The Errors of Talk Radio

On this trip I was also able to listen to a series of podcasts. Twenty years ago I had the opportunity to meet Rush Limbaugh several times when he was beginning his career in Sacramento. For a long time I listened to a variety of talk radio hosts - among my favorites are Laura Ingram, Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt. But for the last couple of years I have been increasingly concerned about the medium. I am bothered by the range of slobbering right wingers who babble without much knowledge - Michael Savage nationally (I think Bill Bennett comes close to that) or John and Ken in LA or Mark Williams in Sacramento are emblematic of hosts who unlike Rush try to build ratings by ranting. Most of Air America, the sinking ship of the left trying to mirror conservative radio, is like that. I don't think Al Franken has ever even considered an alternative point of view. When the people I like are in good form, they are entertaining. Early in Rush's career he had a series of updates that were very funny. Laura Ingram has the "but monkeys" of people who heap praise only to retract it with a "but...."

I originally turned to talk radio because I was annoyed by the consistent bias of network news and its repetitive nature. But then along came podcasts. Podcast was the Oxford dictionary word of the year last year. It is an asynchronous method of communication - does not (yet) have the feedback mechanism that was so important for talk radio in the beginning. A podcast works like this - you sign up for the feeds that can be found on iTunes or on websites and then download the programs into your iPod or other music player (the inferior brands) and then can listen to them at your leisure. When the podcaster creates a new program your computer picks it up and then when you synchronize your iPod you get it downloaded ready to listen to.

I looked around a bit and found several that are quite interesting. For example, a guy in Oregon named Chris Gandalf, publishes something called the Invisible Hand which is basically a set of pretty well done interviews with authors of books in management and economics. Econtalk is a part of the increasingly useful economics resource called Econlib.org - which also has RSS feeds (blogs) and a wonderful library of major economics texts that are in the public domain. (For example, if you want to find a copy of Bastiat's works that is the place to do it.) Econtalk recently had a couple of podcasts on aspects of the economics of sports including scalping - I thought both programs were very interesting. There are an increasing range of these programs on a variety of other topics - including a lot on how to learn or relearn a language (German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian) or other skills (play the guitar) or topics of interest. There are tons on the iTunes website under podcasts and a lot more on websites. There are even some that use video content (vodcasts). The quality of the feeds is mostly pretty good. They would be great resources for drive time (or fly time) when you want to listen to something interesting but are tired of what AM and FM have. What's more, at this point, they are also free. Some have begun to charge nominal amounts for the feed but most are still free.

About a decade ago Kevin Kelly, of WIred Magazine and George Gilder began to discuss the idea of narrowcasting - creating content for a specific group of people. The web and cable allow those kinds of things to happen - podcasts are a good example of narrowcasting that is just at the beginning of its reach (so are blogs, by the way) - the possibilities are endless.