The hour of truth. My husband, Fred, gets the bagels and we listen to the show. You can tweak it, torture it in the studio all night long, but you never can tell if you’ve nailed it until it comes out of the box at home.
People ask me, why does it take so long—roughly 300 man-hours—to produce one hour of radio? I don’t know. It’s like years ago when I used to take pictures and print them in my own little darkroom. I would start around 11 p.m., closeted under a safelight, and emerge seven hours later, squinting at the dawn.
I know there’s something about the technology that invites compulsive fiddling. In photography, an extra second of exposure in a darkroom can change the character of a print. In radio, a second more or less of silence, or laughter, or stumbling can change the impact of a moment.
Back in the old days of quarter-inch tape, I’d slice off an “s” by accident, and spend the next 10 minutes with my tush in the air, crawling under the cutting deck in search of a sliver of acetate. Now, with digital editing, nothing gets lost, you can try it a hundred different ways, and so we do.
By “we,” I mean the staff of On the Media, a program that was launched for the third time in January 2001. This is a show that, despite a lot of talent running through it over the years, has had a lot of trouble getting off the ground. For one thing, the name of the show, On the Media, summons up the bone-crunching tedium of journalists picking the fluff out of their navels, endlessly engaged in metaphorical masturbation and self-flagellation (though if it weren’t metaphorical that would make for a marginally more interesting program).
But really, we aren’t that show. And we spend a lot of time trying to compensate for the name by undermining it as much as possible. At least on a good day. As for today’s show, here’s what we got:
- Back-to-back interviews with two supporters of Israel. One favors the recent boycott of the New York Times by Jewish groups, the other doesn’t. … Not a thrilling lead but some good points scored.
- Co-host Bob Garfield and I read a few listener letters. Less hate mail than usual, which is too bad, because hate mail makes better radio.
- My interview with the lawyer of the first journalist ever subpoenaed to testify in The Hague. This is what we call a “mission-oriented” interview. Important story. Not much juice.
- Solid piece on how satellite radio is selling seven months after its launch. Lots of sound, and a fine topic for our listeners who, by definition, have a greater than average interest in radio.
(So far, this week’s show seems to suffer from a slight excess of earnestness. This is unusual. More often, it’s a touch too much irony that throws it out of balance. But generally, we prefer those shows.)
- An interview about the demise of Ally McBeal, which ends Monday. Touches memoir, miniskirts, feminism, post-feminism, post-post-feminism. … Listenable, but it feels a little late.
- Interview with the host of a new half-hour Spanish-language TV show (read: infommercial) that starts Monday, sponsored by the GOP. Garfield gently wields the cattle prod.
- Here’s the one I was worried about: a discussion of the ethics of Jay Jonah Jamison, the editor of the Daily Bugle where Spider-Man works, versus the ethics of the Daily Planet’s Perry White. This is supposed to be three-quarters a parody of the aforementioned navel-fluff-picking genre, and one-quarter cultural commentary. Does it work? (Fred kinda laughs, kinda shrugs.) Kinda worked, I guess.
- A rebroadcast of Garfield’s piece on direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising. Characteristically caustic, smart.
I rate this week’s show a solid B. My 16-year-old daughters, Sophie and Maxine, wandered in for bagels and hung around, evincing less boredom than usual. Sophie even said that if she ran across it spinning the dial she might have stayed with it on her own.
But I take this with a grain of salt. It could be a little carry-over goodwill from Mother’s Day, when they actually sat through the whole show. Or, more likely, they are just trying to avoid their planned activity for the day: taking SAT II practice tests.
