Non-Factor

Non-Factor - You know your talk show is a disaster when even the choir you're supposed to be preaching to is unimpressed.

Jason Zengerle of the New Republic - certainly a back-row tenor in the liberal media choir - certainly isn't impressed:

It probably doesn't bode well for a purportedly enjoyable radio show when its most entertaining segment is one featuring Al Gore.

It gets worse.

The other two hours and fifty-five minutes consisted of a lot of unenlightening back and forth about current events between Franken and his sidekick, Minnesota Public Radio veteran Katherine Lanpher; a long and desultory interview with 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey; and an initially funny but, after continuous flogging over the course of three hours, eventually tiresome skit about locking Ann Coulter in the radio network's green room. Throw in a mix of phone calls, some jabs at Bill O'Reilly, and a taped interview with an elderly Minnesota couple who are the parents of Franken's best friend and you have "The O'Franken Factor."

If this doesn't sound like great radio, that's because it isn't. Part of the problem with Franken's show is simply that he's sorely lacking in radio experience. Although Air America's founders proclaim their admiration for Rush Limbaugh's broadcasting skills, if not his politics, in Franken they have turned their signature show over to a broadcasting novice. (Limbaugh had been on the radio for close to two decades before he went national with his political talk show.)

I think I see part of the problem:

And, while Air America has clearly tried to offset Franken's inexperience with the radio veteran Lanpher, at times her mastery of the medium merely serves to highlight Franken's own unfamiliarity with it--like when she told him to "zip it."

There you go. When Kacklin' Katherine Lanpher is your flagship performer...

Seriously - as I noted in my original piece on FrankenNet, a third of "Air America's" air talent came from public radio. That's one of the reasons the show sounds so incongruous to Americans who are used to, well, talk radio. Commercial talk radio involves a host (or two, or in the case of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, nine) and maybe a producer trolling the newspapers and internet for stories and topics they think will get the audience riled up.

Public radio - at least as it's done at MPR and NPR - is different; it acts like it wants to be TV, or maybe the glory years of radio; staffs of producers and writers back up the air talent. Back when I used to listen to the wretched Juan Williams on NPR's mid-day talk show, I would sit stunned as he floundered through the opening monologues, stumbling over words and then saying them again in that time-proven manner that everyone that ever worked at a small-town radio station knows; "He's reading this", word for word, off a script. The sort of monologue that any commercial-market talk show host would have ad-libbed off of a couple of scribbled notes - and done better.

Air America - or, let's be fair, the O'Franken Factor - isn't much different. It feels about as spontaneous as a corporate mission statement.

Dreadful stuff.

Now - do you remember the way the mainstream media crowed when Rush Limbaugh's syndicated TV show went off the air? Or Laura Schlesinger's fortunes tottered?

How do you suppose this disaster-in-the-making is going to play in the major media?

Posted by Mitch at April 8, 2004 07:54 AM