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| Cameraphone pic of Al Franken and Paul Sicard! |
When my husband was the only person in town to win tickets* to the live broadcast of the Al Franken Show, I was so excited. I would get to hear, and see, the latest advances in talk radio!
Air America has gotten acres of ink for their “progressive views.” Yet, in his first live Air America broadcast from Austin the Al Franken Show seemed hopelessly mired in the past, much like the unwitting victims on the TV show What Not to Wear.
The broadcast exposed outdated and outmoded concepts lurking in our collective ideological closet. Perhaps it was a show from a time when muckraking journalism attempted to shine light on standard business practices. Maybe it was a broadcast from the days when unions were gaining strength to protect the common worker. The show could have even been from the Roosevelt era, which brought dignity in retirement with Social Security. Everyone knows that those concerns are now passé.
Broadcasting with co-host Katherine Lanpher from the depression-era State Theater, Franken might have as well have been getting his news from teletype machines and carrier pigeons.
From the funeral-home-style paper fans advertising Air America to a faux advertisement from the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau—asserting that Dallas has now been assassination free for 30, no 40 (!) years-- and imploring people to “put the top down and drive thru Dealey Plaza,” it seemed like a transmission from long before the Internet.
