Evaluating Talk Radio

I drive a lot.  Lately I've hardly ever been on an airplane, but it's nothing for me to log 500 to 1,000 highway miles in a week.  So I need to listen to something that is interesting enough to keep me awake.  Most music radio stations don't meet that requirement, although it's pretty common for me to play country music during a trip.

Mostly I listen to talk radio.  I've heard most of the best-known talkers, so I thought I'd do a bit of an evaluation of the medium.

Local radio talkers include Greg Garrison, Larry Downes, Dana Loesch, the Chicks on the Right, to name a few.  Garrison is probably my favorite among the local talent.  He has gotten himself in trouble in the past with some hot rhetoric, but generally seems like a pretty decent guy.  He's an Indianapolis lawyer whose claim to fame was earned when he served as the prosecuting attorney in the Mike Tyson rape trial.

Garrison is still practicing law, and he seems to take a lot of vacation time.  So when I tune into his weekday morning show it seems there's a pretty good chance there's somebody filling in for him.  Some of his fill-in hosts are less than compelling, to be charitable.

Larry Downes and the Chicks are brand new.  Larry seems like a nice guy, but my initial take on him is that he's probably about center-right on the spectrum.  I think Larry's maybe economically conservative, but socially may lean more to the liberal side.  That may not be correct, because I haven't heard nearly enough of him to pin him down for certain.

The Chicks are kind of a fun alternative that are new to the medium.  They apparently are just a couple of relatively young women who happen to lean conservative and started a blog together a couple of years ago.  They got their first radio show on the weekends in Indy, and just last week signed on for a daily show.  They like to talk a lot about cultural stories, and come across sort of like a couple of Valley Girls who happen to also be intelligent.

Dana Loesch is a highly attractive pundit who used to represent a conservative viewpoint on CNN.  She seems to have disappeared from CNN and I've now seen her pop up a couple of times on Fox News.  She has a daily show out of her hometown of St. Louis, and WIBC in Indy picks up an hour of that show.  She's certainly passionate, and sometimes funny.

Among the national group of talkers, Rush Limbaugh is king.  My late liberal father even admitted to enjoying Rush, even though he liked to claim that most of Rush's points were bunk.  On the occasions where I talked about political issues with my Dad, he often tried to shut down my points by accusing me of getting them from Rush.  Most of the time that wasn't true.

Rush is able to reach such a huge audience because he's bombastic but entertaining.  He is indeed mostly fun to listen to, which seems to explain his broad audience of plenty of conservatives and liberals.  Most of those libs who attack Rush as racist and extreme cite internet myths that anyone who has listened to Rush more than a few times know are far from true.

Although I think I'd like Hannity personally, I am not his biggest fan on the radio.  He is extremely repetitive, making the same points over and over and over ....  On the other hand, I've seen some excellent episodes of his Fox News show, especially those in which he talks to folks gathering in the studio.  His lead-in with the country song about "We'll put a boot in your a$$" has really gotten old.

Michael Savage is sort of a strange dude from San Francisco.  My impression of Savage is that he's a very lonely man who loves his dog and fancies himself a gourmand.  He spends a lot of time trashing his fellow conservative talkers, which is something that puzzles me.  I can't tell if it is out of jealousy or he thinks it's a legitimate strategy for stealing listeners or if it's some other thing.  I can't say I'm a fan.

Laura Ingraham is one I actually like very much.  She's smart, witty, and funny.  Her foes like to promote the message that she's a world-class b!%@&.  I can't say if she is or not in private, but I do wonder why she never married.

Glenn Beck is very entertaining as well, and he seems to be building his own empire on the internet and alternative media.  He has a tendency to take a story that has a basis in fact, then spin his interpretation of the story to paint a dire warning.  Sometimes he legitimately scares me.  Other times I just toss him off as taking it way too far.  Recently he was building up some story about terrorist support for the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston bombing.  He promised his story would blow the lid off the government cover-up he was sure was happening to hide their direct relationship with a terrorist group.  But somehow the story quietly faded and never blew the cover off anything.  On the other hand, he can be credited with exposing avowed communists in the Obama administration, which made him one of the most hated conservative talkers.

Mark Levin is also a very intelligent talker.  He yells a lot.  But his focus on the Constitution is valuable, and his insights on constitutional law make me wonder if he wouldn't be a great Supreme Court justice.  Then again, I'm not sure he could restrain himself enough to maintain the decorum of that place.  I'd be afraid he might punch out Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Elena Kagan.

There are lots of other talkers out there in radio land, but the rest of them I have listened to very little.  Certainly Rush is king, and is absolutely the pioneer of the medium.  Thinking about it a certain way, I find it fascinating that I'd probably rather hang out with Hannity, but prefer to listen to Rush's show.  I'd certainly love to meet every one of them.