> While driving last week on a long-distance journey through the US
> heartland, I kept flipping the radio in a vain attempt to stave off
> boredom. Occasionally I'd get a scratchy CBS affiliate here and there. I'd
> hear the usual entertainment-masquerading as news, and then a sudden,
> jarring sound bite: "The Pentagon reports that a major leader responsible
> for recent terror attacks in Baghdad was captured today..." Click. Some
> preacher, ranting about end times. Click. Some tinhorn military life-form
> yelping about Islamofascism on Fox. Click. Schmaltzy big band music from
> the 1950s. Click.
>
> It was like the sonic equivalent of the hotel in "The Shining". All those
> endless corridors and identical rooms, opening into madness... only this
> wasn't the madness of the Empire's beginning. It was the madness of its
> end.
LOL. When you live out here in Kansas City, you have to spend lots of time in the car listening to the radio. Kansas City, as I like to say, is the Los Angeles of the prairie.
I hate to admit this, but I was kind of pissed when a local AM station dropped Alan Colmes from their programming a few weeks ago. He may be a tepid liberal, but his show was the most tolerable political talk show on KC radio in the late evening. With the removal of Colmes, two of the AM stations are constant right wing talk all day long.
We have an excellent FM independent leftie station. KKFI has lots of good programming, but they don't have any political talk in the afternoon or the evening. They have some hour talk shows around dinner time. Their best talk shows come on after midnight on several nights. These are live call-in shows and the content is a very politically incorrect mixture of liberal and libertarian talk. I'm sure the core audience of Amy Goodman-listening, granola-munching peaceniks would have heart attacks if they were awake to hear these shows. KKFI does many things right, but I'm really turned off by the Pacifica flavor in the morning, especially the hippy music shows that come on after Democracy Now (which I always miss because I'm asleep), CounterSpin, and Laura Flanders.
I listen to lots of NPR, but at this point I want to get XM or Sirius when I have some money, so I can have a choice when I'm driving. I've been listening often to a local "alternative" station, but I start beating my head against the steering wheel when they repeat Modest Mouse songs every fucking hour.
The airwaves in the Midwest mostly suck...
Chuck