It was a new slot to be opened up on MSNBC at 10p (Eastern) after Rachel. Everyone wanted it: Sam Seder, Young Turks like Cenk Uygur, old turks like Larry Lovebreath, "Choch" Mañana, and Bryan Styble.
Instead, MSNBC demoted the humorless 'droid, David Schuster whose 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was at 6p, and hired Ed Schultz, (KTPK m-f, 12-3p) to anchor the hour now to be called The Ed Show, which starts Monday.
Conservative talkers are starving for access and decent interviews and cleave unto small potatoes skirmishes that get their names onto such sites as Drudge and Huffington Post.
(photo: Look who's in the front row now- Helen Thomas and Ed Schultz)
It's a new political universe with the Obama presidency, and conservatives' producers are getting plenty of no's and phone calls not returned by those in power.
Continue reading "Right-wing media takes a back seat- if they get to sit at all... " »
Tom Taylor of RadioInfo writes in his annual list, "Who had a good year in 2008?"
“Progressive/liberal talk show hosts”, says longtime radio pro and Lesley University prof Donna Halper, in Boston. She says “it’s true the progressive and liberal talk...
(photo: Stephanie Miller, KPTK m-f, 6-9a)
Barack Obama is our candidate, now, and we've been thinking about whether right-wing talk radio and Fox News will help Olde John in 2008, as much as it did George W. Bush in 2004.
We don't think so.
While talk radio can be influential, things have changed radically since those dark days that re-elected George Bush and brought such shame and catastrophe down upon the land.
There's more liberal talk radio
Air America did not exist in 2004; and Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Stephanie Miller, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Sam Seder, Marc Maron, Mike Malloy, et al. were but local hosts or unknowns. While they're not close to being Big Pants, Hannity or Don Imus, they're competition on the dial to the conservatives, and even within a shrinking industry, progressive radio is growing one talker at a time. We now have a crop of bright, name-recognizable media progressives where there never were before. A good thing.
There's a general downturn in radio, and in talk radio in
particular
Part of this can be directly attributed to the stink of Bush, the failings of a conservative majority and
that the yapping poodles of right-wing media have been so wrong about so much. They've stuck to a political explanation of global warming, powdered Iraq War soft drinks, voodoo fiscal matters, tax cuts for the rich, immigration fear-mongering, Bush's no-policy energy policy; American exceptionalist go-it-alone foreign policy -- they even still claim Bush is competent.The wild-eyed partisan recitations of such GOP apparatchiks as Hannity have left him and his cohort with about the same credibility as the president's... and Arbitron reflects it. As the Democrats come together after the hard primaries, Rush Limbaugh's supposedly monkeywrenching "Operation Chaos" turned out to be as it was intended: a way for Big Pants to get his name in the papers and to be able to piss in a tent from which he's usually excluded.
You'd-a thunk he'd called him a Moslem or something. Talk radio's Ed Shultz (KPTK m-f,12-3p) called Presidential candidate John "Bomb-bomb" McCain a "warmonger" at a North Dakota Democratic rally overnight.
And boyo, what a stink's been raised in the McCain-sucking legacy press! Even the New York Times had it on the front page this morning.
Since we've been calling the dangerous old militarist the same thing we quick right-clicked off The Times to the Answers.com dictionary to see if the meaning of the word had been changed on us since we learned the word in high school.
Nope: a warmonger is still "One who advocates or attempts to stir up war."
McCain's campaign is upset, troubled, disappointed, etc. -- imagine... a radio talk host saying such a thing! Denying McCain was having a liver spot transplant, they issued a statement:
"Barack Obama's willingness to stand-down after a surrogate of his campaign callously called John McCain a 'warmonger' demonstrates an incredible comfort with the old-style politics he claims to reject."
"I am not a warmonger!" McCain was heard to mutter as his caregiver trimmed his toenails.
Continue reading "Ed Shultz: "McCain is a warmonger." So what else is new? " »
It's that time of year when all heads turn toward The Oscars™ to the Heavy Hundred awards where Talkers Magazine, the self-proclaimed "Bible of Talk Radio and the New Talk Media," ranks the "100 most important hosts" every year.
As usual we're underwhelmed.
It's a quirky list; made to promote the magazine's influence in the industry; and to sell syndicators those gnarly full page ads to plump up the fragile egos of those perpetually needy talk hosts. It's dominated by conservatives, naturally.
What are the criteria? You've gotta be working plus, as the august editors always say, their "painstaking compilation" is based on courage, effort, impact, longevity potential, ratings, recognition, revenue, service, talent and uniqueness.
In other words, they pull it out of their ass.
That's not what we meant in our Thursday headline, 
"Seattle arbitron ratings: liberal talk sucks, so does KVI- has everybody gone satellite?, but that's the way a one Seattle radio suit took it.
We'd been plaguing him in that gently annoying way we have, about building a liberal talk station with local talkers. Like the conservatives get to have.
He answered: "Your headline yesterday pretty much answered that question you posed last week!"
Continue reading "Talkritique: is liberal talk radio failing because it sucks? " »
The Spring '07 Arbitron ratings book in the vital 25-54 demo for the Seattle market are in. And yikes!
~ Liberal talk KPTK is tanking across the board- down 66% overall.
Stephanie Miller (6-9a) lost 40%; Thom Hartmann (9a-12p) plunged 63%; Ed Shultz is in the bucket 68%; our Rachel Maddow is down 50%, and Randy Rhodes lost 33% of her audience. The only host who got over 1% of the audience was Mike Malloy- and even he dove 64%. Has everyone taken to reading blogs?
We've of a sudden become aware that the issue of the impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney is ripening.
"Impeachment...the word feared and loathed by every sitting president is back," says Bill Moyers. It's in the air and on your computer screen, a growing clamor aimed at both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney."
As the cursed war grinds ever bloodier; and as The Decider digs in his heels, his executive intransigence, and aura of ineptitude makes the environment more fertile every day for his and Dick Cheney's removal.
And the ground is shifting; we've felt this before.
A wild, SRO crowd packed the Town Hall tonight, to hear the top of KPTK's line-up, Big Ed Schultz, Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, Mike Malloy, and the Young Turks: Ben Mankiewicz, and Cenk Uygur.
(We wangled our way into the meet & greet before the show, and stood around drinking Pluto water, and sucking up the hummus with KPTK clients and the CBS suits as the talk stars ogled us, and picked who'd be singled out to get lucky after the show. Stephanie looked at us like we were a piece of meat- we sucked in our muscles and tried looking unperturbed...).
(Photo: Stephanie Miller reacts to the very idea of our penis.)
Change is good
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