Category Archives: Radio

My Top Five (plus one) local radio stations

By the way, I should add to my Daniel Schorr diatribe that I love NPR. If I could only listen to one radio station, that would be my choice. That doesn’t mean I have to be crazy about everything I hear on it…

Which reminds me that I was talking radio with a friend today about favorite radio stations. The radio spectrum is so broad that I hesitate to try to create a Top Five list, since there could be a station I haven’t ever heard that would be my favorite if I did hear it. But what I can to is provide a list of the six buttons pre-programmed on FM1 in my truck. I’d be interested to hear what y’all like as well — maybe I’ll do some reprogramming:

  1. S.C. ETV Radio, 88.1 — Or sometimes, 91.3, but the one out of Sumter has more news, which is mainly what I listen for. I like classical music, but NPR is just so well done. The material is better organized and presented than any almost print medium in this country, which is saying something for radio.
  2. WUSC, 90.5 — One of my kids was once a DJ at the station, and I keep it programmed for when I want to hear something really unique.
  3. Steve FM, 96.7 — Yeah, the station ID messages can be really grating — that tedious “we’re deliberately sounding unprofessional” tone — but the song selections are pretty good about 50 percent of the time.
  4. WXRY, the Independent Alternative, 99.3 — The best of the largely contemporary formats locally, near as I can make out.
  5. WWNQ, Flashback 94.3 — Oldies, pure and simple. (This station used to have a format that played Country classics, and for a C/W format was pretty listenable, but a year or so ago they went to mainstream oldies.)
  6. WTCB 106.7 — Occasionally, when there’s no music on the other commercial stations, I switch to this one — and will sometimes stay for a song or two, if they’re playing 80s stuff. (Not my era, but I turn to different stations for different things.)

By the way, those are not actually in order of preference — those are the assigned buttons. You’ll note that No. 5 is out of order. That’s because it replaced a station that replaced another station that DID fit between 99.3 and 106.7.

Of course, about half the time I’m listening to a CD instead — often something I’ve burned from one of my old vinyl albums.

And while blogging, I often listen to Pandora. Two current favorite “stations:” My Erik Satie and Solomon Burke stations. (I threw that in so that the Barrys out there could not sneer at my mundane radio tastes.)

State GOP links itself to Wilson more closely than it has to

Just got a tweet from Karen Floyd — remember Karen? she’s the state GOP chairwoman now — calling my attention to this item about Joe Wilson “thanking the Upstate’s ‘talk radio community’ that he said sparked a critical shift in his approach to fighting Democratic health care reform efforts and ultimately led to his now-celebrity status among some conservatives across the state.”

As I’ve said before, I wasn’t bothered nearly as much by Joe’s Tourette’s Moment during the president’s speech as by his subsequent behavior. We all lose control now and then. No, the thing that is really, profoundly offensive is the way Joe has embraced the extremists who embrace him, and decided to make the foolishness of a moment his new guide for political life.

OK, but even that is understandable to a certain degree. It merely illustrates a weakness common to politicians. It’s related to the “dance with the one that brung you” phenomenon. Since the talk-radio screamers are the only ones asking Joe to dance these days, he’s decided to go home with them. It happens, all across the political spectrum. If these are the only folks who will support him, he’ll support them back, under the logic of political survival.

But you’d think that a state party would want to maintain at least a certain neutral aloofness from this process. Not that I expect them to cast him into the darkness or anything; you’d just sort of think they’d stare into space and try to act like they didn’t notice the faux pas. Think about it: Karen is the chair of a party that contains both Joe Wilson and Bob Inglis, who voted for the resolution to express “disapproval” of Joe’s big moment. In fact, Joe was visiting Inglis’ part of the state to deliver this collective hug to talk radio.

Seems like the state chair would just want to stay out of that, and call as little attention to it as possible. I mean, as silly as the action of the S.C. Democrats often are, do you see Carol Fowler putting out a release to call attention to a Democrat who is making a career out of the most embarrassing moment of his life? Maybe she would. There’s no accounting for parties, and I gave up long ago trying to make sense of their doings.

But this sort of stood out, to me.

‘Sarah Palin is now in Argentina with a woman…’

Not really.

That’s just the punch line that my old buddy Michael Feldman is using on current promo spots for his show on public radio.

I pass it on because it provides a measurement of just how much of an automatic laughingstock we have become in South Carolina, thanks to the tireless exertions of our governor. You don’t even have to say “Mark Sanford.” You can just refer to him indirectly, at a step or two remove (in this case, the only connection is that he was until recently a fellow member of the same group to which ex-Gov. Palin still belongs, which I suppose we could describe as “marginal people whom the national media have inexplicably decided to regard as serious contenders for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination”), and still get a laugh.

So this is what we’ve come to.

Listen to me on the radio from 3-4 today

Folks, I’m going to take a break from my busy job-hunting schedule to be on Keven Cohen’s show at 3 today. Actually, I had sent Keven a message related to the job search (I’m sort of making my way through the contacts in my Blackberry), and he said he didn’t know of any jobs, but he could help me stay before the public eye. Or ear, in this case.

Keven has asked me to “talk politics/Sanford/2010-2012 races,” which I guess I can handle.

It’s on WVOC, which you can listen to online here.

Whad’Ya Know? Plenty.

notmuch

In case you missed the show today, here’s everything you need to catch up and be like the cool kids.

First, we have a photo above taken by my favorite “pollster,” Emerson Smith. It shows me with Michael Feldman (that’s Michael in the garnet “Cocks” shirt). That’s bassist Jeff Hamann hanging his head in the background; I don’t know what I said to make him do that.

Then, there’s this synopsis of the segment featuring me from the Web site, notmuch.com:

:10 – Michael talks with Brad Warthen, formerly of The State Newspaper and blogger of “all the opinions that weren’t quite good enough to put in the actual paper.” See http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/. Warthen was the Vice President of the paper and the Editor of the editorials and lost his job. What happened?! “It’s happening all over,” Warthen said. He and Michael talk about the state of the economy in South Carolina. The Governor of South Carolina doesn’t want to accept federal stimulus funds, “because he doesn’t believe in public education. He actually has control over this. Congress is sending out this money in a way that allows Governors to apply for it, assuming that they will. This is actually a moment in which he actually gets to make a decision…and we see the quality of the decision he’s made.” Other political hot buttons? “Everything is related to [the Governor’s choice]. We have 11.4% unemployment,” for example. The cigarette tax is .07 cents…it’s the lowest in the country, “all but subsidizing kids to smoke.” Is Columbia a Democratic enclave? Richland County is. Lexington County, where Warthen lives, has been one of the most Republican counties in the country. The University of South Carolina is working on a new fuel initiative. In the area of research, there’s unprecedented cooperation between USC and Clemson. Michael asks Warthen if he has season tickets. “I do not…I’m not a football fan,” he admits. He went to school here for one semester, started in the Honors College, but had a disasterous experience. “There was all this freedom!” he exclaimed. He transferred to Memphis State University after that, and majored in journalism and history. See bradwarthen.com for Warthen’s online columns, or his blog noted above.

Or, you can go to that same link and listen to the whole show.

Finally, for those who wonder what goes on in the moments before the show, here’s some very bad video from my phone, shot from the wings. About the only part you can hear clearly is when Michael is coaching the audience to say “Not much. Y’all?” instead of the usual “Not much. You?”

If you’ll forgive the cliche, a good time was had by y’all.