Just how pathetic is evening talk radio in this city

[nmoore6676]

...funny how a discussion of nighttime talk radio in L.A. is invariably reduced to which yakker's arm fits the swastika armband best (Junior Conway, Ziegler, Kennedy/Suits). Of course, Chump Channel can't bring itself to put anyone on KTLK worth a damn in that daypart either (Mike Malloy has become a shell of his best period's work on WLS Chicago, and Phil Hendrie is a one-gag pony without material). Six-year-old podcasts of Tom Leykis are still fresher than the lot of them...

Ah yes, the usual "right wing = Nazi" stereotype. How very mature and erudite of you.

...it's the plain truth. "Talk radio" has degenerated into propaganda designed to appeal to the listener's hatreds. Neither Jack Kennedy or Barry Goldwater would recognise today's Democratic or Republican parties as their own...

What you say is pretty much true. Remember that what we now know as "talk radio" began after Howard Stern came to national prominence. Being controversial and even irritating became possible whereas before disc jockeys and entertainers in the media were held back from being too controversial. While Howard was riding the airwaves of terrestrial radio Rush Limbaugh also rose out of his previously failed career as a DJ and talker because he wisely saw the trend developing and hitched his wagon to it.

I grew up in the Dayton Ohio area and can remember when a local radio talk host launched a new kind of talk TV show which though controversial at the time (his first guest was Madeline Murray O'Hare) led to Oprah and many others. Anyone in LA recall the quite pleasant Michael Jackson, the one with a South African accent not the deceased singer? How successful is the erudite Dennis Prager, compared to the more bombastic, grating and loud hosts at KFI?

Truth is that Americans want to be shocked, they want controversy and they want their blood pressures to soar. Even the quite successful Phil Donahue to which I alluded to above would not raise many eyebrows today and thus he would not get the air time that he did way back when on Dayton's channel 2.

 

[sdwulfdawg]

As far as Conway goes, for me the only thing that I find good about his show is "What did Jessie say?", other than that, well, he's not a very good host. He spouts off about things that he knows nothing about, get what facts he does know wrong and has to rely on others to correct him. He repeats himself constantly, even running the same recorded gags, bad ones at that, over and over again. Oh, and how many times does this guy have to remind you about living in the valley and having a wife & kid. We get it, even though you have a famous father, you're just a regular guy. Sadly, he does bring some color to nights at KFI, but could he at least try to prepare a little before his show?

Instead of just spouting off yourself, what exactly has he spouted off about that he "knows nothing about" or do you just disagree with his viewpoints?

 

[davideduardo]

Remember that what we now know as "talk radio" began after Howard Stern came to national prominence. Being controversial and even irritating became possible whereas before disc jockeys and entertainers in the media were held back from being too controversial.

Gee, I seem to remember that Joe Pyne was as acerbic and controversial as anything today... and his immediate successor at KABC, Bob Grant, was cut of the same cloth. Imus, at his first position of prominence in Cleveland, was of the same ilk. And they were very successful.

Stern was not a talk host... he did a morning show for mostly 18-34 men, not for the classic 35+ demographics of talk stations. Stern did not belong on talk stations, which is why so few of them carried Stern. And the attempt to create a talk format based on the Stern style failed, as what he represented could not be reduced to a formula.

While Howard was riding the airwaves of terrestrial radio Rush Limbaugh also rose out of his previously failed career as a DJ and talker because he wisely saw the trend developing and hitched his wagon to it.

Stern was a failed and oft-fired AOR DJ who found something he did well. Limbaugh actually did a bit better as an average-but-not-bad DJ but he discovered that he didn't want to sit and wait 4 minutes for songs to end just to say a few words. Limbaugh created the model for what is today's talk radio, and was in an ideal position when Fairness was taken off the table.

Truth is that Americans want to be shocked, they want controversy and they want their blood pressures to soar.

Americans want to be entertained. A good bout with listener regarding some topic du jour is a lot more fun than mild-mannered milquetoast talkers. And that's the same reason we have Simon Cowell instead of Ted Mack and Idol instead of Ed Sullivan or why we get Jersey Shore and not Ozzie and Harriet. Media reflects a nation's mood, and America is a lot more divided and angry than it was decades ago.

 

[Ultimajock]

...it's the plain truth. "Talk radio" has degenerated into propaganda designed to appeal to the listener's hatreds. Neither Jack Kennedy or Barry Goldwater would recognise today's Democratic or Republican parties as their own...

What you say is pretty much true. Remember that what we now know as "talk radio" began after Howard Stern came to national prominence. Being controversial and even irritating became possible whereas before disc jockeys and entertainers in the media were held back from being too controversial. While Howard was riding the airwaves of terrestrial radio Rush Limbaugh also rose out of his previously failed career as a DJ and talker because he wisely saw the trend developing and hitched his wagon to it.

I grew up in the Dayton Ohio area and can remember when a local radio talk host launched a new kind of talk TV show which though controversial at the time (his first guest was Madeline Murray O'Hare) led to Oprah and many others. Anyone in LA recall the quite pleasant Michael Jackson, the one with a South African accent not the deceased singer? How successful is the erudite Dennis Prager, compared to the more bombastic, grating and loud hosts at KFI?

Truth is that Americans want to be shocked, they want controversy and they want their blood pressures to soar. Even the quite successful Phil Donahue to which I alluded to above would not raise many eyebrows today and thus he would not get the air time that he did way back when on Dayton's channel 2.

...the blame for this is much more deserving of Limbaugh than Stern. Limbaugh was picked up by several times as many stations as Stern ever managed to get onto -- Limbaugh's main affiliation core was medium and small market daytimers and weaker local channel signals, most of whose cash-strapped owners liked that he was available in middays and on a barter basis, while Stern was always a cash purchase and limited mainly to classic rock outfits in larger markets and in the Northeast. (One notable exception was Stern's brief placement on WJJD Chicago when it tried to compete against WGN and WLS as an AM hot talker.) Prager and Michael Medved may be trying to give Salem the bogus veneer of a respectful broadcast organisation, but their carriage of Michael "Savage" and the more recently bellicose Mike Gallagher in many of the same markets puts the lie to that idea. (Gallagher personally told me he owed much of his '90s success at WGY Schenectady to programming himself directly before the moderate Tom Leykis, and Gallagher's track record at WABC and in syndication after that spell at WGY seems to have borne that out)...

...I wouldn't trace this back to Phil Donahue; Phil wasn't doing anything on TV in Dayton that wasn't already being done by Barry Farber or Long John Nebel in New York and Alex Bennett in Houston that same year. A more accurate root would be Paul Gibson at WBBM Chicago in the 1950s, who was a proud and cantankerous chauvanist (track down the surviving airchecks of his late '50s "The Lady & The Tiger" show with Lee Philip sometime). But, like Leykis was capable of once you could get him away from his chauvanist act of his KLSX period, Gibson would just as frequently -- if not moreso -- be a well-read and reasonable lecturer on current affairs, a capacity that Limbaugh never displayed even in his less bellicose pre-Lincoln bedroom days in syndication...

 

[Ultimajock]

Remember that what we now know as "talk radio" began after Howard Stern came to national prominence. Being controversial and even irritating became possible whereas before disc jockeys and entertainers in the media were held back from being too controversial.

Gee, I seem to remember that Joe Pyne was as acerbic and controversial as anything today... and his immediate successor at KABC, Bob Grant, was cut of the same cloth.

...in his surviving airchecks, Pyne wasn't even as abrasive as Michael "Savage" is today...

Imus, at his first position of prominence in Cleveland, was of the same ilk. And they were very successful.

...Imus in the early 1970s was not a talk host; he was trying to do a legitimately satirical act within a Top 40 structure. Much of what he was doing at WGAR had already been done by Larry Lujack in Chicago and Seattle and Robert W. Morgan in Los Angeles (by Imus' own admission) when Imus was still working his railroad job...

Stern was not a talk host... he did a morning show for mostly 18-34 men, not for the classic 35+ demographics of talk stations. Stern did not belong on talk stations, which is why so few of them carried Stern. And the attempt to create a talk format based on the Stern style failed, as what he represented could not be reduced to a formula.

...plus, most of the hosts that CBS' "Free FM" format utilised -- Rover, David Lee Roth, Opie & Anthony, Penn Jillette, even Steve Dahl -- were clearly sub-par Stern knockoffs at best and broadcasting amateurs at worst. Only Tom Leykis and Danny Bonaduce had any idea of what they were really doing...

Truth is that Americans want to be shocked, they want controversy and they want their blood pressures to soar.

Americans want to be entertained. A good bout with listener regarding some topic du jour is a lot more fun than mild-mannered milquetoast talkers. And that's the same reason we have Simon Cowell instead of Ted Mack and Idol instead of Ed Sullivan or why we get Jersey Shore and not Ozzie and Harriet. Media reflects a nation's mood, and America is a lot more divided and angry than it was decades ago.

[/quote]...I'll remind that during the heyday of Ted Mack, Ed Sullivan and Ozzie & Harriet, America also had weekly doses of Henry Morgan, Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen, all of whom were not without their own prickliness of image. And Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, while not nearly as abrasive, could scrap with the best of them from time to time, too...

 

[nmoore6676]

Remember that what we now know as "talk radio" began after Howard Stern came to national prominence. Being controversial and even irritating became possible whereas before disc jockeys and entertainers in the media were held back from being too controversial.

Gee, I seem to remember that Joe Pyne was as acerbic and controversial as anything today... and his immediate successor at KABC, Bob Grant, was cut of the same cloth. Imus, at his first position of prominence in Cleveland, was of the same ilk. And they were very successful.

Stern was not a talk host... he did a morning show for mostly 18-34 men, not for the classic 35+ demographics of talk stations. Stern did not belong on talk stations, which is why so few of them carried Stern. And the attempt to create a talk format based on the Stern style failed, as what he represented could not be reduced to a formula.

While Howard was riding the airwaves of terrestrial radio Rush Limbaugh also rose out of his previously failed career as a DJ and talker because he wisely saw the trend developing and hitched his wagon to it.

Stern was a failed and oft-fired AOR DJ who found something he did well. Limbaugh actually did a bit better as an average-but-not-bad DJ but he discovered that he didn't want to sit and wait 4 minutes for songs to end just to say a few words. Limbaugh created the model for what is today's talk radio, and was in an ideal position when Fairness was taken off the table.

Truth is that Americans want to be shocked, they want controversy and they want their blood pressures to soar.

Americans want to be entertained. A good bout with listener regarding some topic du jour is a lot more fun than mild-mannered milquetoast talkers. And that's the same reason we have Simon Cowell instead of Ted Mack and Idol instead of Ed Sullivan or why we get Jersey Shore and not Ozzie and Harriet. Media reflects a nation's mood, and America is a lot more divided and angry than it was decades ago.

I was using Howard as an example of how tastes changed and never implied that he was a talk host as say Limbaugh or even John and Ken.

Entertainment is shock, as the old vaudeville comedians learned that a unresponsive audience could be brought to life with an off color joke or a not so subtle double entendre. Why else do we love even more daring amusement park rides? I think my point was valid.

America was a better place when we all aspired to be like Ozzie and Harriet and The Stone Family (Donna Reed) or The Cleavers. So while tastes have changed, not all has been for the better. But time moves on we learn to accept or become bitter and lonely.

 

[nmoore6676]

...it's the plain truth. "Talk radio" has degenerated into propaganda designed to appeal to the listener's hatreds. Neither Jack Kennedy or Barry Goldwater would recognise today's Democratic or Republican parties as their own...

What you say is pretty much true. Remember that what we now know as "talk radio" began after Howard Stern came to national prominence. Being controversial and even irritating became possible whereas before disc jockeys and entertainers in the media were held back from being too controversial. While Howard was riding the airwaves of terrestrial radio Rush Limbaugh also rose out of his previously failed career as a DJ and talker because he wisely saw the trend developing and hitched his wagon to it.

I grew up in the Dayton Ohio area and can remember when a local radio talk host launched a new kind of talk TV show which though controversial at the time (his first guest was Madeline Murray O'Hare) led to Oprah and many others. Anyone in LA recall the quite pleasant Michael Jackson, the one with a South African accent not the deceased singer? How successful is the erudite Dennis Prager, compared to the more bombastic, grating and loud hosts at KFI?

Truth is that Americans want to be shocked, they want controversy and they want their blood pressures to soar. Even the quite successful Phil Donahue to which I alluded to above would not raise many eyebrows today and thus he would not get the air time that he did way back when on Dayton's channel 2.

...the blame for this is much more deserving of Limbaugh than Stern. Limbaugh was picked up by several times as many stations as Stern ever managed to get onto -- Limbaugh's main affiliation core was medium and small market daytimers and weaker local channel signals, most of whose cash-strapped owners liked that he was available in middays and on a barter basis, while Stern was always a cash purchase and limited mainly to classic rock outfits in larger markets and in the Northeast. (One notable exception was Stern's brief placement on WJJD Chicago when it tried to compete against WGN and WLS as an AM hot talker.) Prager and Michael Medved may be trying to give Salem the bogus veneer of a respectful broadcast organisation, but their carriage of Michael "Savage" and the more recently bellicose Mike Gallagher in many of the same markets puts the lie to that idea. (Gallagher personally told me he owed much of his '90s success at WGY Schenectady to programming himself directly before the moderate Tom Leykis, and Gallagher's track record at WABC and in syndication after that spell at WGY seems to have borne that out)...

...I wouldn't trace this back to Phil Donahue; Phil wasn't doing anything on TV in Dayton that wasn't already being done by Barry Farber or Long John Nebel in New York and Alex Bennett in Houston that same year. A more accurate root would be Paul Gibson at WBBM Chicago in the 1950s, who was a proud and cantankerous chauvanist (track down the surviving airchecks of his late '50s "The Lady & The Tiger" show with Lee Philip sometime). But, like Leykis was capable of once you could get him away from his chauvanist act of his KLSX period, Gibson would just as frequently -- if not moreso -- be a well-read and reasonable lecturer on current affairs, a capacity that Limbaugh never displayed even in his less bellicose pre-Lincoln bedroom days in syndication...

As I said, I grew up near DAYTON, not New York, Chicago or Houston so I was not intimately aware of the people you cited and Donahue was syndicated nationally which made him universally recognized, thus my use of him as an example.

I am aware of how Limbaugh grew his network and that model has been followed by most who followed. But the Stern example was more to the point of showing how the doors of acceptability were opened while Rush was more emblematic of the growth of so called conservative talk which for some reason still reigns. Perhaps Ed Shultz is the closest that liberal talkers ever got to the success level of Limbaugh. But I don't listen to either, as I find them too ponderous and narrow minded. But I never meant to imply that Stern and Limbaugh are somehow exactly related, they are as apples and oranges, but both are examples of the changing tastes of American Media.

 

[gordonlee]

Good grief, at least you guys have LIVE and LOCAL hosts. In Miami, we've got one English language talk station and it's on automation except from 6a-10a and 3p-6p on the weekdays. And, being that it's a Clear Channel station, that means that nobody is even at the cluster monitoring the programming going out, which consists of weather forecasts from 2 days ago, and stopsets that run amock, frequently running into at least half of the next segment of whatever syndicated show they're piping in at the moment.

 

[AM FM listener]

I would say that Tim Conway Jr. is probably the best host to come along in that time slot since Phil Hendrie, who used to make me laugh out loud. I think Phil began as strictly local, then went syndication and then got that TV gig, which proved to be the beginning of the end for him.

 

[ChannelFlipper]

I would say that Tim Conway Jr. is probably the best host to come along in that time slot since Phil Hendrie, who used to make me laugh out loud. I think Phil began as strictly local, then went syndication and then got that TV gig, which proved to be the beginning of the end for him.

A few months back I heard Hendrie on either KFI or KLAC with my wife in the car. I am not sure if he was filling in or if they were running some sort of "best of" filler, but I stopped to listen for awhile for old time sake. My wife isn't really much into talk radio and had never heard, or even heard of, Phil before. But on this particular day she was paying closer attention than she normally would to the radio. One of the things that always amazed me about Phil is that when he does the character voices, of course I know its him, but I can't tell at all by just the voices that is him, which was what always amazed me about his show. But after a few minutes listening to him for the first time my wife says "Who is this guy and why do they let him on the air if he is just going to sit there and host AND do all of the caller voices?" I've never been so floored.

 

[robnokshus06]

Stern did not belong on talk stations, which is why so few of them carried Stern. And the attempt to create a talk format based on the Stern style failed, as what he represented could not be reduced to a formula.

If you are referring to the cookie cutter aproach that CBS employed with "Free FM" you would be correct. However, WTKS in Orlando and KLSX in Los Angeles had tremendous success with talk formats utilizing Stern as the anchor personality, KLSX even ranking in the top-10 nationally in billing at one point. Ratings wise, KLSX was a dominant station 25-54 while WTKS was #1 12+ (in addition to 25-54 dominance) several times during the Stern days.

 

[dagrudt]

Answer to problem; Full strength Mr. KABC. No guests, no topics, no planted callers, no sound effects, no call screener.
7 to 10 on 790 KABC. Just a fantasy as Cumulus, like Citadel is TOO CHEAP to re-install him as an evening local talk show.

 

[ChannelFlipper]

Answer to problem; Full strength Mr. KABC. No guests, no topics, no planted callers, no sound effects, no call screener.
7 to 10 on 790 KABC. Just a fantasy as Cumulus, like Citadel is TOO CHEAP to re-install him as an evening local talk show.

What is he doing these days? Wasn't he toiling as Mr. KTLK for awhile?

 

[dagrudt]

He's actually doing Saturday night's on Red Eye Radio and filling in for Doug McIntyre as well as doing his own show weeknights on Talkradioone.com.

 

[AM FM listener]

He's actually doing Saturday night's on Red Eye Radio and filling in for Doug McIntyre as well as doing his own show weeknights on Talkradioone.com.

So, is he Mr. Red Eye or Mr. Talk Radio One then? ;D

I remember when he got his start as Mr. KFI. I wouldn't mind if he came back to LA full time.

 

[OhioMediaWatch]

No, believe it or not, he's Mr. Marc Germain!

http://www.redeyeradio.com/marc-germain.php

And yes, KABC does carry the Saturday night "Red Eye" he hosts, and even acknowledges it:

http://www.kabc.com/showdj.asp?DJID=58966

Though they do not note the "Mr." names, either at KABC or KFI...

 

[radio777]

So, is he Mr. Red Eye or Mr. Talk Radio One then? ;D

I remember when he got his start as Mr. KFI. I wouldn't mind if he came back to LA full time.

He had quite a following back in the day when he was host on KFI and a lot of us would be on his usenet newsgroup at alt.fan.mr-kfi.
We weren't too thrilled when the Cox sisters replaced him with Phil Hendrie so we followed Marc to KABC where he often got bumped around Dodger games.

As for Tim Conway Jr, he's mailing in his first hour these days. He plays a sound bite from a show or interview of someone he dislikes and for the next hour he talks back to it, over and over again. Sometimes the bite would be replayed multiple times before he realizes that maybe he should move on. It's becoming rather annoying and he has discovered a great way to make people turn off the show until 9pm.

 

[DJBigOne]

Try living in a market with NOTHING on at night.

After the time change (dark at 5), and winter's cold, KFI comes in well at night in Northern California. Tim makes me LMAO.

Phil Hendrie is brilliant. It's always funny when those who never heard his show actually think callers do the voices. BTW, Phil grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, an alumnus of my high school.

 

[AM FM listener]

As for Tim Conway Jr, he's mailing in his first hour these days. He plays a sound bite from a show or interview of someone he dislikes and for the next hour he talks back to it, over and over again. Sometimes the bite would be replayed multiple times before he realizes that maybe he should move on. It's becoming rather annoying and he has discovered a great way to make people turn off the show until 9pm.

I have noticed this too. It IS annoying the way he interrupts the interview he's playing every 5 seconds. It drives me crazy and more importantly, it makes me switch stations. Tim Conway can be funny at times but that habit he has of interrupting the tape he's playing is awful.

 

[SimiRadioListener26]

As for Tim Conway Jr, he's mailing in his first hour these days. He plays a sound bite from a show or interview of someone he dislikes and for the next hour he talks back to it, over and over again. Sometimes the bite would be replayed multiple times before he realizes that maybe he should move on. It's becoming rather annoying and he has discovered a great way to make people turn off the show until 9pm.

I have noticed this too. It IS annoying the way he interrupts the interview he's playing every 5 seconds. It drives me crazy and more importantly, it makes me switch stations. Tim Conway can be funny at times but that habit he has of interrupting the tape he's playing is awful.

I totally agree. I don't remember him being like this on KLSX. He's also a political phony. When he was at KLSX he claimed to not be for building a border fence, and now suddenly he's for it now that he's at KFI.