I’m with Moody Bastard – I fucking love it too!
Most of all, I love that it offers viewpoints that are not being heard on commercial radio elsewhere.
I also love that it has a good variety of talent styles. There’s something for every (lefty) taste: from the smart, deceptively mild, dry and sometimes goofy Al Franken to the impassioned and articulate firebrand Randi Rhodes; from the fairly lighthearted but a tad stiff Marty Kaplan to the feisty, funny, blissfully angry tagteam of Majority Report’s Janeane Garafolo and Sam Seder to the NPR-esque seriousness of Laura Flanders.
I disagree that Randi is some kind of conspiracy Art Bell fruitcake. She is an ardent, voracious reader, that’s why she can correctly identify names and dates and places to the Nth degree. Being well-informed is somehow worse than the half-baked utterly unfactual ravings of Limbaugh and O’Reilly? Please! She may sound paranoid, but that’s more due to the very scary times we’re living in. Randi rarely makes any factual reference or accusation that isn’t backed up by painstaking research. (And when she does make an error, she acknowledges it.)
The only shows I haven’t been able to get into are Morning Sedition and Unfiltered, and that’s mainly because I work at night and am almost never up in the mornings. But I heard Mark Maron (cohost of Morning) on Friday night when he stopped by the Janeane/Sam show, and he really impressed me. I remember him as being an innocuous comedian on Comedy Central (was he a host of Short Attention Span Theater after Jon Stewart left?) and thus I was surprised at how articulate and on top of the issues he appears to be.
What little I’ve heard of Lizz Winstead on Unfiltered disappoints me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved her on The Daily Show and she deserves a place in heaven for that alone! But she rambles and goes off topic too often. Al does that too, but he’s got three hours to fill, so I don’t mind some digressions as long as they’re funny. Lizz isn’t quite as funny as I expected her to be. (Plus she sounds exactly like Kathy Griffen, which in my book is an offense punishable by $5000 or 30 days in prison.) Meanwhile, her cohost Chuck D, from what I’ve heard so far, is very good indeed. Not surprising, since I remember him facing off against none other than the brilliant Bill McNeal! ;))
Hosts aside … holy cow, the guests throughout the past month have been absolutely stellar! John Dean, Al Gore, Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, Hillary Clinton, Bob Kerrey, Bob Graham, even G. Gordon Liddy (oy) … every day there’s some incredible discussion to learn from. Of course, I’m sure the star-studdedness of the shows will diminish a bit as time goes by, since they’re probably pulling out all the stops in these early weeks. But then again, I can imagine that many politicos and other guests will be relieved themselves to find a relatively safe harbor. For me, it’s certainly a relief to listen to voices and points of view that aren’t welcome on other networks!
(Although I’m sure Ralph Nader was expecting more of a safe harbor than he got from Randi, hee!!! Take THAT, shmuck.)
I also really appreciate the respect and attention AAR gives to the hardworking, tireless web-based journalists/bloggers. Folks like Atrios and Bill Sher (from LiberalOasis) have been godsends in uncovering facts and disseminating them to the public. It’s terrific that they’re getting a wider audience including people who aren’t web-savvy yet.
The negatives? Lots of growing pains and technical problems have made it really rough going at times. Their webfeed sucks, and they really really really need to get either more servers or better techies. The contract battle with that idiot owner of the Chicago & L.A. affiliates has put some negative focus on AAR’s business plans, perhaps not entirely undeserved. They need to get new stations lined up ASAP to move beyond this mini-scandal. Also, why the heck don’t they have a message board? Blogs are great, but having to use the comments feature for discussion is, well, sucktastic in the extreme.
On the talent side, it’s obvious that several of the hosts are relative newbies, which can result in some awkward moments – although in the case of Janeane and Sam, I find their self-deprecating exasperation hilarious and endearing. Time will smooth out their rough edges, though. I can’t wait to hear Mike Papantonio and Robert Kennedy’s weekend show.
The biggest downside for me is – WHERE IS MIKE MALLOY??? Malloy is the best damn liberal radio host – whip-smart, absolutely hilarious, frothing with righteous anger, knowledgable about pop culture, and incredibly friendly/respectful to his callers. God, how I miss his show since the IE America Network folded. Mike would totally rule on AAR, and should be taking up the 11PM slot, or at the very least a weekend show of his own. It’s not as if there’s no room for him; AAR goes into repeats at night and on the weekends. With Mike Malloy, Randi Rhodes and Jeanane/Sam doling out the impassioned anger, and Al Franken, Marty Kaplan, Chuck D. and Laura Flanders providing the more laid-back tone, AAR’s lineup would kick ass and take names.
Even without Mike, and with all the little nagging glitches that have cropped up, AAR is the best thing that’s happened to the media world in a long, long time.