"Put a fork in him," a poster's subject line reads in Radio Info...
As rookie Ron Reagan is rising up on Air America, (KPTK m-f,3-6p) hi older step-brother Michael Reagan, a veteran radio broadcaster is down for the count.
Michael Edward Reagan, 63, former speedboat racer, and adopted son of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, is one of the weakest talents in right-wing radio. He's milked his famous father's name shamelessly to no avail -- his radio career has been on a descending glide path for years.
This month he was dropped from the third rate right-wing network he was on and was picked up by a fourth-rate one. He was dropped to make room for Roger Hedgecock, the disgraced former mayor of San Diego cum radio talk host.
We've always kept track of Mike Reagan because he got his start in Seattle in the early '90's at KVI, in the seminal days of talk radio. Mike Siegel, then at the top of the local Seattle talk-heap pile, took the rookie Reagan under his wing, and got him some practice shifts, as KVI was just beginning to roll. it was kind of personal for those of us who listened to right-wing radio being born in Seattle.
(Even though they were relatively early in the talk radio heyday, Siegel and Reagan were soon swamped by a tsunami of larger talents (beginning with Rush Limbaugh) and washed out to sea, so to speak).
Sensational eliminationist talk has given Michael Reagan most of the high points in his professional life in recent years.
In 2008, Reagan got some headlines in blogs like BlatherWatch, and a Worst Person out of Olbermann for announcing he'd like to stick a grenade up the butts of Palestinian babies named after Hezbollah by their mothers, and "I'd light it."
In 2008, after deluded Truthers sent letters to troops stationed in Iraq claiming that 9/11 was perpetrated by the U.S. government. Reagan said,"We ought to find the people who are doing this, take them out and shoot them. Really. You take them out, they are traitors to this country, and shoot them.... I'll pay for the bullets."
In 2005, he told a listener, "Howard Dean should be arrested for treason and either hung or put in a hole until the war's over."We've asked over the years: What does it take -- short of child molesting -- to finish a career in talk radio?
Reagan tried everything but settled on mediocrity, and ungrammatical, dumbed-down, right-wing rhetoric with a target audience of those with his own lack of sensibilities.
You'd think such a formula would work -- and it did for a while.
But he was never able to grow a major audience despite the built-in advantage of his name which he whores continuously --we've counted the times he said "my father" in one hour -- it averages over 30.
(Ron Reagan speaks only about his father, the president in the most intellectual terms; Michael whines about how neglected he was by Ronald and Nancy on air. Listen to him complain about never getting any parental mail at summer camp here, it's pathetic).
In 2004, The Republican National convention committee asked him to give the countering speech to half-brother Ron 's pro-stem cell research one at the D's Convention.
After all that, plus lots of face time on Fox News, and CNN you'd think he might have a better than average chance, but it hasn't helped -- his new network is the tiny, rabid Christianist/right-wing American Family Radio network, of Tupelo, Mississippi.
The network has few stations in major markets, and no major stations anywhere.
AFR is the media "arm" of far-right goofball and eliminationist Christian Donald Wildmon's American
Family Association (AFA) a network of about 165 radio stations. that depend on evangelists and vitamin salesmen who pay for their own shows.
Mike Reagan will be by far the biggest name on their little Christian stations scattered mostly in the South, and the Midwest. God and Donald wildmon only know what kind of financial arrangement Reagan's got: he might have to sell some vacation packages to make ends meet.
(Catch AFR's Today’s Issues show broadcasting live Jan. 30, 10a from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky)
Reagan hasn't been heard in the Seattle market for several years: for that we are grateful although his show was sometimes good for comic relief. Mike might do well to follow the suggestion of a few commenter on his unlively web forum:
I think that it would be really great to have a lively discussion/debate about modern techniques that could be employed in the harvesting of redwood trees. Compare and contrast this with the planting and harvesting of corn in Nebraska.
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