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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Mike Malloy's left-wing rants have gotten him bounced from major radio markets. Could he draw an audience of millions if he got the chance?
May 13, 2003 | Two hours after American forces launched their "shock and awe" assault against Baghdad in March, Mike Malloy went on the air from a concrete office building outside Atlanta for his weekday syndicated talk show. "I don't know if you saw it, but I did," he said near the outset, his voice uncommonly subdued. "This is the United States attacking a truly defenseless Third World country."
For the next five minutes and 19 seconds, Malloy wordlessly broadcast the noise of missiles shrieking, bombs exploding, antiaircraft fire rattling. He had taped the audio straight from CNN, but on radio the war was shorn of television's video game visuals, its safe distance from danger. This soundtrack thrust Malloy's listeners into a nocturnal Baghdad, reeling from concussions.
When the battle tape ended, Malloy switched to a sound bite of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference lauding the "careful, measured beginning" of the war. Then Malloy returned to the air, saying, "This is a dark day, this is a filthy day, this is a day for shame." And finally, heading into a commercial break, he wove together more combat racket with a madrigal-like song by Pink Floyd, "Goodbye, Blue Sky."
For nearly 20 years, Mike Malloy has been making talk radio like this: caustic, abrasive, inventive, confrontational and resolutely left of center. It has won him admirers and awards, and it has cost him jobs. At a time when the very genre of talk radio is widely seen as synonymous with strident conservatism, his career both ratifies and belies that premise.
Malloy has hosted shows on major stations in major markets -- WSB in Atlanta and WLS in Chicago -- defying the conventional wisdom that liberal talk radio barely exists. Yet the fact that Malloy, at age 60 a proven success with a numerous honors and much critical praise, now reaches only a handful of affiliates on a network run by a labor union attests to the structural obstacles liberal talk radio faces. The vast majority of his listeners hear him not on the radio at all, but from his own Web site, which streams live audio of his daily show and also links to an archive of recent broadcasts. The site attracts "tens of thousands" of listeners each day, Malloy estimates.
For worse or better, then, Malloy operates under the commercial radar. "I do feel restricted and closed in," he said. "Having worked for two 50,000-watt stations whose signals would boom out over half the country, yes, it does feel a little claustrophobic now. But we have six telephone lines, and they stay busy after the first few minutes of the slow. Kind of like the way it was when I was in Atlanta and Chicago on radio stations."
Malloy may well figure prominently in a high-profile effort to provide a liberal alternative on commercial radio. Sheldon Drobny, the venture capitalist from suburban Chicago who has put in upward of $10 million to start a liberal talk-radio network by the end of 2003, was inspired partly by Malloy's shows, first on WLS and now on the I.E. America Radio Network, owned by the United Auto Workers. Malloy even recommended the man, Jon Sinton, whom Drobny hired as chief executive officer of the nascent network, AnShell Media.
"I don't want to violate anybody's contract or hurt anybody else," Drobny said in a recent telephone interview. "But Mike's the kind of homegrown entertainment we're looking for. He's not only very seasoned, he's very entertaining, he's a hard-hitting opposition to the right wing. And he reaches both the elites and the blue-collars."
Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers, named Malloy to his "Heavy Hundred" list three times in the past four years. "Just like Rush Limbaugh," he said, "Malloy is a radio guy. He's paid dues. He's there to entertain, not to save the world. When he's exposed, he gets ratings. And when he's not exposed, he can't get ratings."
To consider Mike Malloy's career is thus to reckon with the reasons liberal talk shows do, or don't, get that exposure. The child of Democrats in the union stronghold of Toledo, Ohio -- his mother a waitress, his father a cost analyst for construction projects -- Malloy grew up listening to such radio staples as "The Shadow," Jack Benny, and "Amos 'n' Andy." He had bounced through four colleges in as many states by the time he landed in Atlanta in the late 1970s. There he honed his journalistic talents as an editor of the alternative weekly Creative Loafing and later as a writer on CNN. Acting with the Southern Theater Conspiracy, an avant-garde troupe, he learned "how to use language, how to be dramatic, how to leave someone wanting more."
