Capturing The Base

Captain Ed tips us off to a hilarious drubbing of Air America by LATimes media crit David Shaw.

Shaw is, as you read in the article, an unabashed liberal who wants very much to see Air America on the air - preferably, one supposes, as a result of market rather than judicial action .

He's not especially hopeful.

He opens with his real feelings about conservative talk radio:

OK. That's about what I expected — liberal paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy to match the conservative paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their ilk have used to turn talk radio into a powerful forum that liberals now blame for every social and political malady this side of tooth decay.

Not a whole lot to the right of Brian "Howler Monkey" Lambert, really.

And yet...:

Unfortunately, I greatly overestimated Air America's potential. Granted, Air America is only a few weeks old — and at midweek, it was off the air, at least temporarily, in L.A. and Chicago, amid a dispute with the owner of the stations in those cities over payment for air time. But paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy would be a big improvement on what Air America has been broadcasting.

Shaw notes the smug, collective-y mentality of the show - almost all of which involve casts of comedians and NPR rejects jammed into studios, in on the same jokes.

Which aren't that good to begin with:

The Air America hosts seemed equally shortsighted in their preoccupation with sex, another subject not designed to win over moderates. Shortly after opening his show, Maron, one of three hosts who felt compelled to mention his sex life, started talking about having sex with his "much younger" wife and thinking, "Wow, I'm really good at this" — only to suddenly feel very old when she said, "Don't kill yourself."

Maron also ticked off a mock list of chores the president would do that day — including ordering "an extra inch" for his penis.

Putting someone like a Marc Maron (or Lizzzzzzzz Winstead) in as host of a show is part of a larger, grotesque miscalculation, indicative of the sort of condescenscion this effort represents. The talk radio audience - the conservative one - comes to talk radio for...what? Entertainment? Sure - but that's a secondary issue. The conservatives in the audience are used to the major media condescending to them, talking down to them...

...something Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt don't do, and Limbaugh does only in a very theatrical sense.

On the other hand, even the liberal Shaw notices the smug, condescending undercurrent on the network:

All Maron's comments drew hoots of supportive laughter from co-hosts Sue Ellicott and Mark Riley. In fact, I think what ultimately annoyed — and disappointed me — the most about Air America was all the false, aren't-we-funny, aren't-we-smart laughter that virtually all the hosts gave each other. Four of Air America's six weekday programs have co-hosts — and two have three co-hosts apiece, liberal collectives that stand in stark contrast to the individual, every-man-for-himself approach of the conservatives. Maybe that's one reason they don't work as well as, say, Limbaugh's solo effort.

It shouldn't take a village to raise a radio program.

Of course not.

But I think Shaw misses the point. It's not just that it's a village; the Northern Alliance is a village, of sorts, and it's a format we're going to stand by.

But there's a difference; the various FrankenNet collectives are like little graduate seminars, laughing at everyone that's not on their (perceived) level. Talk radio - whether solo operations like Hewitt or groups like the Northern Alliance - see themselves and the audience as a free association of equals, with a market relationship; the hosts provide something they hope the audience is interested in, the audience either finds traction and enjoyment or they don't.

As opposed to relying on a federal judge to get the message out there.

Posted by Mitch at April 20, 2004 04:52 AM