on the blogroll, right at the top of the second column, with higher placement than even the Big Blue Smurf himself, has NOTHING whatsoever to do with this endorsement.
Usually Sam Seder and Marc Maron are Melina's beat, but since she is taking care of some family stuff this evening, I'll sit in and fill you in on at least the outside story, if not the inside story.
I knew that "Maron v. Seder" was going to have to be a working title. For one thing, Sam and Marc are practically doppelgangers of each other, with Sam the "good son" who got married, had a child, and despite his warped sense of humor and priceless righteous outrage, no doubt still gives his parents some naches. Marc is clearly the Designated Family Shithead, the repository of all the family neurosis and pain, who has somehow managed to turn what makes most of us just depressed and anxious on a regular basis into a career as one of the smartest, most incisive standup comics in the business.
It's no secret that we here at B@B were devotés of the late and still lamented Morning Sedition. But by some miracle, the current crop of suits at Air America seem to have realized that no matter how much advertising for John Cummuta's get rich quick schemes, or fake penis enlargement products, or annoying life insurance quote ads you sell, you simply cannot replace the kind of ferociously loyal (and patient) listener/fan base these two guys have.
In its first few months Maron v. Seder has been the kind of experimental endeavor we haven't seen since Marshal Efron nearly put Banquet out of the frozen cream pie business in 1971 on The Great American Dream Machine. But after some truly weird efforts in the Air America break room last month involving people like Mark Green, who still hangs around despite no longer being such a big macher in the company, some shadowy visionary at Air America Media, who may very well have been Sam himself, may have stumbled upon a formula that could catapult these Two Live Jews into the kind of cult following that has many of us still listening to old Morning Sedition podcasts from 2005.
The show is now called "Break Room Live with Maron and Seder", which is the next evolution towards an identity which if we are extraordinarily lucky, will recapture the kind of lunatic intelligence which brought us interviews with Mick Ware before he went nuts, Middle East expert Borzou Daragahi, who has managed to keep his sanity, and guest hosting by pro wrestler Mick Foley, who was smarter than anyone ever thought; not to mention Lawton Smalls, the Milfingtons, Sammy the Stem Cell, and the Presidential Palm Pilot -- all of which are immortalized for eternal listening here.
The show's web site describes this new identity as follows:
BREAK ROOM LIVE is the first of its kind; a daily, live online political talk and comedy show. At 3pm Eastern every weekday, Marc Maron and Sam Seder take a seat in the Air America break room to discuss the hot topics of the day, with live guests, comedy sketches, and recurring segments, all streaming live at BreakRoomLive.com. In addition to the daily live broadcast, visitors will be able to view the show on demand, subscribe to vodcasts and podcasts of the show, and chat live, 24/7, with fellow fans and the hosts.
BreakRoomLive.com will also be home to exclusive on-demand video content from Marc and Sam. Along with a fully interactive blog, Marc and Sam will provide BreakRoomLive.com with interviews, political discussions, and irreverent comedy that can’t be seen anywhere else.
“Based upon the fact that no one has developed a model for what we’re doing, we’re confident that people will consider this a success,” said Sam Seder. “I see our show as PornTube meets MSNBC meets Twitter meets PopFly meets Yodio meets SplashCast meets Zillow meets TradeSports meets Meets.com.”
Marc Maron added, “I’m excited that Sam and I will be able to take risks in a new format, and whether we succeed or fail, it will be available online forever.”
Marc and Sam have known each other for 20 years. They’re not quite friends but they’re able to work together. For the right price.
Of course when it comes to Air America, as well as these guys, you never know what the truth is. But the story we're told about how all this happened is basically this:
So, if you're home during the day, or if you work for a company that doesn't block streaming video, check it out, 3:000 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, at Break Room Live.
And no, the fact that they put us on the blogroll, right at the top of the second column, with higher placement than even the Big Blue Smurf himself, has NOTHING whatsoever to do with this endorsement.
Labels: comedy, Marc Maron, Sam Seder, talk radio
Monday, August 11, 2008
I'm no Marc Maron, but I'll do in a pinch
Does this mean I'm a real blogger now?
I'm keeping this post at the top to remind you to all tune in to Sirius Indie Talk (channel 110) from 5:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern Time today, Monday, August 11, when I will be a featured guest on "The Blog Bunker."
I have no idea yet what topics are being covered, so I consider it to be an adventure.
If you have Sirius, please tune in, and if you can record it somehow and get me a copy of the show, that's even better. If you don't subscribe, you can get a free 3-day pass here.
I'm keeping this post at the top to remind you to all tune in to Sirius Indie Talk (channel 110) from 5:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern Time today, Monday, August 11, when I will be a featured guest on "The Blog Bunker."
I have no idea yet what topics are being covered, so I consider it to be an adventure.
If you have Sirius, please tune in, and if you can record it somehow and get me a copy of the show, that's even better. If you don't subscribe, you can get a free 3-day pass here.
Labels: bloggers, satellite radio, talk radio
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
This Is Not Over
Not by a long shot.
NBC may have shitcanned Imus from its MSNBC simulcast, but if anyone thinks that's the end of it, guess again. Because there are still the little matters of people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Weiner Savage.
LTR notes:
Imus may be a political non-Euclidian, an equal-opportunity basher, but Limbaugh and Beck and Savage and Coulter are not. And the amount of bile and vitriol spewing out of these people, the wishing people were dead, the advocating of murder, has gone on among the reptilian brains of the right wing for years. Funny how there was no outcry when Rush Limbaugh referred to a then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton as "the family dog." It's one thing to point out the Bush twins drinking themselves into stupors when their peers are off fighting a war, because that's a FACT. Making fun of a thirteen-year-old's looks is just plain cruel, just the way calling a bunch of high-achieving collegiate athletes whores is just plain cruel, just the way saying that an 11-year-old kid who was kidnapped and held captive by a pedophile "liked his circumstances" is just plain cruel -- and crosses any kind of line of decency.
This isn't political discourse, this is whacking a hatchet at people just because you disagree with them. It isn't debating points of view, it's resorting to ad hominem attacks because your side of the fence has decided that this is the way to retain power. And the near-monopoly that the hatemongers who call themselves conservatives have had to spew their bile over the airwaves has contributed to the coarsening of the debate of the future of this country far more than a bunch of hip-hop artists working as cash cows for white guys have.
And don't talk to me about Randi Rhodes. I have my own beef with Randi Rhodes, most of it having to do with her excuses for the ineffectuality of the Democratic Party over the last six years and her propensity to scream at callers who disagree. Randi Rhodes doesn't have an H.R. from Staten Island, the progressive talk radio equivalent of Doris from Rego Park. H.R. is an old guy from Staten Island, a knee-jerk wingnut conservative who called Sam Seder at least once a week, just to argue. The thing is, H.R. is fond of Sam, and I think he respects Sam for standing up for what he believes in, even if H.R. doesn't agree. Randi doesn't have one of those. But I'll give Randi credit for this: She does her homework. She doesn't just pull stuff out of her ass, and the one time she went over the line, she recognized that it was offensive and apologized profusely. And she hasn't done anything like it since -- unlike Imus, unlike Glenn Beck, unlike Rush Limbaugh, unlike Ann Coulter, and the other lizardbrains of the right who spew this kind of thing daily. And those who would crucify Rhodes might recall that when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms told Bill Clinton if he traveled to North Carolina, he'd better have a bodyguard, the Secret Service didn't investigate Jesse Helms.
Imus may very well have done us all a service with this latest stunt. Because certainly Keith Olbermann gave every indication on Countdown tonight that whether anyone else makes the connection between the Imus fracas and what the lizardbrains of the avowed right say, he's made the connection. And I am telling you Keith Olbermann is not going to let this go quietly. And neither am I.
NBC may have shitcanned Imus from its MSNBC simulcast, but if anyone thinks that's the end of it, guess again. Because there are still the little matters of people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Weiner Savage.
LTR notes:
So, should Imus be fired once and for all? Who knows? Often, these scandals disappear after a short time, once another scandal comes around that our alleged media finds something else to pound into the heads of America. But this is just one of many audio nasties blasted out over the airwaves of our great country. There were many more prior to this. For example:
"(Cynthia McKinney) looks like ghetto trash. Get a braider over there ... quick!"
Oh wait, that was Neal Boortz who said that.
Or, "You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray . We miss you, James. Godspeed."
Oops, sorry. That was Rush Limbaugh.
"...Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."
My bad. Limbaugh again.
"Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."
"Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"
"The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."
Yep. Limbaugh again.
"You open the door to them (immigrants), and the next thing you know, they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control."
Threw you all a curveball. That was Michael Savage who said that.
"(If) you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down... (aborting all African-American babies) would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.. but the crime rate would go down"
That was Salem morning guy Bill Bennett.
Oh, and don't get me started on Glen Beck and Ann Coulter. I'm trying to keep this article short.
Imus may be a political non-Euclidian, an equal-opportunity basher, but Limbaugh and Beck and Savage and Coulter are not. And the amount of bile and vitriol spewing out of these people, the wishing people were dead, the advocating of murder, has gone on among the reptilian brains of the right wing for years. Funny how there was no outcry when Rush Limbaugh referred to a then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton as "the family dog." It's one thing to point out the Bush twins drinking themselves into stupors when their peers are off fighting a war, because that's a FACT. Making fun of a thirteen-year-old's looks is just plain cruel, just the way calling a bunch of high-achieving collegiate athletes whores is just plain cruel, just the way saying that an 11-year-old kid who was kidnapped and held captive by a pedophile "liked his circumstances" is just plain cruel -- and crosses any kind of line of decency.
This isn't political discourse, this is whacking a hatchet at people just because you disagree with them. It isn't debating points of view, it's resorting to ad hominem attacks because your side of the fence has decided that this is the way to retain power. And the near-monopoly that the hatemongers who call themselves conservatives have had to spew their bile over the airwaves has contributed to the coarsening of the debate of the future of this country far more than a bunch of hip-hop artists working as cash cows for white guys have.
And don't talk to me about Randi Rhodes. I have my own beef with Randi Rhodes, most of it having to do with her excuses for the ineffectuality of the Democratic Party over the last six years and her propensity to scream at callers who disagree. Randi Rhodes doesn't have an H.R. from Staten Island, the progressive talk radio equivalent of Doris from Rego Park. H.R. is an old guy from Staten Island, a knee-jerk wingnut conservative who called Sam Seder at least once a week, just to argue. The thing is, H.R. is fond of Sam, and I think he respects Sam for standing up for what he believes in, even if H.R. doesn't agree. Randi doesn't have one of those. But I'll give Randi credit for this: She does her homework. She doesn't just pull stuff out of her ass, and the one time she went over the line, she recognized that it was offensive and apologized profusely. And she hasn't done anything like it since -- unlike Imus, unlike Glenn Beck, unlike Rush Limbaugh, unlike Ann Coulter, and the other lizardbrains of the right who spew this kind of thing daily. And those who would crucify Rhodes might recall that when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms told Bill Clinton if he traveled to North Carolina, he'd better have a bodyguard, the Secret Service didn't investigate Jesse Helms.
Imus may very well have done us all a service with this latest stunt. Because certainly Keith Olbermann gave every indication on Countdown tonight that whether anyone else makes the connection between the Imus fracas and what the lizardbrains of the avowed right say, he's made the connection. And I am telling you Keith Olbermann is not going to let this go quietly. And neither am I.
Labels: Don Imus, Glenn Beck, Randi Rhodes, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Is there someting going on with Don Imus??
I kid, of course. This evening I received an e-mail from Scott that referenced his post about the Don Imus Fracas.
I haven't weighed in on all this, mostly because I really don't care about Don Imus. I haven't listened to his show in years and I've thought for a long time that it's shameful the way everyone in the Washington Hackocracy (and that includes government AND punditry) sucks up to him. I think he's misogynistic, racist, and a generally Angry White Old Man, and while I give him credit for his charitable work, work of which one is reminded every time one drives down Summit Avenue in Hackensack past the children's wing of Hackensack University Medical Center that bears his name, that doesn't mean he's not an ass. And frankly, I've been more concerned with the early destruction of Air America Radio under the Green Regime.
I'm as big a free speech advocate as anyone, but the fact that you have a right to free speech doesn't give you a right to be paid millions of dollars and be given a platform for your worst instincts. And it seems to me that guys like Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek were banished to Media Invisibility for comments far less derogatory.
Forget for a minute how ludicrous a sixty-something white guy sounds trying to sound like black rappers. Has this man never heard of the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule? I'm not excusing the kind of disgusting, misogynistic lyrics that one hears in hip-hop culture, but it's unseemly for a man in his seventh decade saying such things about a bunch of nineteen-year-old girls.
It's been appalling to see a bunch of white giys wondering just what the fuss is about calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's". I'd like to see how Imus would react if someone called him a saggy-scrotal pencil-dick. Of course, if it were a member of the Washington Hackocracy that seems to want to liine up and kiss his ring, at least we'd be talking about people playing on the same field, so to speak; two equals in terms of being able to get a message out. But this is a sixty-something white guy using not one but two pejoratives -- one racial, one sexual, to describe a bunch of teenaged girls that he doesn't even know.
If you want to know why this isn't something that black women can and should just "shrug off", don't ask me. Ask Pam, who knows of what she speaks:
Substitute the word "fat" for "nappy-headed" and "pig" for "ho's" and THEN I can relate.
Which of course brings us back to Air America and Lionel, and I have to wonder if Mark Green is now wondering about the "special brand of humor" that Lionel brings to the progressive network and when the other shoe is going to drop. I wonder if that "special brand of humor" is going to be continuing to refer to Rachel Maddow as a "thick necked lesbian" and the next overweight woman in the news as a "fat pig."
Context is everything, and this is hardly the context into which you want to bring a guy with a track record of hateful remarks about women into a progressive radio network.
Grab your popcorn, folks. It's going to be interesting.
I haven't weighed in on all this, mostly because I really don't care about Don Imus. I haven't listened to his show in years and I've thought for a long time that it's shameful the way everyone in the Washington Hackocracy (and that includes government AND punditry) sucks up to him. I think he's misogynistic, racist, and a generally Angry White Old Man, and while I give him credit for his charitable work, work of which one is reminded every time one drives down Summit Avenue in Hackensack past the children's wing of Hackensack University Medical Center that bears his name, that doesn't mean he's not an ass. And frankly, I've been more concerned with the early destruction of Air America Radio under the Green Regime.
I'm as big a free speech advocate as anyone, but the fact that you have a right to free speech doesn't give you a right to be paid millions of dollars and be given a platform for your worst instincts. And it seems to me that guys like Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek were banished to Media Invisibility for comments far less derogatory.
Forget for a minute how ludicrous a sixty-something white guy sounds trying to sound like black rappers. Has this man never heard of the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule? I'm not excusing the kind of disgusting, misogynistic lyrics that one hears in hip-hop culture, but it's unseemly for a man in his seventh decade saying such things about a bunch of nineteen-year-old girls.
It's been appalling to see a bunch of white giys wondering just what the fuss is about calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's". I'd like to see how Imus would react if someone called him a saggy-scrotal pencil-dick. Of course, if it were a member of the Washington Hackocracy that seems to want to liine up and kiss his ring, at least we'd be talking about people playing on the same field, so to speak; two equals in terms of being able to get a message out. But this is a sixty-something white guy using not one but two pejoratives -- one racial, one sexual, to describe a bunch of teenaged girls that he doesn't even know.
If you want to know why this isn't something that black women can and should just "shrug off", don't ask me. Ask Pam, who knows of what she speaks:
This isn’t about School Daze and socio-political commentary; this is about Imus and Co. demeaning those women using a common racist denigration of hair texture — nothing more needs to be telegraphed — kinky hair=bad, ugly, animalistic, straight hair=good, attractive. And to top it off, those nappy-headed gals at Rutgers are therefore ‘hos as well. Nice.
And people wonder why so many black women have a complex about their hair, gooping it up with nasty lye relaxers, frying their scalp with hot combs? The self-loathing is so culturally ingrained, so pathological, and it’s reinforced by the messages like the ones Imus and friends are having a great laugh over. It’s toxic and ignorant. From my post, The politics of hair (again):
I am old enough to experience the “pleasure” of the thermal hot comb — you rested it over the gas flame of the stove to heat it up. Then the grease was carefully applied to your hair and that comb sizzled through the kinks till it was bone straight, hissing as you prayed the comb didn’t touch your scalp — inevitably you got scalp burns because the “stylist” f*cked up. [By the way, the “stylist” for most folks was usually a relative, but in my case, everyone in my family had straight hair, so my mom had to take me to a salon till she figured out what to do.]
Once the chemical relaxer came into vogue it was the same problem with a different twist, it became a watch-the-clock endeavor to see how long you could leave the vile-smelling chemicals on to achieve maximum straightness before your scalp started to peel, burn and get open sores. Anything for that damn straight hair.
Substitute the word "fat" for "nappy-headed" and "pig" for "ho's" and THEN I can relate.
Which of course brings us back to Air America and Lionel, and I have to wonder if Mark Green is now wondering about the "special brand of humor" that Lionel brings to the progressive network and when the other shoe is going to drop. I wonder if that "special brand of humor" is going to be continuing to refer to Rachel Maddow as a "thick necked lesbian" and the next overweight woman in the news as a "fat pig."
Context is everything, and this is hardly the context into which you want to bring a guy with a track record of hateful remarks about women into a progressive radio network.
Grab your popcorn, folks. It's going to be interesting.
Labels: Air America, Don Imus, talk radio
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