On air, off-balance
On Wednesday, the new liberal radio network goes live. But just days ago in rehearsal, the glitches were many.
chicagotribune.com
By John Cook
Tribune staff reporter
March 31, 2004
NEW YORK -- "This is all bull, right?" asked New York Times columnist Frank Rich, settling into his chair in the drab Air America Radio studios during a commercial break in "The O'Franken Factor" last Thursday.
Rich's question is on the minds of many this week as the liberal talk network is set to go live Wednesday in the nation's top three radio markets, including Chicago (on WNTD-AM 950), beginning with the "O'Franken Factor" at 11 a.m.
Air America's stated goal -- to reclaim talk radio from Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and to defeat President Bush in November -- has generated a wave of generous publicity since it was first announced in November 2002. Michael Harrison, the publisher of the trade publication Talkers Magazine, remarked that he'd never seen something that doesn't exist get so much press.
But now Air America does exist, at least in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and its public face belongs to Al Franken, the liberal comic, author of "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," and newly minted host of "The O'Franken Factor."
Though Rich's question might be addressed to Air America's long-term prospects, he was simply confirming with his friend Franken that the radio interview he was there to give would be for practice and not for broadcast.
Franken and his co-host, former Minnesota Public Radio host Katherine Lanpher, had been rehearsing the show-- in real-time, with real commercials (a redundant parade of public service announcements, usually featuring Sharon Stone pitching for the American Foundation for AIDS Research), real guests and even callers -- for two weeks to work out the bugs and to give Franken an idea of what it's like to go live three hours (11 a.m. to 2 p.m., opposite Limbaugh) of every weekday. Rich was there to fake trash Mel Gibson while Franken and Lanpher faked trying to keep the fake show together despite a cascade of real technical snafus and miscommunications.
By the time Rich arrived -- just one hour into the three-hour show -- Franken was already showing signs of frustration at the difficulty of pulling together a seamless radio show on deadline.
"I'm doing this so someone else doesn't have to do it," Franken joked during a commercial for Operation: Graduation, a stay-in-school ad campaign sponsored by the U.S. Army and the Ad Council.
"I think that's very noble of you," Rich said.
If one can judge the show by one rehearsal, "The O'Franken Factor" will likely be a loose, cerebral affair -- two parts NPR, one part New York Times Op-Ed page and one part Franken's political wit. If Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Howard Stern are the radio equivalents of monster truck rallies, full of bombast and vitriol, Franken's show is a dinner party hosted by a policy wonk who takes puckish delight in skewering sanctimony with off-the-cuff satire.
Mother-hen role
Lanpher plays a mother-hen role in the show, keeping Franken grounded and occasionally compelling him to back up his arguments with facts. When Franken mentions in an aside that Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism chief whose new book accuses the White House of ignoring the threat from Al Qaeda, is a registered Republican, Lanpher shoots a shushing finger through the air toward her co-host's mouth. Though he's been described that way, Clarke is not in fact a registered Republican -- in Virginia, where he votes,party registration doesn't exist (Clarke did vote in the Republican primary in 2000, for John McCain.)
As a former columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Lanpher is no stranger to taking partisan positions, but working in public radio for 5 1/2 years trained her to play things more down the middle politically. That instinct followed her to Franken's show, but she said she's beginning to come back around to getting her hands dirty with politics.
"Al loves it when I'll read some straight news piece and just, we'll be off the air, and I will just react," said Lanpher. "And he gets this look on his face like, `She's coming back.'"
"She has very good journalistic instincts," said Franken. "To some extent she's playing rhythm and I'm soloing." Behind the scenes she plays a similar role as the only person who appears to know what she's doing.
Producer Billy Kimball is a longtime Franken associate and TV writer with no radio experience, and the engineer manning the boards is a researcher for Team O'Franken rather than a seasoned technician.
"Right now I'm doing more of the housekeeping because I know how do it," Lanpher said. "And it's a lot to learn . . . to hit the posts, to remember everything you have to say going in, going out."
Out of the gate, housekeeping is probably the show's biggest challenge. Franken's lack of familiarity with the medium is clear. Coming in after the show's first commercial break, Lanpher invited Franken to "take us in." But he got caught up in a conversation with a producer and wound up almost talking over the introductory music and Lanpher was forced to quickly employ her silencing forefinger in Franken's direction, a move she used at least three times throughout the program.
Dropped calls
There are also many suddenly disconnected phone calls with guests -- which included political consultant James Carville, Slate political writer William Saletan , and New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston. Virtually every sound bite Franken wanted to use to illustrate his points was miscued.
The show will be broadcast from the offices of Inner City Broadcasting Corp., the company that owns Air America's New York affiliate and which, in a partnership the terms of which Air America has not disclosed, is turning over its airtime to the new network. Its facilities are not quite state-of-the-art.
Lanpher complained repeatedly that her computer screen was displaying the previous day's Associated Press headlines, and Franken and Lanpher had to communicate with producers in the control room via handwritten signs because their computers weren't set up with instant messaging.
Producer Kimball put in a comic performance during every commercial break, when he repeatedly tried, and failed with exasperation, to make a dry-erase board with the network's call-in number stand up in Franken's line of sight.
"Phone lines drop, you get hobgoblins in the system," said Lanpher. "You have to pretend that you're Alan Shepard or someone and the plane's going down -- `Well, if you look to your left you've got the Grand Canyon. Nice view before you go.' You just keep vamping."
Compelling radio?
But a larger question, once the hobgoblins are exorcised, is whether Franken's low-key, sarcastic persona can translate into compelling radio. Though he has made a career of what he describes as "hard-hitting advocacy comedy," Franken is not a fire-breather. The only time he raised his voice on the air was to shriek "Lies!" in a high-pitched Gollum impression, in response to some perceived mendacity on the part of the White House -- not out of genuine indignation, but in a sort of irony-swaddled caricature of an outraged curmudgeon. The message: Righteousness (a la Bill O'Reilly) isn't funny. Knowing parody is.
"Talk radio tends to reward directness," said Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio. "Subtlety and nuance means the message gets lost. Conservatives have figured out how to hone the message so it's polished and gleaming." For that reason, along with the general difficulty of building a new network in the saturated talk-radio market, Taylor said, Air America's ratings will be "microscopic" in the beginning.
"It's a slow build," he said. "But they'll grow." And the network's investors are going to be patient, at least according to CEO Mark Walsh, who told reporters in March that he expects the venture to lose money for years before turning a profit.
The rest of the show, Franken was relaxed, laconic and cool (as cool as a Jewish Minnesotan who wanted to be an actuary when he was growing up can be). He clearly has taken to heart the advice given to him by fellow Minnesotan Garrison Keillor: "He said that on the TV the viewer is sitting across the room," Franken said "On the radio, the listener is on your lap."
But when presented with the sorts of political targets that might stir his blood, Franken seems loath to betray any excitement or anger. When the topic arose of President Bush's much-discussed joke, during his appearance at the White House correspondent's dinner, about looking for weapons of mass destruction under furniture in the Oval Office, Franken was almost demure in his critique: "Some [people] were upset. And I kind of don't blame them. I defend the right for comedians to do dark humor. I am not sure that the president . . . "
"So he's either not presidential enough or he's not enough of a comedian?" interjected Lanpher.
"No, he was very good. He delivered the stuff very well," Franken said.
Life-size personality
It's a far cry from the "liberal echo chamber" Franken has said he wants to create. Limbaugh or Hannity would likely have used a similar joke as an opportunity to make hay, to offer listeners a glimpse of the audacious, larger-than-life, forceful personalities that made them successful.
Franken's personality is more life-size.
Of course, Air America's founders have been vocal about what they think the current crop of talkers does wrong--lying, distorting, engaging in personal attacks chief among them. "We're going to find their lies every day and hold them up to scorn and ridicule," Franken said earlier this month when the network's lineup was announced.
But in a promotional videotape the network sent to reporters featuring samples of the shows, actress Janeane Garofalo, who will co-host "The Majority Report," displays her willingness to engage in the same sorts of tactics Franken and others have deplored by repeating an Internet rumor about conservative talking head Bill Bennett's sex life.
Kimball, the show's producer, studied the talk radio field in preparation for the show, and he decided that the appeal of Limbaugh and the other right-wing talkers lay in their repetitive approach.
"The main point is that they are able to link the specific thing they're talking about into a very basic [theme about liberals] -- `They are stuck in a victim mentality' or `They want government to solve all their problems,'" Kimball said. "It's these very basic messages, and I guess there's like six of them for Rush and nine for Hannity or whatever, and every single thing is brought back to that. And for Al's show I think that he's developing those as well [about the right] -- `They're not credible,' or `you can't trust them.'"
Kimball also praised Limbaugh for his delivery, his stamina as a broadcaster and his facility with words.
"How Rush does three hours a day without a single guest, is incredible," Kimball said.
"He doesn't say, `Uh, what am I going to talk about next?' He moves right from point to point to point with declarative sentences."
A different style
For better or for worse, Franken is no Limbaugh. His style is much more digressive, and his sentences aren't so much declarative as mischievous.
On the air, Franken told a story about seeing Gibson at a Hollywood party. He avoided approaching Gibson until he thought up the perfect introductory line, but by that time it was too late and the director of "The Passion of the Christ" had already left. But Franken delivered the line on the air with relish: "Hi Mel. You know, your father and my father probably wouldn't have gotten along."
It's a funny joke, but you have to know that Gibson's father has made several noted anti-Semitic statements to the press and that Franken's father is Jewish to get it. Even then it's only funny after you think about it for a second.
It's unclear whether that sort of joke will have the same sort of appeal that the bombast and simplicity of Limbaugh and others have been able to exploit.
But Franken, who said he didn't really study the talk-radio business in preparation for his latest gig, is hopeful.
"Maybe I'll break the mold by not knowing much," he said. "That's how Bush works."
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17 hours of Air
Air America will launch at 11 a.m. Wednesday in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
At press time, an Air America spokesman said stations in Portland, Ore., and Loma Linda, Calif., might be signed up in time for launch.
The network said it expects to have a station in San Francisco one week after the debut.
Air America will also be available on XM Satellite Radio and on the Dish Network's audio programming, as well over the Web at www.airamericaradio.com.
The network's 17-hour broadcast day is as follows:
5-8 a.m.: "Morning Sedition," with comedian Marc Maron.
8-11 a.m.: "Unfiltered," with "Daily Show" creator and Air America executive producer Lizz Winstead and Public Enemy founder Chuck D.
11 a.m. to 3 p.m.: "The O' Franken Factor," with Al Franken and Katherine Lanpher.
2-6 p.m.: "The Randi Rhodes Show," with longtime Florida talker Randi Rhodes.
6-7 p.m.: "So What Else is News?" media coverage with Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.
7-10 p.m.: "The Majority Report," with actress Janeane Garofalo.
Weekend: "Champions of Justice," with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as "Best of O'Franken," and reruns.
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