At 07:41 PM 03/01/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
> MSNBC just fired Phil Donahue after a marketing report
> outlined a "nightmare scenario" in which MSNBC was perceived
> as giving a forum to anti-war sentiment while all other
> networks were engaged in patriotic flag-waving.
You are making all this crap up. For example Donahue was fired
because few were watching him sneer at them. Liberals cannot
succeed in talk shows because they hate and despise their audience.
He was getting about one quarter the audience of the competion.
Nah. It's not that liberals hate and despise their audiences
any more than conservatives do (oh, come on now, can you tell me
Ollie North doesn't disrespect the people he lies to?)
I don't get the impression that Oprah's a flaming conservative,
though she may not be the most liberal person around,
but she seems to do just fine at _her_ talk show.
And Howard Stern seems to be successful, in between getting
kicked off the air occasionally for tastelessness.
Donahue stopped being on the air years ago because he'd
used up his supply of imagination and interestingness
(not that I was ever a fan of his), and dragging back someone
who used to be interesting just because you hope maybe he'll be
interesting again is usually a losing game; talk shows aren't sitcoms
and they don't make good nostalgic reruns, though an occasional
rerun of, say, David Frost interviewing Nixon might be fun.
(There are a few exceptions, like the Canadian import Sue Johangten
doing the Sunday Night Sex Show on cable tv.)
Most of the national talk shows on radio are either conservatives
or ranting right wingers or sports shows (which don't count.)
The ranters get some mileage out of insulting people for a while,
trying to keep finding new people to hate and insult,
but it gets old after a while, and now that there's no longer
a Clinton Administration supplying easy targets, it's hard to sustain.
Some of them manage to be entertaining and interesting for a long time,
but it's hard to get more than your fifteen minutes of fame unless
you're really skilled at it (anybody still remember Mort Downey Jr?)
And radio talk is easier to do well than TV talk; even Limbaugh
couldn't sustain the latter, and I assume Dr. Laura's gone too.
The more interesting problem is watching the national syndicated shows
try to take over for the locals. Limbaugh's the classic,
and in general it's been conservatives who succeeded, though
Jim Hightower was around for a while. Most of the nationalists
have been political, while the locals have had much more mixed topics,
typically focusing on local issues as well as national, and not all politics,
and they're often more likely to be liberals, like Bernie Ward in SF.
