I like Dan but he’s not a radio guy. People like Rush, Beck, Maddow and Wilcow were radio people (DJs) before they became talk show hosts. They understood the business and how to handle an audience and manage the clock long before they started as talk show hosts. To seasoned hosts, five seconds is a lifetime, to Dan it just means he has to talk faster.
Radio people know how to make the content about the audience, “playing your favorite songs” or “topics we need to discuss” whereas Dan makes it too much about himself when most people don’t even know him yet. He needs to slow down.
Rush would have an occasional “4th hour” and frequently stated that he ran out of time long before he ran out of topics.
I give him six months to get into game shape and start to make the connection with the audiences.
I’ve given him two weeks of listening...in edited/time compressed form. 3 hrs chock full of commercials and interruptions is a hiding to nothing.
The challenges (to use a charitable term) in presentation and format remain.
Someone, possibly Bongino himself, or more likely management, syndicators, etc. have convinced him to take a softer, almost confessional tone.
There are immediate problems with this:
1) This is radio. As in audio. It depends entirely on sound produced, sound detected, sound transmitted, sound perceived.
I realize Bongino has a bit of a raspy voice which complements his hard-bitten image but if someone has a raspy voice then HE CANNOT WHISPER. A $7,000-10,000 condenser microphone is highly accurate and sensitive but it can only transmit what it ‘hears.’ His rapid-fire delivery with a hint of accent only exacerbates the problem.
Many of us were first exposed to Bongino as a guest host for Mark Levin. On that show Bongino was audible, forceful and stopped for breath - which was a form of ‘punctuation.’
To be fair, in the time between then and now Bongino has undergone elaborate treatment for cancer and that may have affected his voice, his stamina, etc. But he’s a smart lad and I doubt he would take on something if he didn’t feel up to it.
Rush Limbaugh was famous, and constantly mocked, for his rather foghorn-like delivery. In his early days it was a bit of an affectation...a wink at the audience. The bluster became the target of critics, not the ideas he presented, but that was more or less by design. After his deafness set in and before his cancer the delivery became loud because he couldn’t hear himself properly.
Beyond Rush, Chris Plante, Mark Levin and others are loud and proud on mic. We can always compress and limit peaks in volume. Raising the gain when someone is inaudible means raising the ‘noise floor’ of extraneous sounds in the room, electronic hum or hiss, etc.
2) His delivery of material is all over the shop. As above, when guest hosting for Levin, Bongino would set the dominoes up and knock them down in order with very few diversions. It was clear, it was concise, it was powerful, it was unflinching and it was captivating.
We don’t have that now. Being grateful for an audience, affiliates and a radio platform is nice and all but the Alphonse & Gaston routine of interrupting himself to thank people destroys his train of thought and therefore his train of delivery. If this is ‘theatre of the mind’ then we can’t have the curtain lowering and raising and the house lights coming up at random intervals.
Dare I say it? Bongino is suffering from Joe Biden disease with the frequent remarks of ‘Oh I’m going to get in trouble for that one.’ We get it - it’s an orator’s trick - a bit of humility meant to ingratiate oneself with the audience. But it can’t be done repeatedly as it loses its ‘currency’ quickly and becomes yet another distraction from the topic being discussed.
3) Mr Bongino’s background is laudable and well-known but he isn’t an agent or a cop anymore. It’s great that he has ties to the Secret Service and police but the frequently elliptical, cryptic references to law enforcement’s reports, intelligence, actions - without endangering plans or operations - are something of a disservice to the audience and to himself. If he has something solid that can be disclosed, then by all means do it, as he did with FISA, Russia, FBI/DOJ, etc. He’s in the media now, with all that entails, good or bad.
4) Per a previous post, the show needs bookends and markers. A familiar, clear appealing theme. Michael Savage-style instrumental nu-metal isn’t going to suffice even though it may sound street-tough.
It doesn’t have to be commercial music, including the ‘beds’ often sold to stations. Get a bespoke theme. Thousand of musicians would jump at the chance for notoriety and/or royalties. Although Limbaugh adopted the Pretenders’ song, it became as familiar as his theme.
A new, custom Bongino theme would be, as the marketing types say, audio or sound branding (eg the two-note Honda piano ID).
Bongino should do away with his NPR-style outro of ‘I’m Dan Bongino and this is the Dan Bongino Show.’ It’s redundant. It’s self-evident. It eats up airtime. Play music and increase the volume towards the end of the segment a la Chris Plante. Have a separate announcer give the show ID. Or, as in a previous post, develop an end-of-segment sound effect to be used consistently a la Rush.
These sounds become Pavlovian cues to the audience who know where they are in a broadcast hour and will, consciously or unconsciously, adjust their activities and their schedules to maintain or expand the time spent listening ie the magical ‘quarter hour’ ratings that media companies obsess over.
Finally, with the Clay Travis/Buck Sexton 12 noon show quickly approaching, there will be competition. Competition is good but we don’t want it to kill off the competitors. Travis is a very clear and measured speaker...Sexton does more of the conspiratorial close-mic stuff that Bongino does. But they will have a contrast and and a conversational presentation since there will be two of them, with Travis likely taking the tiller and drawing comments from Sexton more often than the other way round.
I really do want Bongino to succeed and I believe he can do this by being his old self which I believe is his real self. Stop pulling punches, stop apologizing, stop giving disclaimers. Hit them between the eyes every day and reap the rewards.