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Filed under: Imported

I just finished reading David Foster Wallace's fascinating piece on political talk radio in the current Atlantic Monthly. Unfortunately the article's not available on-line unless you're a subscriber. It's quite smart and authoritative (and not surprisingly, outrageously annotated).

He focuses in on a poli-shock jock named John Ziegler who works for Southern L.A. talk-radio powerhouse KFI. As best I can tell from the piece, this guy's a first-rate bloviator who suffers from severe narcissism. This latter condition manifests itself on-air by the host constantly seeking to outrage his traffic-stressed listeners into apoplexy, consequentially resulting in somewhat stimulating host-caller dialogues. In other words, Ziegler's a fairly typical talk-radio specimen. Probably the best local analogy is KSTP morning host Bob Davis (who for pathological reasons best left unexplored I wake up to every morning). Wallace adeptly uses this prototype to explore the wider phenomenon of political talk radio.

But I was struck by one of Wallace's digressions relating to advertising:

A live read is when a host or newsperson reads the ad copy himself on-air. They're sort of a radio tradition, but the degree to which KFI weaves live reads into its programming is a great leap forward for broadcast marketing. Live-read spots are more expensive for advertisers, especially the longer, more detailed ones read by the programs' hosts, since the ads (a) can sound at first like an actual talk segment and (b) often clearly set up to exploit these features--see for instance John Kobylt's live read for LA's Cunning Dental Group during afternoons' John & Ken: "Have you noticed how bad the teeth are of all the contestants in these reality shows? I saw some of this the other day. Discolored, chipped, misshaped, misaligned, rotted-out teeth, missing teeth, not to mention the bleeding, oozing, pus-y gums. You go to Cunning Dental Group, they will take all your gross teeth and in one or two visits fix them and give you a bright shiny smile."

Even more expensive than live reads are what's called "endorsements," which are when a host describes, in ecstatically favorable terms, his own personal experience with a product or service. Examples here include Phil Hendrie's weights loss on Cortislim, Kobylt's "better than 20-20" laser-surgery outcome with Saddleback Eye Center, and Mr. Bill Handel's frustration with dial-up ISP's before discovering DSL Extreme. These ads, which are KFI's most powerful device for exploiting the intimacy and trust of the listener-host relationship, also result in special "endorsement fees" paid directly to the host.

Now what caught my attention about this excerpt is a recurring segment I've noticed locally on the Ron Rosenbaum & Mark O'Connell Show (of which I'm generally a huge fan). They seem to have taken this corporate whoring to a whole new extreme. Every Wednesday morning during the show they devote an entire segment to speaking with the proprietor of Abbot Travel. The hosts simply ask Mr. Abbot Travel (I can't recall his name right now) to reveal all the incredible deals that his company's currently offering to snow-suffering Minnesotans. There's no attempt at editorial justification. Just a roughly-ten-minute Q & A in which the guy gets to unapologetically shill for his company. It's nothing but a very lengthy commercial segment masquerading as user-friendly news.

I'm not pretending that talk-radio is anything but a money-making venture designed to generate profits for the corporations that own stations. But this strikes me as a particularly shameless manifestation of the phenomenon.

Exactly how much does Abbot Travel pay for this privilege? And why would anyone (other than talk-radio obsessed losers like me) listen?