Posted on 09/10/2002 5:41:35 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Those two observations are not a criticism of the general conclusions of the article - with which I am in agreement.
When I came to Atlanta, I was a morning drive talk show host at a "black talk" radio station here. I was also lucky enough to be the Program Director and Station Manager at the same time.
The station was languishing at the bottom of the ratings, and was the place where black folks got to yell at each other and to commiserate about how "the white devils got us down."
When I hit the door, I didn't call myself conservative yet - I was pretty much still in "transition mode" in my way of thinking. But I talked about thinking and doing for yourself as opposed to being wrapped up in any sort of group think.
The one common thread that I noticed - and it got even more vocal as my transition to conservative became complete there - was that if anyone didn't toe the line; didn't follow the unwritten code of the "soul patrol," they were ostracized, derided and worse.
The other hosts (all liberal) didn't have the issues that I had from callers - they parrotted the party line, and in more than one case, they instigated things.
I really sent them into a quandry when I took a lesbian host, Alicia Banks, from an one-hour (some would say obscure, although she had her own core audience) Saturday show - very, radically, no--rabidly left-wing - and put her on during the week in the middle of the day; 1-3 PM.
There were some that couldn't handle the fact that she was a lesbian; while on the other hand, because she said the things that they loved and wanted to hear. She would deride anyone who didn't toe the line. She still falls into that mold today - if you follow the link to her site, put your seat belt on, she's way far afield.
Then to really send things into a tailspin, I put Ken Hamblin's syndicated show on immediately behind her at 3. The "soul patrol" was really in a tizzy.
I was completely unapologetic. I knew who the core audience of the station was, and I wanted to grow it. What better way to do so than to build a huge fire. And you know what? It started working, albeit slowly. I got more than one death threat during that timeframe, and one person actually called the station's switchboard demanding to know what kind of car I drove.
I got a few letters, some demanding to know who and what gave me permission to come into "their" community and make the kinds of changes I was making; one insisted that I had sold my soul and that I was married to a white woman who had put these "turncoat" thoughts into my head (She-who-must-be-obeyed is very much a beautiful black woman - probably more conservative than me in some ways - and she got a huge kick out that letter).
Needless to say, when you put that together with other things that I was doing to the station (mind you without a budget to do it with), I was making people sit up and take notice. In a major coup for Atlanta radio, within a three-week time-frame, I had snagged the exclusive NBA radio affiliation as well as the CNN Radio affiliation for Atlanta.
When the bottom fell out (the station was sold out from underneath me, and everyone was fired), we were tracking to make the first real ratings the station had been able to garner in more than ten years.
Ah, well, I digress. Needless to say, the notion of liberal talk radio will stay dead until and unless they can get over their emotional attachment to not telling the truth, and having their myths shattered by smart callers...
A quartet of articles from today's New York Times on taxes and the wealthy. They provide another reason why this issue can't be effectively discussed on talk radio - it's too complicated.
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