Poole/Jennings

I haven't changed my stance on anonymity. It is not inherently good or bad. People can be truthful or not; write interesting and useful posts that add to public debate or lousy posts, either way. It's like my old advertising professor used to say:

"There is no such thing as bad advertising, just crummy ads or insufficient audience. Saying 'advertising is bad' like saying 'motherhood is bad'."

Call in the Big Show

So my decision with the call-in project was where to call. This was the easiest part. The only kind of call-in show I am really interested in is sports. Given that there no longer is a local sports show that I receive, and I have no interest in Those Idiots On Fox, as I call them, that leaves WEEI.

My first plan was to call them last weekend, because I figured I would have an easier time getting on the air, but their coverage of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament on Saturday, and the Red Sox spring training game on Sunday neatly covered all of the possible hours I was able to call in.

Wiki world

Having just seen the Pogues March 12th in Boston, I thought it would be fun to update the Pogues page on Wikipedia.

I also have been a big fan of my Thursday Night Baseball teammate Justine Siegal's efforts to throw batting practice to six different Major League Baseball teams, so decided to edit the Women's Baseball page to include her info.

Overall I found Wikipedia easy and intuitive to use, very similar to Blogger. Most functions (adding links, references) I could figure out myself. Stuff I couldn't figure out was easy enough to find in the help sections.

Is talk radio "journalism"?

In general, the answer to this question is "no."
Journalism requires a commitment to principles: finding out the truth, fairness, verifying facts, looking out for the interests of readers/listeners instead of advertisers etc.

Genereally, none of these are present in talk radio. This doesn't mean that there aren't issues of importance discussed. Often there are. But talk radio is an entertainment format. There is no presumption that the hosts, producers or call screeners are trying to follow journalistic principles.

Talk Radio callers

My initial answer to the question to the question:

"How does Bogosian portray the talk radio callers?"

is "with great disdain."

The difference between a work of drama and the every day reality of call in radio is in a drama, all of the callers need to advance the plot of that drama. The run-of-the-mill caller has no place in a drama. As a result, all of the callers in Talk Radio are greatly caricatured. They all server to illustrate how stupid the Champlain character's callers are and show how fed up he is with them and how he is smarter than them. The only caller who asks a sensible question, one of those identified only as "caller", asks

"why does an intelligent fellow like yourself spend so much energy hurting other people?"

is hung up on, leaving the question unanswered.

Talk radio and responsibility

The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “we’re better”—strenuously—or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating.

--Host by David Foster Wallace

Certainly this quote is an accurate description of the facts relative to commercial talk radio. John Ziegler has one job: bring in ratings to maximize billing for the radio station.Whether what he chooses to do for a living is making the world a better place, a worse place, or not doing either is between him and his sense of morality. Like the rest of us.

Ziegler comparison

It seems to compare John Ziegler to other talk radio hosts, it make sense to compare him to other political, conservative hosts. To compare him to the Car Talk hosts or Jim Rome would be silly.

From the descriptions in the story Host by David Foster Wallace, he sounds more sensible and polite than many of his contemporaries.Granted, that's not high praise, give how far off the deep end Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and others are. To be sure, I think his brand of spreading hate is lowering the debate in this country at the best, at the worst encouraging racism. To say that "...we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than.." the (undefined) "Arab world" is, based on the actions of the most extreme members of the Muslim faith is the same as defining "we" by the actions of Timothy McVeigh.