My ears feel dirty...

[clayhornik]

There's a LOT of stuff out there in the realm of the podcast.
I've been hearing about Air American and how it'd be a counterpoint to Rush & Co. so I thought I'd try one of their shows: "Morning Sedition". I love NPR, and I thought, how cute... it's a even more liberal version of the news.
Nope.
It was a liberal counterpoint to Rush all right. Ranty, annoyingly so. Almost frothy. What I'd love to see is a rational, collected person as an anti-Rush. Case in point: Terri Gross on Fresh Air. She had O'Reilly as a guest and she asked him some journalistic questions and he got defensive, then shrill, then went with ad hominem attacks, then he finally walked out of the studio. Since the shows are taped via phone, he where ever he was and her in Massachutes, I think, she's left saying "hello? hello?". It's pretty funny. Not as funny as Gross getting flustered then annoyed by Gene Simmons of KISS. Gut bustingly misogynistic. Interestingly enough, Simmons did not give permission for NPR to make available the audio or transcripts after broadcast... but you know, nothing REALLY goes away on the internet.

Comments

[spimby.livejournal.com]

Man, if you thought Morning Sedition was bad, you should listen to everything else on Air America, especially that loud-mouthed byatch who comes on in the afternoons from Florida and obviously thinks she's Joan Rivers and spends most of her show talking about herself, when she's not flogging wildly improbable liberal conspiracy theories.

Her name's Randy Rhodes or something like that...I seriously heard her say once on her show in criticism of the Iraq war that "No nation in history has ever had its political structure changed by force."

That's about the level of Air America "commentary," I've found.

I didn't hear the Simmons interview, but I was listening to Fresh Air the day O'Reilly threw a tantrum and stormed out. Jeez, what a baby. Maybe nobody'd pleasured him with a vibrator or a falafel all day, that day, maybe that was it.

[francis-clay.livejournal.com]

I saw a listening for Randy Rhodes and I thought it was a music show.
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The funny thing abt O'Reilly is I really didn't have an opinion about him til I heard Fresh Air. I don't have cable, so I wasn't familiar with his style. Great way to become familiar with someone.

[spimby.livejournal.com]

"The funny thing abt O'Reilly is I really didn't have an opinion about him til I heard Fresh Air."

To be honest, I didn't really, either. I listen to a lot of right wingers in the car because I'd rather listen to talk than music, these days and...I dunno, O'Reilly never really seemed like that much of a nutjob. He at least tried to play the part of a disinterested centrist and voiced some opinions re: drugs, sex and other social issues that were surprising, at least to me. I'd heard his books were complete crap and at least as rife with distortions and total lack of fact checking as, say, Michael Moore's, but...I wasn't planning to read the chump's books, anyway.

That is, if I remember correctly, what the Big O'Reilly Huff came down to that day: Gross started asking him about a review of his latest book Janet Maslin had written, in which she questioned a number of his alleged facts, and O'Reilly freaked out about what the hell was a BOOK REVIEWER doing checking his work for facts, anyway, and accused Gross of ambushing him and things degenerated from there.

I thought it was pretty classy of Gross to fill the dead time by reading the entire review she'd been asking O'Reilly about.

"I don't have cable, so I wasn't familiar with his style. Great way to become familiar with someone."

I haven't had cable for a few years, and I didn't make a practice of watching Fox News when I did, so I'd never really seen him on TV, either.

What a prong.

Have I mentioned that I want to have sex with Terry Gross' radio voice?

[francis-clay.livejournal.com]

"Have I mentioned that I want to have sex with Terry Gross' radio voice?"

I don't believe so, but I understand. Our NPR affiliate would delay the show by a day and play it in the morning after the news. I'm the one o'clock guy at work, so I could sleep in til nine. Imagine her voice being the first thing you hear in the morning.
It was nice.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine listens to Air America, and he cannot stand Randy Rhodes. He finds her as obnoxious as the O'Reilly's of the right.

He did say that Janeane (sp?) Garofolo's show is entertaining, ditto Al Franken.

Personally I have no idea what Air America is like, I haven't listened, I'm not that interested really, it'll only be like preaching to the choir generally speaking. Plus after election season, I like to avoid politics a bit, lest depression set in ;)

[spimby.livejournal.com]

Franken's show is easily the best of the lot, but that's damning with faint praise.

The Garafalo thing I tried to listen to a couple of times when it first aired and it was horrible. I listened again, recently, and it seemed a little better, but...you know, like most everything else on Air America, it's basically hours on end of a couple of people ranting about how goddamned much they hate George Bush, and that one note gets old, fast.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

Yep, hence I don't listen.

I guess a similar type of person listens to the rant radio of either political bent. It all gives me a headache, I know Bush sucks, and I don't need to be told every other minute either.

Said friend I mentioned before seems to like to torture himself by listening to that kind of thing, and reading endless amounts of newssites with things he can rant about. I'm not that much of a masochist.

[spimby.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, one last thing, in case you haven't listened to enough of Morning Sedition yet to run across it: you know what one of their favorite running jokes is? Mocking NPR as stodgy and old-fashioned and hopeless and blah, blah, blah. I've heard a couple of "bits" where they talk to made-up NPR correspondents, and...they're painfully unfunny*, even more so because the people doing the mocking are so ridiculously weak, themselves.


*You know that Saturday Night Live skit, "Delicious Dish," with Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer hosting the terminally dull NPR cooking show? Now, I don't know if you found that amusing, but I did, pretty consistently. Whatever your response to "Delicious Dish," however on an imaginary "funny graph," the spoofs of NPR on Air America are somewhere around nine million points lower on the X axis. If you hated the SNL skit, the Air America stuff is still hovering somewhere down in the Sheol of humor.

[francis-clay.livejournal.com]

Isn't there one where they get some spiked egg nog or hash brownies or something? That one left me in stitches by its sheer subtlety. Quiet humour- there's not enough of it.

[boyfacedgirl.livejournal.com]

I remember that Fresh Air show, Terry Gross was my hero for the rest of the week. Very classy handling, I thought. People like O'Reilly give conservatives a bad name.

Liberal media is annoying because tehy can't seem to wink at themselves. That's where Rush & co succeed, is that they are first in the entertainment business, and they keep that in always in sight.

RULE ONE: Never believe your own hype. O'Reilly obviously does, so does Air America. Other people who succumbed to their own hype include Marlyn Monroe and a couple of coffeehouse managers I knew once.

[ex-gingerann370.livejournal.com]

Oh, Rush. Storming out because someone disagrees with you. How mature! Damn I hate that hypocrite.

On O'Reilly, Gross and NPR

[1stcyborg.livejournal.com]

The Simmons interview was new to me. I did hear the O'Reilly debacle and yes T. Gross is classy and yes the voice does some truly awesome things for me. I laughed uncontrollably here at my desk at work all the way through the Simmons/NPR transcript. What would you expect from Mr Simmons though! O'Reilly is just a carpetbagger! I'm going to check out Air America today, wish me luck

Re: On O'Reilly, Gross and NPR

[francis-clay.livejournal.com]

Keep some q-tips around to clean up when your ears start bleeding.