Talk about “hot talk.” Listen to this talk radio confrontation between actor Alec Baldwin and conservative talkers Sean Hannity and Mark Levin on WABC’s Brian Whitman show.
What’s interesteing is how Baldwin keeps wondering why the host has to have Hannity and Levin on when he has regular listeners waiting on line. But the nature of talk radio is “hot talk” — rage, anger..stuff that gets the adrenalin going. Still, if you can detatch yourself from the whole talk radio culture that we’re all conditioned to now in this country, and you look at it from the standpoint of political debate, you wonder: how did political discussion get so absolutely poisonous in this country?
Another question is: why did Hannity and Levin have to be on with Baldwin? It’s to create a moment of confrontation. Just taking calls from callers, discussing films and talking about issues might not be “hot” enough. The name of the game is “controversy” and rage.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.