Posted on 06/04/2012 6:02:54 AM PDT by TomServo
Yes it is.
"Ludlow Porch" -- I remember the name from the dim past, was he one of those "alternative personalities" shock-jocks sometimes use (I think Mancow's alter ego on his show, his Charlie McCarthy, is Mancow himself doing a voice or "dialect" -- speaking of radio personalities who are a waste of brainpower -- I think people's IQ's actually decline actively while listening to Mancow: a National Merit Scholarship finalist with a 154 IQ at 6pm becomes a 119-IQ also-ran by 11 pm).
The old second-banana/butt-of-the-joke fall guy is an old act in radio/TV, and I think it's become stale. I remember the way Branford Marsalis got used on the Tonight show; I can understand why he left. Damn few people have the constitution for a long-running Ed McMahon/"Rochester" act.
Yes, I think I was listening to some of his repartee that time I was listening to him to scope his position on something, but I think it was a caller. I could be wrong. But I remember thinking that Boortz flunks "plays well with others". Bill Bennett, Hannity, and Dennis Miller are among the few who pass as being totally civil with guests. Rush doesn't have guests on his show -- that "nonguested confrontation" format that he shares with Levin and Doc Savage, and which Ed Schultz was paid to imitate.
Ludlow Porch died last year, he was a folksy sort of Wil Rogers kind of guy. The male version of Celestine Sibley. Older Atlantans would know both.
Agree with you all the way except Hannity. Hannity’s juvenile and repetitive format is unbelievably boring, and he doesn’t give his guests a chance to speak. He talks over them constantly, and doesn’t have the intellectual heft to engage in a stimulating conversation.
Hannity is kindergarten for conservatives. Rush is post-graduate.
I like Boortz because he is all over the place in his thinking, and like he says - “Somebody’s got to say it.” I like his niche and can separate his good from his bad.
I still think Mancow is the other guy, too, the stupid one. Something he does with ease.
I don’t know anything about Mancow, although I bet he caught hell in grade school with that last name.
About this time of year, Neal Boortz always laments that he has never been asked to give a commencement speech. He's written and delivered a couple of them over the airwaves.
He once gave a speech to a crowd of his supporters at Kennesaw State University, in the guise of what he would tell a graduating class if he had the chance. I think it was at a Fair Tax rally, but it clearly could have been at something else. That speech was replayed a week ago today on his show.
Somebody took the transcript and played a prank in an email circulating the transcript, suggesting that Boortz had delivered the speech at Texas A&M (Boortz's alma mater) and adding a bunch of details that were nonsense, including that detail about silence from the faculty section.
Hannity is kindergarten for conservatives. Rush is post-graduate.
I agree with your comments about Hannity, and part of the problem is that he is very demonstrative and declamatory, but he wears a RNC ring in his nose, like Michael Medved and a couple of other soft-conservative, more "Republican" talk-show talents, Mike Gallagher and Dennis Prager.
I think the intellectual heavyweights are Bill Bennett, Doc Savage, and, more because of their astuteness, Rush, Levin, and Glenn Beck, despite Beck's openness to being lured (IMHO, I just have an impression about it w/o having listened to his show a lot) into areas calculated to damage his credibility.
Rush is living proof that you don't need a master's from a liberal arts college or JFK or an Ivy, to have a good all-round political education and a public man. The snobs would like to change that, take politics private.
I lost the link when I lost my post, but here is a good whine from the Left about talk-radio, dating from 1/07.
Air America’s ideological course has often been unclear if not wishy-washy. Over all, while hosts have been good at belittling George Bush and other Republicans and conservatives, they have not been good at articulating a progressive agenda. This may stem in part from the way Air America hosts tend to cleave to a Democratic Party line that has itself often been hard to decipher in recent years.
This would not happen in conservative talk. For one thing, the Republicans with whom the conservative talkers ally themselves are virtually never at a loss as to exactly what their agenda is. But there’s also a spirit of independence in conservative talk that leads hosts to sometimes criticize the Republicans for not taking a principled right-wing stand. For instance, recently conservative hosts have widely criticized congressional Republicans and the White House for being soft on immigration and federal spending.
Right-wing radio’s role as a conservative vanguard may be irksome to GOP officials on occasion, but conservative talk, even when it’s critical, still benefits the GOP. That’s because conservative talk radio is not just a laboratory and echo chamber for testing and amplifying the party’s ideas and policies. More than that, its most influential hosts—e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage—are often ideologically situated on the far-right flank of the party, so conservative talk serves to widen the national political spectrum to the right, giving cover to Republican politicians by allowing them to appear more moderate by contrast.
(Emphases added)
Praise extorted from the mouths of your enemies is the sweetest whine of all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Boortz was carried for a while -- before Rush went wide -- by a clear-channel Atlanta station, giving him regional reach, or by a satellite superstation that "got him out" beyond Atlanta and Georgia. But I'm trying to recall things half-remembered here.
Regardless, Rush didn’t ‘walk through’ a door Boortz opened; he did it on his own.
I meant in the sense that Boortz proved that political talk radio can build and hold an audience and a market. You'll recall that other early talkers like Laura Schlessinger may have been culturally conservative, but their shows were either lifestyle, or entertainment chat, or sports chat -- Boortz was doing the news-politics talk format that made Rush, 15 years before Rush did it. Boortz didn't give Rush a specific opportunity or introduction to someone; rather, he proved the concept.
There’s that one, and the now famous “Boo got shot” by the late Royal. I chuckle every time I think about it.
Perhaps I was thinking of Hannity's older show with Alan Colmes. Nevertheless, I had the impression from listening to him for a few hours over the last year, that he isn't rude or overbearing with guests unless he gets a Mau-Mau or a seminar caller, and he gets his share of both. I thought he was decent to his guests, but I'll pay a little more attention to that next time.
I’ll miss Boortz being on the air. I always loved how he mocked the “I’m never listening to your show again!” crowd.
“So what if the intelectualy unimmpresive primma dona new how to spel. Kolor mi unimprest.”
Yeah, “Kolor” and not “Kolour”!
Hate to see him go. He’s actually the first talk radio show I listened to. What I enjoyed most about his was his libertarian ways, and his remarkable ability to piss off virtually everyone in a day, yet you want to tune in again the next day to listen for more. He also never ‘carried the water’ for any political party. He would tell it like was.
Heard Boortz’ own comments on his impending retirement, and it sounded like he made a conscious decision to go Galt.
Me too. You're depending on an old fart's memory with me. I listened to him for years and I just never got the impression he ever was as wide-spread as Rush - ever.
Boortz left WGST sometime in 1991 and then came on with WSB (a real "clear-channel" vs. the corporate Clear Channel) in 1992 - 4 years after Rush went nationwide.
In fact, my overall impression is that while he gave the one-up to people like Hannity, it was Hannity who helped propel Boortz into the limelite by appearances, talk-up, introductions, etc.
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