AIR AMERICA
The Portland station for “Air America” was once upon a time a standard flare of right-wing blowhards, with the excellent Lionel Show somewhere in the night.
A Clear Channel Station, with the canned quality of a Clear Channel Station.
It was then turned into a charmless station of 50s music, radio beamed from out of Houston. The Clear Channel style, if you will.
Now we have “Air America”…
Two days in, with the aid of night-time reairings, click on and away, and I’ve some impressions.
Al Franken does not have the voice for radio… Show was boring. Check back in a few weeks. Bob Eliott is doing comedy bits for him, apparently, which is a plus.
The goading of Michael Moore to apologize to Al Gore on the air for supporting Nader was bizarre, and awkward.
The local station has shoehorned a show out of the “Air America” purview into its lineup. He displays some of Rush Limbaugh’s tics, and at times I swear I’m hearing the bizzarro Rush Limbaugh (replace the word “Clinton” with “Bush”, and you get the idea.)
In the likely event that this radio network fades away into the night, Randi Rhodes will be the one that survives its death. But, then again, she is the one who has a decade or so experience doing this.
BUT… her interview with Ralph Nader? Sour. Not that Ralph Nader porported himself terribly well, but Rhodes managed to tap into the spirit of Bill O’Reilly… “Confrontainment”… In this case, we had two individuals going off on tangeants of agendas.
(Look up the Carter quote on Nader, though. It bears looking at… A puzzling strategy to fend off the Nader threat appears to be materializing.)
Janeane Garofalo? Didn’t get to hear her.
There’s something depressing about the whole enterprise. It seems kind of contrived and, hierarchically, top-down. Note that the New York station replaced the city’s only afro-centric talk radio station… community radio gets shelved for…
Note also that the voice-over man for the station-spots of the Portland station is the exact same as the voice-over man for the old station, (except no longer is it “We Support the Troops. Talk about the War with Michael Reagan, Michael Gallagher, Glen Beck”… Now it’s “Cutting Through the Right-wing Rhetoric and party-line spin with Common Sense. Portland’s Only* Progressive Talk Radio Station.”)
A manufactured right / left dichotemy that America is expected to kind of fall into… talk past the issues of the day and miss the mark somehow.
Still, it can be entertaining. And since my old radio-standby (home of Clyde Lewis and Phil Hendrie) seems to be in the process of destroying itself.
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*Ever hear of “KBOO”?