This morning, a fill-in radio talk show host read a listener's text on-air that asked, "When is (the show's regular host) coming back? The show is boring now."
The host responded gracefully, "Tough but fair. We take all kinds of feedback."
I'd like to think I'd have been equally diplomatic in that situation--but I wouldn't guarantee it.
Recently, a radio talk show host read a complaint from a listener, saying that the host allowed someone, most likely a caller, to "bloviate on topics he knows nothing about."
I joined in the host's chuckling when he asked the listener rhetorically, "Are you new to talk radio?"
If one thing is inevitable on talk radio, it's bloviating.
It doesn't happen that often, but it irks me just a little when radio personalities refer to their station's commercials as ads. It's not technically incorrect, but I've always thought of ads as a term for print media and commercials as a term for radio and TV.
Admittedly, I could just as easily have written this extremely minor complaint as one of my "A petty fixation" posts.
Whenever I got to choose the music for a radio shift, I liked to segue a familiar melody with an obscure, compatible one. Thus, I recommend playing almost any version of "The Girl From Ipanema" before "Robin's Egg Blue" by Hot Club Of St. Louis; the rhythmic similarity between both tunes makes it a sound pairing.
As a DJ on former smooth jazz station KNJZ, I was required to say every so often, "You're in the middle of another extended set of today's smooth jazz."
I understood the business logic behind summarizing the type of music we played and reinforcing the concept that listeners were going to hear a lot of it. I also thought, however, "Isn't this interrupting the musical flow by reminding listeners of this, using this exact phrasing, so frequently?"
While sweeping the floor recently, a clump of dust kept evading the broom. My reaction fell in an odd middle ground between anger and nonchalance. It was mild irritation masked with an improvised rhythm. To the tune of a made-up percussive beat, I sang to the dust under my breath, "Don't do that if I don't command it. Don't do that if I don't decree it."
This middle-of-the-road approach worked. The dust allowed itself to be swept up, thanks to my direct admonishment--and a made-up salsa rhythm to take the edge off.
On September 11, 2001 and the days following it, I grappled with how to split the difference between watching, reading, and listening to news coverage of that day's atrocities. At first, to grasp the severity of the attacks, it felt necessary to watch footage of them. After seeing the same or similar footage multiple times, however, I thought, "It's really best to turn my attention to radio and newspaper coverage now."
I still think that was the right call. When you see the horrifying footage of the attacks and their aftermath, it's too easy to be shocked and not absorb all of the information about them. Listening to radio coverage and reading articles forces one to process the information without the distressing visuals.