FORD
06-29-2007, 03:47 AM
Mike Malloy Doesn't Mince Words -- And His Progressive Talk Radio Fans Love Him for It
Created 06/26/2007 - 3:54pm
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
"The playing field has never, ever, ever, ever been level between right wing and liberal. The genius of Limbaugh was not Limbaugh, it was Roger Ailes. ... the person who comes up with the best marketing idea is the person who usually comes up with the winner, not the person who comes up with the best product. Right-wing talk radio is not a good product. It's toxic. It's destructive. It's negative. But it had behind it a marketing genius, Roger Ailes."
-- Mike Malloy
* * *
Mike Malloy has spent nearly two decades representing an aggressively progressive perspective on radio programs in various markets. After departing in contentious circumstances from Air America Radio during their period of financial bankruptcy, Malloy was hired by NovaM Radio Network, the new kid on the block for developing progressive radio outlets and talent. (Interestingly enough, NovaM was founded by Anita and Sheldon Drobny, who began Air America Radio before leaving the struggling network during a "reorganization.")
Malloy has developed a core of fans known as "truthseekers." They are loyal and devoted, many of them BuzzFlash readers.
Mike is the fourth periodic BuzzFlash interview to introduce progressive talk show hosts to BuzzFlash readers. Our first three were with Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes and Stephanie Miller. We will be talking with other progressive radio personalities in the coming months. Our goal is to help build an audience for these programs.
Give them a listen. Most of them can be streamed online during their live broadcasts -- or check to see if they can be heard on a radio station in your area.
* * *
BuzzFlash: Where can people find out about when you're on, where you're on, and when to listen to you, including on the Internet?
Mike Malloy: Two sites - they can go to novamradio.com or they can go to mikemalloy.com. Preferably to novamradio.com, because there's so much there in addition to just my program, although it does carry a lot of information about my show, too.
BuzzFlash: Does your show stream live on the Internet?
Mike Malloy: Yes, from 9 ‘til midnight Eastern time, Monday through Friday.
BuzzFlash: How do you describe your style on the radio?
Mike Malloy: Regarding the political issues, it's very confrontational. Regarding my callers, I have no patience with Republicans or right-wingers, and very little patience with people who are middle of the road. I believe in what Jim Hightower said a long time ago: "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is a yellow line and dead armadillos."
To me, the only issues that exist right now are the issues of the corruption and the utter incompetence of the Bush Administration. Regarding those issues, my style, my approach, is very confrontational. I think this republic is under direct assault by a cadre of people who want to destroy it and replace it with totalitarianism. And that pisses me off to a degree I didn't know was possible. So I scream, I yell, I pound things, and occasionally I've been known to use bad language.
BuzzFlash: We've asked the other progressive talk-show hosts we've talked to very specifically, how you do handle callers? If a caller upsets you, do you just cut them off?
Mike Malloy: It depends on the nature of the caller. Over twenty years of talk radio, but especially in the past three or four years, I've found that most right-wing or conservative callers, or people who call who think they're going to challenge me on a specific point, are functionally illiterate. Their minds are capable of parroting only what they've heard from Rush Limbaugh, or a Free Republic, or Sean Hannity. They are incapable of carrying on a dialogue. They are eaten up with right-wing religious garbage.
I know that the majority of my audience doesn't want to hear this. They don't want to hear it because they deal with it constantly out in the real world -- at the workplace, in their churches, in their synagogues, on the bus, in the carpool, at the PTA meeting. They hear these right-wing parrots who are utterly eaten up with fear, utterly eaten up with ignorance. And these right-wingers get their strength only from repeating over and over what they've heard from right-wing radio or right-wing television. So I don't want them to call me.
I have no interest in converting them. I have no interest in hearing their point of view, because I know what their point of view is. The only thing I'm interested in doing with right-wingers or conservatives is hoping that maybe -- and I realize this is really reaching -- maybe they'll just sit back and listen to my program, and some spark will go off in their head that will make them want to do some independent research for the first time in their lives to find out how they've been lied to and led into this blind alley of right-wing idiocy.
BuzzFlash: Isn't that like expecting a reverse lobotomy to occur?
Mike Malloy: It is indeed. But hope springs eternal in the human breast, right? If I had completely given up, I think I would just resign from talk radio.
BuzzFlash: I think most BuzzFlash readers are aware that, when a talk-show host of any stripe is on the air, you have a monitor in front of you that tells you the calls that are in the queue and what the person wants to talk about.
Mike Malloy: Yes.
BuzzFlash: How do you use that, and how do you pick who you're going to talk to?
Mike Malloy: The callers who are most connected to what I just said in the previous ten minutes are the ones that I usually put on first. The other criterion is how long they've been on hold. With a three-hour program, I have a bad reputation of maybe not taking phone calls until the last 30 or 45 minutes. Consequently, while we have six lines for callers to get in the queue, I'll look at the times in addition to the subject. I look how long they've been on hold. And for example, last night, the first caller I took had been on hold for two hours and ten minutes. And her call was not necessarily exactly parallel to what I'd been talking about the previous ten minutes.
So it depends on what they told my call screener in Phoenix. He doesn't screen calls out. He just screens them to find out what it is they want to say. He'll type in maybe eight or nine pertinent words up on the screen for me, and how long they've been on hold. Those are usually the two criteria.
BuzzFlash: How do you prepare for a program? How much is planned in advance?
Mike Malloy: My background before I ever came to talk radio was in deadline writing, when I wrote for a newspaper, and deadline newscasts, when I worked at CNN. As a result, I have been known to have an entire show prepared for the radio, and if there's breaking news at six p.m. and I go on at nine, I'll just toss out what I have prepared for that day and go with the breaking news.
I try to keep my program as immediate as possible. If there is a major news story that happens at, say, eight o'clock at night, I'll try to have it on at nine o'clock. That's the result of working on deadline for newspapers and especially television. I worked as a writer at CNN, and you had to be able to completely rewrite your script on just a moment's notice if the story changed, or the executive producer wanted something else.
I pay attention to what's going on in broadcast media, including not just television, but also NPR or BBC Radio. I tune in periodically to as much broadcast media as I can during the day, and I subscribe to The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I will read those papers, and then go online and read LA Times, Washington Post, the British press, the Asian press, and if it's in English, the Middle Eastern press.
That also comes as a result of training at CNN. We were always told, back in the day -- I'm not sure it's true anymore -- but in the early Eighties, we were told to take a look at a story from four or five different reporting sources. If you had a story from the Associated Press, see what Reuters had. Then go ahead and see what the Soviet News Agency said, back then. See what the British news agency said. Take a look at the same story from four or five different angles. Sadly, that has kind of changed in the past twenty years. You have pretty much two points of view now -- the American point of view, and the rest of the world. What I have found is that the rest of the world is pretty much on the same page regarding American foreign policy, and it's usually almost diametrically opposed to what is being consumed by American news consumers.
BuzzFlash: What do you like most about being on radio as compared to doing news writing?
Mike Malloy: News writing was very restrictive, especially at CNN. Again, this was back when CNN was run by Turner, and it was run as a news organization. It is not run as a news organization now. But it was very restricted back then. Our senior editors, senior producers, supervising producers, would tell us repeatedly they did not want to find even a nuance of opinion in what we wrote, to the extent that it became a game.
There were about six of us working as writers at the same time, including Christiane Amanpour. Some of us would attempt to slant our stories with just one word, changing, for example, "would" to "could" -- and see if we could get it by the senior editor. We never could. We would kind of get our asses slapped for even attempting that. Writing news was very restricted back then.
Doing talk radio, there are absolutely no boundaries for me except those that might be imposed by FCC language rules and regs. At the last two networks I've worked for, Air America and now Nova M, there are no restrictions on what I've said. So the difference is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
News writing for television is a medium of very restricted time. The anchor people on the network news have about 22 minutes, after you take away the commercial and station breaks, to tell their story. Talk radio is a lot less restricted. I have three hours, and I can inject as much editorial or emotional content as I want to. As a matter of fact, that's what I'm supposed to do. That's what talk radio is all about -- injecting me, Mike Malloy, into the story -- my personal, gut-level feelings about things. I also bring in what has funneled into me from the listeners via e-mail, letters, phone calls, or what-have-you.
I consider myself to be pretty much 90% as common as dirt. I feel like, if I like a movie, most of America likes the movie, and vice-versa. If I have a liberal point of view on something, I know it's shared by most liberals.
BuzzFlash: We asked this of Randi Rhodes, and I'll ask it of you. What would you be doing if you weren't a radio talk-show host?
Mike Malloy: Probably writing for television news. It might have to be the foreign media, like Greg Palast has been working for the BBC because his approach was too strong for American television. I'd probably be writing for television or broadcast, somewhere on the planet, for my income. For catharsis, I would be writing columns or feature articles that had a political point of view. And if I could find the time and the discipline, I would write fiction. Writing would pretty much be it.
BuzzFlash: Talk radio is quite different from writing, in that you're connected to your audience and there's an immediacy.
Mike Malloy: That's true. I also had five years of theater here in Atlanta. I went into theater to do playwriting, and wound up getting into the acting end of it because it looked very easy, which it's not. But I took classes and was with a theater company here for four or five years, the Southern Theater Consortium. While I'm certainly not by any means an accomplished actor, I still had the training to understand the importance of breaking down as much as possible the so-called "fourth wall" between the actors and the audience. And theater is an immediate medium, because when the play's over, you get the applause or the garbage thrown at you.
I think I carry that into talk radio, and I've done it specifically and deliberately. There's an awful lot of theater in the kind of talk radio that I do. And I relish that; I'm proud of that; I think that's a good thing, to be able to translate the day's horrific political events into something that connects with people on an emotional level, because it damn sure connects with me on an emotional level. If I can do that, then I feel like I'm doing what talk radio should be about.
I go for the gut, not the head, because that's where I'm motivated. I can intellectualize until the cows come home, and that's fine. I mean, there certainly is a time for intellectualization. But most of us don't live in our heads, we live in our emotions. That's what motivates us. That's what makes us get up. So I try to stay in that strong, emotional, theatrical area.
BuzzFlash: In talk radio there's a yardstick people use in talking about building a large audience, and it's usually Rush Limbaugh. Clearly, they've had money behind them to get them going and to build an audience. Do you think progressives are going to get just as invested in an emotional sort of way, in a radio program about the issues, or are the people on the right more raw-meat oriented -- more likely to listen to someone who gets them all charged up or appeals to their basest instincts? Or are we just at a point still where we haven't marketed progressive talk well enough?
Mike Malloy: I tend not to think it's an either/or situation. Limbaugh is a standard only to right-wingers. Now how did Rush Limbaugh get to where he's at, and why is talk radio dominated by right wingers? It has nothing to do with audience choices whatsoever. As a matter of fact, when Limbaugh broke out in the mid-Eighties, the way he broke out was that Roger Ailes, who went on to found the Fox News Network, came up with a marketing idea. He said to small and medium markets in places like Bowling Green, Kentucky, or Albuquerque, New Mexico, "I have a three-hour program. It's on from noon to three, and it's conservative, so it'll gel well with your advertisers. And I'll give it to you free. All you have to do is give me X number of minutes per hour that I will, in turn, sell to national advertisers."
Well, the small to medium markets salivated over that. They said: Oh, my God. We get a free program, and all it costs us is a few minutes out of each hour for advertising that Roger Ailes turns around and sells. Rush Limbaugh went from being -- now I'm exaggerating, but not by much -- he went from being on maybe five stations to being on five hundred. And as a marketing approach, it had nothing whatsoever, and it never has had anything to do, with people calling radio stations and saying: Gee, will you put Rush Limbaugh on? Will you put right-wing talk radio on? That has never been the case.
The playing field has never, ever, ever, ever been level between right wing and liberal. The genius of Limbaugh was not Limbaugh, it was Roger Ailes. This is America, but you can't buy it. This is a marketing Petri dish, this country, this society of ours. So the person who comes up with the best marketing idea is the person who usually comes up with the winner, not the person who comes up with the best product. Right-wing talk radio is not a good product. It's toxic. It's destructive. It's negative. But it had behind it a marketing genius, Roger Ailes. So all of a sudden, you had the availability of a conservative talk show.
So what happens next? Mid-level managers in this country -- I don't care if they're in media or in manufacturing -- mid-level managers, for the most part, are conservative. They're conservative because they're cowardly. If you remember, there was a book from the Sixties called The Peter Principle, which stated clearly that people in organizations rise to their level of incompetence and then stay there. Now in radio, in the Eighties especially, there was a level of mid-level management in radio stations that was totally uncreative. They couldn't find their ass with both hands. All of a sudden, you have a guy who's on five hundred radio stations. Well, what are you going to do? You're going to say: Ooh, there's a success. And you're going to grab for it.
It doesn't make any difference that Limbaugh is anti-American, he's anti-woman, he's anti-democratic process, he's anti-U.S. Constitution, he's pro-war, he's pro-death, he's pro-upper class. None of that matters. What matters is the program was free. This is America.
So there's never been a level playing field. When you have a Limbaugh or a Hannity, or any of these jerks on the right, say that the marketplace determines what's on radio, not only is that a lie, it's a goddamn lie. The marketplace has never, ever, ever been fair and balanced for people to make a choice.
Now there's a postscript to this. As talk radio became more and more right wing, the audience started to shrink. There are 75 million adults in this country who would listen to talk radio but don't because it's mostly right wing. The other 75 million who do listen are right wingers. So if you pick a city, and Rush Limbaugh has X amount of market share there, that doesn't mean that he's got X amount of potential listeners. It means he has X amount of the people who are listening. If most of the people who are listening are right wingers, it becomes a closed loop, and it makes it appear that a Limbaugh or a Hannity have these phenomenal ratings when they don't. The universe of talk radio has shrunk.
Now liberal talk or progressive talk networks are opening up the market. They're bringing people back into that universe of those who want to listen to talk radio. If the progressive networks can continue, people like Hannity and Limbaugh and Mike Savage will become nothing but postscripts or asterisks to the history of talk radio, because people don't want to hear that. They'll listen to it if they're already committed to the kind of right-wing drivel that these people put out. But the average American doesn't want to hear it anymore. They don't want to hear all of the reasons why we've got to continue to send our people into the meat grinder of Iraq. They don't want to hear why it's good to have polluted air and filthy water, and products that will kill us. They don't want to hear that. But that's what the right-wing talkers promote.
BuzzFlash: You were at CNN under Ted Turner. It has obviously changed ownership, management, and style since then. The other day, The Daily Show had a satirical piece with Samantha Bee where basically she did a review of the attractive female anchors on television, and particularly CNN and Fox. Her theory was basically that we've got sexpots and hunks on television now, and that a large number of anchors are hired for their looks. I have to say that while it was satirical, her presentation was fairly convincing. You see women discussing the Iraq war in mini-skirts, leather boots and so forth, and kind of giggling and laughing and so forth. What has happened here? It's gone beyond being entertainment. It's almost titillation.
Mike Malloy: When I started at CNN, we had generic anchors. There was no sexualization, no titillation. The anchors sat behind a desk. There was no flirting with the camera.
But the target audience now for television news is people 18 to 34, whether they're men or women. Consequently, you're going to target that age group with what they're used to being targeted by, and that's an approach that's sexualized. But in the entire society, everything is sexualized.
If you're trying to attract young women, which advertisers are, then you put guys on who look like they might be able to go for a romp in the bed. On the other hand, if you take a close look a male anchors, you'll see that they're almost asexual. They're appealing in a cross-gender way. They don't put men on to appeal to women, and women on to appeal to men. They put people on to appeal across sexual orientation lines. There's a lot of male anchors that are on television right now who are very appealing on a homosexual level. And that's by design. They're trying to bring in viewers based on psychological marketing and market testing. Again, whether you're gay or straight, you are being targeted if you're in that 18 to 35 age group.
BuzzFlash: Isn't that consistent with how news has trivialized the Presidential races, for instance?
Mike Malloy: Oh, absolutely.
BuzzFlash: It's not where you stand on the issues, but do you look like a president? Bill O'Reilly was saying the other night that Mitt Romney looks like a president, so, how could he lose? He's got that jutting jaw. He's got the graying flecks of hair. He's over six feet. This man should be president because he looks like a president.
Mike Malloy: Yes. That's a primary example of why the American public is the most politically ignorant on earth, at least in industrialized countries. We are the most politically ignorant. And it's by design. Don't forget -- television specifically is a medium to make people forget. That is the sole function of television -- to make you forget.
Now I'm not talking about the commercials. The operative words in advertising are repetition and irritation. Those are the words that sell products -- repetition and irritation. But television itself -- the programming -- is designed to make you forget. You know, everybody talks about the fast news cycles. Well, sure, of course there are fast news cycles, because you are supposed to forget what you saw at 6:30 yesterday and replace it with what you're seeing at 6:30 today. As a result, the American public has absolutely zero historical sense, whether that history is twenty years or twenty days. People don't remember.
For example, this new guy that's the head of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick. How many people know that he was one of the signatories to this "Project for a New American Century" letter that went to Bill Clinton, demanding that he invade Iraq? Wolfowitz was involved in that, too. How many people remember that about Zoellick? Nobody. How many people can sit down and tell you about Bill Frist diagnosing a dying woman by looking at a videotape? And how many people can tell you that a special session of Congress was put together on the Terri Schiavo case, and that Bush came back from a vacation to sign that bill?
Television is designed to make people forget. Because if we remembered too much, we would all go mad. But the vast majority of people get the vast majority of current events and information that they think they need to survive from television. And they're getting misinformation, disinformation, lies, distortions.
When George Herbert Walker Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, then all of a sudden you have the networks marketing the war as if it's a goddamn car -- with graphics, and music, and drums, and new phrasing, and teaching America that it has to watch this network if it wants the real coverage of the Iraq war. I mean, this is beyond an obscenity. And what happens is Americans become unable to make decisions that are in their own best interest. And this is so upsetting to me, as you can probably tell.
BuzzFlash: One of the most symbolic mergers of news, entertainment, and Republican politics was the evening of the US attack on Iraq in 1991, the so-called shock and awe thing. I was watching CNN, and it was covered as if this was a fireworks display.
Mike Malloy: That's right. And every year on the anniversary of our 2003 invasion, I play a six-minute audio from CNN of the explosions going off. People always e-mail me and say: Oh, my God. Where did you get that? And I want to say, you know, that just happened four years ago. You saw it, and you watched it on CNN. But we play that audio every year just to remind people what it sounds like when you invade a country for no reason, and bomb the Christ out of it!
BuzzFlash: I think, if you played the visual tape as well as the audio tape, with a split screen with someone reporting on a fireworks display for July 4th, it would be the same thing. "Over there in the sky, that's quite a bright one there. And look, there's a little bit of yellow, and a little tungsten. Wait, wait, wait - there's one over there."
Mike Malloy: Yes.
BuzzFlash: War is a little bit louder. It's quite an amazing display of firepower. To me, sadly, the merger is complete between the political, mob-style muscling us into a war, and the entertainment and news that they have allowed to merge into one.
Mike Malloy: I had a very interesting experience when I left Chicago in 2000 and went to work for CNN International writing scripts for newscasts that went to CNN's international audience, not for domestic consumption. There was none of that bullshit. The male anchor I worked for was some old fart that if you saw him walking down the street, you'd think: Wow, there's somebody getting ready for a retirement check. The female anchors at CNNI were all from different parts of the globe. We would have a South Asian Indian woman and a Russian woman and someone from Wales. They would come to CNN to learn how to be anchors, and they'd go back to their own countries.
They would be hour-long newscasts, with no flash, no pizzazz. It would be kind of like the BBC Television newscast, with two people sitting there literally reading the news from teleprompters. There would be videotape and voiceovers -- there would be all the bells and whistles that you find in any newscast -- but there was no horseshit. There was no trying to seduce an audience.
The reason for it is very simple. In Israel, in Nigeria, in India, in Japan, when people sit down to look at the news, they want to find out what in the hell is going on. They don't want to have the latest news on some movie star. They want to know what the news is. So it was a real eye-opener for me as recently as 2000, and that was not what I was seeing on my nightly news.
BuzzFlash: BuzzFlash readers who have access to CNN International through satellite occasionally write to us. They complain that the angle that CNN International takes is very different than the American CNN -- that the American CNN is very close to the American government, in this case, the Bush Administration.
Mike Malloy: That's right. You know, on CNNI, you would never find a Wolf Blitzer, for one example. You're just not going to find that.
BuzzFlash: In radio, what difference does it make that people don't know what you look like, unless they go to your website? They're hearing a voice. They might imagine what you look like. But there's no chance of them being impacted by your visual presence. What difference does that make in radio as a medium, as compared to television?
Mike Malloy: I think it's a good thing. One of the descriptions of radio is that it provides a theater of the mind. You think about some of the most stunning examples in the history of radio was, of course, Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds." People thought they were were being invade by Martians because radio does provide a theater of the mind.
And I think it applies for talk radio now. When you listen to radio, you can construct scenarios, images, way beyond what televison provides. Radio requires you to really get involved. If somebody has a three-hour program, whether it's me or anyone else, that's really expecting a lot of people.
But there's an element of talk radio that is that theater of the mind. If the person behind the microphone can do it effectively, he or she can construct inside the listener's mind the images that the talk-show host wants that person to see. I think radio is more effective in a lot of ways than television, because it's a cooler medium in a McLuhanesqe sense. It's a cooler medium in that it requires more involvement.
Just listen to the difference in the two words: "watch television" versus "listen to talk radio." There's a big difference. Where television far exceeds every other medium is in the use of videotape -- the old idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. But again, that's a very forgetful thing. I think radio is more effective in that it sticks with you longer. It's the difference between having a donut for breakfast -- that would be television - or having a bowl of oatmeal -- and that would be radio.
BuzzFlash: Mike, thanks so much. And best of luck.
Mike Malloy: Thank you.
BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.
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Resources
http://novamradio.com/index.php?pid=25&HID=2
http://www.mikemalloy.com/
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Link (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/067)
Created 06/26/2007 - 3:54pm
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
"The playing field has never, ever, ever, ever been level between right wing and liberal. The genius of Limbaugh was not Limbaugh, it was Roger Ailes. ... the person who comes up with the best marketing idea is the person who usually comes up with the winner, not the person who comes up with the best product. Right-wing talk radio is not a good product. It's toxic. It's destructive. It's negative. But it had behind it a marketing genius, Roger Ailes."
-- Mike Malloy
* * *
Mike Malloy has spent nearly two decades representing an aggressively progressive perspective on radio programs in various markets. After departing in contentious circumstances from Air America Radio during their period of financial bankruptcy, Malloy was hired by NovaM Radio Network, the new kid on the block for developing progressive radio outlets and talent. (Interestingly enough, NovaM was founded by Anita and Sheldon Drobny, who began Air America Radio before leaving the struggling network during a "reorganization.")
Malloy has developed a core of fans known as "truthseekers." They are loyal and devoted, many of them BuzzFlash readers.
Mike is the fourth periodic BuzzFlash interview to introduce progressive talk show hosts to BuzzFlash readers. Our first three were with Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes and Stephanie Miller. We will be talking with other progressive radio personalities in the coming months. Our goal is to help build an audience for these programs.
Give them a listen. Most of them can be streamed online during their live broadcasts -- or check to see if they can be heard on a radio station in your area.
* * *
BuzzFlash: Where can people find out about when you're on, where you're on, and when to listen to you, including on the Internet?
Mike Malloy: Two sites - they can go to novamradio.com or they can go to mikemalloy.com. Preferably to novamradio.com, because there's so much there in addition to just my program, although it does carry a lot of information about my show, too.
BuzzFlash: Does your show stream live on the Internet?
Mike Malloy: Yes, from 9 ‘til midnight Eastern time, Monday through Friday.
BuzzFlash: How do you describe your style on the radio?
Mike Malloy: Regarding the political issues, it's very confrontational. Regarding my callers, I have no patience with Republicans or right-wingers, and very little patience with people who are middle of the road. I believe in what Jim Hightower said a long time ago: "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is a yellow line and dead armadillos."
To me, the only issues that exist right now are the issues of the corruption and the utter incompetence of the Bush Administration. Regarding those issues, my style, my approach, is very confrontational. I think this republic is under direct assault by a cadre of people who want to destroy it and replace it with totalitarianism. And that pisses me off to a degree I didn't know was possible. So I scream, I yell, I pound things, and occasionally I've been known to use bad language.
BuzzFlash: We've asked the other progressive talk-show hosts we've talked to very specifically, how you do handle callers? If a caller upsets you, do you just cut them off?
Mike Malloy: It depends on the nature of the caller. Over twenty years of talk radio, but especially in the past three or four years, I've found that most right-wing or conservative callers, or people who call who think they're going to challenge me on a specific point, are functionally illiterate. Their minds are capable of parroting only what they've heard from Rush Limbaugh, or a Free Republic, or Sean Hannity. They are incapable of carrying on a dialogue. They are eaten up with right-wing religious garbage.
I know that the majority of my audience doesn't want to hear this. They don't want to hear it because they deal with it constantly out in the real world -- at the workplace, in their churches, in their synagogues, on the bus, in the carpool, at the PTA meeting. They hear these right-wing parrots who are utterly eaten up with fear, utterly eaten up with ignorance. And these right-wingers get their strength only from repeating over and over what they've heard from right-wing radio or right-wing television. So I don't want them to call me.
I have no interest in converting them. I have no interest in hearing their point of view, because I know what their point of view is. The only thing I'm interested in doing with right-wingers or conservatives is hoping that maybe -- and I realize this is really reaching -- maybe they'll just sit back and listen to my program, and some spark will go off in their head that will make them want to do some independent research for the first time in their lives to find out how they've been lied to and led into this blind alley of right-wing idiocy.
BuzzFlash: Isn't that like expecting a reverse lobotomy to occur?
Mike Malloy: It is indeed. But hope springs eternal in the human breast, right? If I had completely given up, I think I would just resign from talk radio.
BuzzFlash: I think most BuzzFlash readers are aware that, when a talk-show host of any stripe is on the air, you have a monitor in front of you that tells you the calls that are in the queue and what the person wants to talk about.
Mike Malloy: Yes.
BuzzFlash: How do you use that, and how do you pick who you're going to talk to?
Mike Malloy: The callers who are most connected to what I just said in the previous ten minutes are the ones that I usually put on first. The other criterion is how long they've been on hold. With a three-hour program, I have a bad reputation of maybe not taking phone calls until the last 30 or 45 minutes. Consequently, while we have six lines for callers to get in the queue, I'll look at the times in addition to the subject. I look how long they've been on hold. And for example, last night, the first caller I took had been on hold for two hours and ten minutes. And her call was not necessarily exactly parallel to what I'd been talking about the previous ten minutes.
So it depends on what they told my call screener in Phoenix. He doesn't screen calls out. He just screens them to find out what it is they want to say. He'll type in maybe eight or nine pertinent words up on the screen for me, and how long they've been on hold. Those are usually the two criteria.
BuzzFlash: How do you prepare for a program? How much is planned in advance?
Mike Malloy: My background before I ever came to talk radio was in deadline writing, when I wrote for a newspaper, and deadline newscasts, when I worked at CNN. As a result, I have been known to have an entire show prepared for the radio, and if there's breaking news at six p.m. and I go on at nine, I'll just toss out what I have prepared for that day and go with the breaking news.
I try to keep my program as immediate as possible. If there is a major news story that happens at, say, eight o'clock at night, I'll try to have it on at nine o'clock. That's the result of working on deadline for newspapers and especially television. I worked as a writer at CNN, and you had to be able to completely rewrite your script on just a moment's notice if the story changed, or the executive producer wanted something else.
I pay attention to what's going on in broadcast media, including not just television, but also NPR or BBC Radio. I tune in periodically to as much broadcast media as I can during the day, and I subscribe to The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I will read those papers, and then go online and read LA Times, Washington Post, the British press, the Asian press, and if it's in English, the Middle Eastern press.
That also comes as a result of training at CNN. We were always told, back in the day -- I'm not sure it's true anymore -- but in the early Eighties, we were told to take a look at a story from four or five different reporting sources. If you had a story from the Associated Press, see what Reuters had. Then go ahead and see what the Soviet News Agency said, back then. See what the British news agency said. Take a look at the same story from four or five different angles. Sadly, that has kind of changed in the past twenty years. You have pretty much two points of view now -- the American point of view, and the rest of the world. What I have found is that the rest of the world is pretty much on the same page regarding American foreign policy, and it's usually almost diametrically opposed to what is being consumed by American news consumers.
BuzzFlash: What do you like most about being on radio as compared to doing news writing?
Mike Malloy: News writing was very restrictive, especially at CNN. Again, this was back when CNN was run by Turner, and it was run as a news organization. It is not run as a news organization now. But it was very restricted back then. Our senior editors, senior producers, supervising producers, would tell us repeatedly they did not want to find even a nuance of opinion in what we wrote, to the extent that it became a game.
There were about six of us working as writers at the same time, including Christiane Amanpour. Some of us would attempt to slant our stories with just one word, changing, for example, "would" to "could" -- and see if we could get it by the senior editor. We never could. We would kind of get our asses slapped for even attempting that. Writing news was very restricted back then.
Doing talk radio, there are absolutely no boundaries for me except those that might be imposed by FCC language rules and regs. At the last two networks I've worked for, Air America and now Nova M, there are no restrictions on what I've said. So the difference is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
News writing for television is a medium of very restricted time. The anchor people on the network news have about 22 minutes, after you take away the commercial and station breaks, to tell their story. Talk radio is a lot less restricted. I have three hours, and I can inject as much editorial or emotional content as I want to. As a matter of fact, that's what I'm supposed to do. That's what talk radio is all about -- injecting me, Mike Malloy, into the story -- my personal, gut-level feelings about things. I also bring in what has funneled into me from the listeners via e-mail, letters, phone calls, or what-have-you.
I consider myself to be pretty much 90% as common as dirt. I feel like, if I like a movie, most of America likes the movie, and vice-versa. If I have a liberal point of view on something, I know it's shared by most liberals.
BuzzFlash: We asked this of Randi Rhodes, and I'll ask it of you. What would you be doing if you weren't a radio talk-show host?
Mike Malloy: Probably writing for television news. It might have to be the foreign media, like Greg Palast has been working for the BBC because his approach was too strong for American television. I'd probably be writing for television or broadcast, somewhere on the planet, for my income. For catharsis, I would be writing columns or feature articles that had a political point of view. And if I could find the time and the discipline, I would write fiction. Writing would pretty much be it.
BuzzFlash: Talk radio is quite different from writing, in that you're connected to your audience and there's an immediacy.
Mike Malloy: That's true. I also had five years of theater here in Atlanta. I went into theater to do playwriting, and wound up getting into the acting end of it because it looked very easy, which it's not. But I took classes and was with a theater company here for four or five years, the Southern Theater Consortium. While I'm certainly not by any means an accomplished actor, I still had the training to understand the importance of breaking down as much as possible the so-called "fourth wall" between the actors and the audience. And theater is an immediate medium, because when the play's over, you get the applause or the garbage thrown at you.
I think I carry that into talk radio, and I've done it specifically and deliberately. There's an awful lot of theater in the kind of talk radio that I do. And I relish that; I'm proud of that; I think that's a good thing, to be able to translate the day's horrific political events into something that connects with people on an emotional level, because it damn sure connects with me on an emotional level. If I can do that, then I feel like I'm doing what talk radio should be about.
I go for the gut, not the head, because that's where I'm motivated. I can intellectualize until the cows come home, and that's fine. I mean, there certainly is a time for intellectualization. But most of us don't live in our heads, we live in our emotions. That's what motivates us. That's what makes us get up. So I try to stay in that strong, emotional, theatrical area.
BuzzFlash: In talk radio there's a yardstick people use in talking about building a large audience, and it's usually Rush Limbaugh. Clearly, they've had money behind them to get them going and to build an audience. Do you think progressives are going to get just as invested in an emotional sort of way, in a radio program about the issues, or are the people on the right more raw-meat oriented -- more likely to listen to someone who gets them all charged up or appeals to their basest instincts? Or are we just at a point still where we haven't marketed progressive talk well enough?
Mike Malloy: I tend not to think it's an either/or situation. Limbaugh is a standard only to right-wingers. Now how did Rush Limbaugh get to where he's at, and why is talk radio dominated by right wingers? It has nothing to do with audience choices whatsoever. As a matter of fact, when Limbaugh broke out in the mid-Eighties, the way he broke out was that Roger Ailes, who went on to found the Fox News Network, came up with a marketing idea. He said to small and medium markets in places like Bowling Green, Kentucky, or Albuquerque, New Mexico, "I have a three-hour program. It's on from noon to three, and it's conservative, so it'll gel well with your advertisers. And I'll give it to you free. All you have to do is give me X number of minutes per hour that I will, in turn, sell to national advertisers."
Well, the small to medium markets salivated over that. They said: Oh, my God. We get a free program, and all it costs us is a few minutes out of each hour for advertising that Roger Ailes turns around and sells. Rush Limbaugh went from being -- now I'm exaggerating, but not by much -- he went from being on maybe five stations to being on five hundred. And as a marketing approach, it had nothing whatsoever, and it never has had anything to do, with people calling radio stations and saying: Gee, will you put Rush Limbaugh on? Will you put right-wing talk radio on? That has never been the case.
The playing field has never, ever, ever, ever been level between right wing and liberal. The genius of Limbaugh was not Limbaugh, it was Roger Ailes. This is America, but you can't buy it. This is a marketing Petri dish, this country, this society of ours. So the person who comes up with the best marketing idea is the person who usually comes up with the winner, not the person who comes up with the best product. Right-wing talk radio is not a good product. It's toxic. It's destructive. It's negative. But it had behind it a marketing genius, Roger Ailes. So all of a sudden, you had the availability of a conservative talk show.
So what happens next? Mid-level managers in this country -- I don't care if they're in media or in manufacturing -- mid-level managers, for the most part, are conservative. They're conservative because they're cowardly. If you remember, there was a book from the Sixties called The Peter Principle, which stated clearly that people in organizations rise to their level of incompetence and then stay there. Now in radio, in the Eighties especially, there was a level of mid-level management in radio stations that was totally uncreative. They couldn't find their ass with both hands. All of a sudden, you have a guy who's on five hundred radio stations. Well, what are you going to do? You're going to say: Ooh, there's a success. And you're going to grab for it.
It doesn't make any difference that Limbaugh is anti-American, he's anti-woman, he's anti-democratic process, he's anti-U.S. Constitution, he's pro-war, he's pro-death, he's pro-upper class. None of that matters. What matters is the program was free. This is America.
So there's never been a level playing field. When you have a Limbaugh or a Hannity, or any of these jerks on the right, say that the marketplace determines what's on radio, not only is that a lie, it's a goddamn lie. The marketplace has never, ever, ever been fair and balanced for people to make a choice.
Now there's a postscript to this. As talk radio became more and more right wing, the audience started to shrink. There are 75 million adults in this country who would listen to talk radio but don't because it's mostly right wing. The other 75 million who do listen are right wingers. So if you pick a city, and Rush Limbaugh has X amount of market share there, that doesn't mean that he's got X amount of potential listeners. It means he has X amount of the people who are listening. If most of the people who are listening are right wingers, it becomes a closed loop, and it makes it appear that a Limbaugh or a Hannity have these phenomenal ratings when they don't. The universe of talk radio has shrunk.
Now liberal talk or progressive talk networks are opening up the market. They're bringing people back into that universe of those who want to listen to talk radio. If the progressive networks can continue, people like Hannity and Limbaugh and Mike Savage will become nothing but postscripts or asterisks to the history of talk radio, because people don't want to hear that. They'll listen to it if they're already committed to the kind of right-wing drivel that these people put out. But the average American doesn't want to hear it anymore. They don't want to hear all of the reasons why we've got to continue to send our people into the meat grinder of Iraq. They don't want to hear why it's good to have polluted air and filthy water, and products that will kill us. They don't want to hear that. But that's what the right-wing talkers promote.
BuzzFlash: You were at CNN under Ted Turner. It has obviously changed ownership, management, and style since then. The other day, The Daily Show had a satirical piece with Samantha Bee where basically she did a review of the attractive female anchors on television, and particularly CNN and Fox. Her theory was basically that we've got sexpots and hunks on television now, and that a large number of anchors are hired for their looks. I have to say that while it was satirical, her presentation was fairly convincing. You see women discussing the Iraq war in mini-skirts, leather boots and so forth, and kind of giggling and laughing and so forth. What has happened here? It's gone beyond being entertainment. It's almost titillation.
Mike Malloy: When I started at CNN, we had generic anchors. There was no sexualization, no titillation. The anchors sat behind a desk. There was no flirting with the camera.
But the target audience now for television news is people 18 to 34, whether they're men or women. Consequently, you're going to target that age group with what they're used to being targeted by, and that's an approach that's sexualized. But in the entire society, everything is sexualized.
If you're trying to attract young women, which advertisers are, then you put guys on who look like they might be able to go for a romp in the bed. On the other hand, if you take a close look a male anchors, you'll see that they're almost asexual. They're appealing in a cross-gender way. They don't put men on to appeal to women, and women on to appeal to men. They put people on to appeal across sexual orientation lines. There's a lot of male anchors that are on television right now who are very appealing on a homosexual level. And that's by design. They're trying to bring in viewers based on psychological marketing and market testing. Again, whether you're gay or straight, you are being targeted if you're in that 18 to 35 age group.
BuzzFlash: Isn't that consistent with how news has trivialized the Presidential races, for instance?
Mike Malloy: Oh, absolutely.
BuzzFlash: It's not where you stand on the issues, but do you look like a president? Bill O'Reilly was saying the other night that Mitt Romney looks like a president, so, how could he lose? He's got that jutting jaw. He's got the graying flecks of hair. He's over six feet. This man should be president because he looks like a president.
Mike Malloy: Yes. That's a primary example of why the American public is the most politically ignorant on earth, at least in industrialized countries. We are the most politically ignorant. And it's by design. Don't forget -- television specifically is a medium to make people forget. That is the sole function of television -- to make you forget.
Now I'm not talking about the commercials. The operative words in advertising are repetition and irritation. Those are the words that sell products -- repetition and irritation. But television itself -- the programming -- is designed to make you forget. You know, everybody talks about the fast news cycles. Well, sure, of course there are fast news cycles, because you are supposed to forget what you saw at 6:30 yesterday and replace it with what you're seeing at 6:30 today. As a result, the American public has absolutely zero historical sense, whether that history is twenty years or twenty days. People don't remember.
For example, this new guy that's the head of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick. How many people know that he was one of the signatories to this "Project for a New American Century" letter that went to Bill Clinton, demanding that he invade Iraq? Wolfowitz was involved in that, too. How many people remember that about Zoellick? Nobody. How many people can sit down and tell you about Bill Frist diagnosing a dying woman by looking at a videotape? And how many people can tell you that a special session of Congress was put together on the Terri Schiavo case, and that Bush came back from a vacation to sign that bill?
Television is designed to make people forget. Because if we remembered too much, we would all go mad. But the vast majority of people get the vast majority of current events and information that they think they need to survive from television. And they're getting misinformation, disinformation, lies, distortions.
When George Herbert Walker Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, then all of a sudden you have the networks marketing the war as if it's a goddamn car -- with graphics, and music, and drums, and new phrasing, and teaching America that it has to watch this network if it wants the real coverage of the Iraq war. I mean, this is beyond an obscenity. And what happens is Americans become unable to make decisions that are in their own best interest. And this is so upsetting to me, as you can probably tell.
BuzzFlash: One of the most symbolic mergers of news, entertainment, and Republican politics was the evening of the US attack on Iraq in 1991, the so-called shock and awe thing. I was watching CNN, and it was covered as if this was a fireworks display.
Mike Malloy: That's right. And every year on the anniversary of our 2003 invasion, I play a six-minute audio from CNN of the explosions going off. People always e-mail me and say: Oh, my God. Where did you get that? And I want to say, you know, that just happened four years ago. You saw it, and you watched it on CNN. But we play that audio every year just to remind people what it sounds like when you invade a country for no reason, and bomb the Christ out of it!
BuzzFlash: I think, if you played the visual tape as well as the audio tape, with a split screen with someone reporting on a fireworks display for July 4th, it would be the same thing. "Over there in the sky, that's quite a bright one there. And look, there's a little bit of yellow, and a little tungsten. Wait, wait, wait - there's one over there."
Mike Malloy: Yes.
BuzzFlash: War is a little bit louder. It's quite an amazing display of firepower. To me, sadly, the merger is complete between the political, mob-style muscling us into a war, and the entertainment and news that they have allowed to merge into one.
Mike Malloy: I had a very interesting experience when I left Chicago in 2000 and went to work for CNN International writing scripts for newscasts that went to CNN's international audience, not for domestic consumption. There was none of that bullshit. The male anchor I worked for was some old fart that if you saw him walking down the street, you'd think: Wow, there's somebody getting ready for a retirement check. The female anchors at CNNI were all from different parts of the globe. We would have a South Asian Indian woman and a Russian woman and someone from Wales. They would come to CNN to learn how to be anchors, and they'd go back to their own countries.
They would be hour-long newscasts, with no flash, no pizzazz. It would be kind of like the BBC Television newscast, with two people sitting there literally reading the news from teleprompters. There would be videotape and voiceovers -- there would be all the bells and whistles that you find in any newscast -- but there was no horseshit. There was no trying to seduce an audience.
The reason for it is very simple. In Israel, in Nigeria, in India, in Japan, when people sit down to look at the news, they want to find out what in the hell is going on. They don't want to have the latest news on some movie star. They want to know what the news is. So it was a real eye-opener for me as recently as 2000, and that was not what I was seeing on my nightly news.
BuzzFlash: BuzzFlash readers who have access to CNN International through satellite occasionally write to us. They complain that the angle that CNN International takes is very different than the American CNN -- that the American CNN is very close to the American government, in this case, the Bush Administration.
Mike Malloy: That's right. You know, on CNNI, you would never find a Wolf Blitzer, for one example. You're just not going to find that.
BuzzFlash: In radio, what difference does it make that people don't know what you look like, unless they go to your website? They're hearing a voice. They might imagine what you look like. But there's no chance of them being impacted by your visual presence. What difference does that make in radio as a medium, as compared to television?
Mike Malloy: I think it's a good thing. One of the descriptions of radio is that it provides a theater of the mind. You think about some of the most stunning examples in the history of radio was, of course, Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds." People thought they were were being invade by Martians because radio does provide a theater of the mind.
And I think it applies for talk radio now. When you listen to radio, you can construct scenarios, images, way beyond what televison provides. Radio requires you to really get involved. If somebody has a three-hour program, whether it's me or anyone else, that's really expecting a lot of people.
But there's an element of talk radio that is that theater of the mind. If the person behind the microphone can do it effectively, he or she can construct inside the listener's mind the images that the talk-show host wants that person to see. I think radio is more effective in a lot of ways than television, because it's a cooler medium in a McLuhanesqe sense. It's a cooler medium in that it requires more involvement.
Just listen to the difference in the two words: "watch television" versus "listen to talk radio." There's a big difference. Where television far exceeds every other medium is in the use of videotape -- the old idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. But again, that's a very forgetful thing. I think radio is more effective in that it sticks with you longer. It's the difference between having a donut for breakfast -- that would be television - or having a bowl of oatmeal -- and that would be radio.
BuzzFlash: Mike, thanks so much. And best of luck.
Mike Malloy: Thank you.
BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.
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Resources
http://novamradio.com/index.php?pid=25&HID=2
http://www.mikemalloy.com/
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Link (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/067)