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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
All of those skills came into use in 1985, when he apprenticed himself to a conservative talk-radio host named Ludlow Porch on the Atlanta station WCNN (no relation to the cable network). Though their politics stood at a polar remove, Malloy appreciated Porch's populist style of humor, which reminded him of both Will Rogers and Harry Golden. "Ludlow said you have to remember you're not the smartest person sitting behind the mike," Malloy recalled. "He said, Play to your audience's intelligence, to their curiosity, not to their prejudices."
By late 1986, Malloy was hosting his own late-night show on 50,000-watt WSB. His chief issues included the Reagan administration's involvement in Central America, especially the arms-for-hostages deal, and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and he performed strongly enough to be moved into a midday slot. It placed him in direct competition with Limbaugh, however, at the very time Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich was successfully leading the Republican Party into control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a half century. "I was swamped," Malloy admitted. In 1995, WSB replaced Malloy with Dr. Laura Schlessinger, herself part of the conservative phalanx in talk radio.
Taking over a 10 p.m.-1 a.m. show on WLS in Chicago in 1997, Malloy raised listenership by a double-digit margin and regularly put his station in Chicago's top five for the overnight slot. In addition to being named to the Heavy Hundred in 1999 and 2000, he won the Achievement in Radio award for the best overnight show in the Chicago market. He championed the causes of several death row inmates who were ultimately exonerated or pardoned.
Most of all, in a deeply polarized time in national politics, Malloy whetted his satiric blade. The more that conservatives (and their favorite talk-show hosts) accused President Clinton of both real and imagined high crimes and misdemeanors, the more Malloy ridiculed what he routinely called the "flying-monkey right." Or as he once put it, "I'm picking on Republicans tonight. And every night."
When Paula Jones came forward to charge belatedly that the president had, years before, sexually harassed her, Malloy mimicked her in a creaky twang out of the "Beverly Hillbillies": "It was me. I was the one. See, it says right there it's me. Right here on my shirt label, where my momma sewed it on: 'That s.o.b. sullied my reputation.' That's what he did. Can you bring that camera in a little closer?"
The ascent of then-Gov. George W. Bush as a presidential aspirant in the late 1990s inspired all of Malloy's working-class contempt for a rich boy. "Oh, W., you want a baseball team?" he said in a typical bit, imitating the senior Bush. "How about an oil company? Off-shore drilling rights in the Red Sea. Red Sea. Never mind. We'll get it for you."
Yet in March 2000, Malloy left WLS. The official version, part of a formal settlement, portrayed his departure as the product of mutual consent. But Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, pointed to ideology as the real cause, citing an e-mail from the WLS program director, Mike Elder, that had criticized Malloy's "very dark and mean-spirited approach." (Elder, now an executive with WRKO in Boston, refused several requests to comment for this article.) "They were always on his case about being too harsh, too rough on his conservative callers," Zorn said of Malloy in a recent telephone interview. "But the truth is, he was no rougher on his callers from the right than Rush or Dr. Laura are with their liberal callers. I don't think there's any question that if Mike Malloy had his exact same manner and style and rating and was politically conservative, he'd still be on the air."
Interestingly, Malloy found himself virtually unemployable. Major stations such as KIRO in Seattle, WMAL in Baltimore, and KOA in Denver all expressed interest, solicited his demo tape, and then backed away. "They'd say, 'Your program is too edgy,' or 'Too dark and depressing,'" Malloy recalled. "Very simply, it means too liberal."
He signed on with the I.E. America Radio Network in October 2000. The UAW network streams audio on the Internet and serves about 170 stations, none in markets larger than Omaha and Santa Fe. The network's average weekly audience of 1.7 million listeners amounts to what Rush Limbaugh might reach in one or two big cities. Even at that, I.E. America has had far greater success placing service-oriented shows like "Antique Talk," "Car Care Clinic" and "The Employees' Lawyer" than Malloy's political talk. By the last count, merely four stations carried him. Despite such obscurity on the radio dial, the show has built such a following on the Internet that I.E. America must sometimes triple its bandwidth when Malloy starts his three-hour shift at 9 p.m. each weekday. (He switched to the later time slot on April 21.)
