Somebody named “Party Ben” resents the degree to which“the public” is permitted to waste precious public radio airtime in a “Mother
Jones” online blog, “World, Shut Your Mouth: The Horror of Public Radio Call-In
Shows.”
It is one of very few circumstances in which I have been disappointed by
“Mother Jones,” which is an otherwise excellent magazine.
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| MotherJones.com |
Party Ben, who identifies himself as a late-night radio
DJ, resents that public stations waste one-sixth of their programming on
call-in radio shows. He dismisses every single caller, in every single case, as
“yammering and paranoid.”
I wonder if it has occurred to Party Ben that one of those
radio callers for whom he holds such disdain could be the next Larry the Cable
Guy?
Our news editor, Mandy Feder recently talked with Dan
Whitney, a.k.a. Larry the Cable Guy, during a telephone interview. Larry the
Cable Guy appeared this weekend at Konocti Harbor Resort & Spa. One of the things Whitney told her was that for 13 years,
he called a local radio station as the character he had created. “He’s the
relative or friend who will say or do anything, burp, fart and talk about his
sister’s moles,” Whitney told my colleague.
