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Radio on.

I started listening to AM talk radio on the first of the cross-country drives last summer. At first it was just part of a desperate search for something other than classic rock to listen to while driving through Idaho and Montana--I love classic rock as much as the next former garage-band groupie, but there's only so much falsetto singing and big guitar a girl can take, especially while driving ten- and twelve-hour days. And maybe (certainly) it's a sign of what a little bubble I live in, but AM talk radio is like this whole weird other country.

Some of it is the politically-conservative viewpoint (more on that later), but a lot of it is just that the grammar of the experience is different. I'm used to NPR, with all the soothing rounded Susan Stamberg and Carl Kasell voices. The standard AM talk-radio voice seems to be harsher, like there's a value placed on lack of polish. And that's before you get to the advertising. These programs seem to be equal parts content and advertising, and the talk radio personalities do a lot of product endorsement. (A lot of product endorsement. In a typical hour's worth of commercials during Dr Laura, you'll hear the good doctor endorsing air purifiers, a matchmaking service, foam mattresses, a calcium supplement, a service for (I think) student tutoring, and her very own brand of multivitamin.) It's all so different! And that's before you even take in to account that so many of these shows seem to be just hours at a stretch of the hosts finding things to be angry about, and then taking calls from other people who are angry. There's a lot of anger out there in AM talk-radio land. There's not a whole lot of anger on NPR.

And then, yeah, the conservative viewpoint. I'm not sure there's anything of interest I can say about that.

At any rate, that's what Mark's experience as a kind of Freeper spy made me think of--the mixture of "where do these people come from?" and "so this is the kind of thinking that leads people to vote the way they do" that I feel when listening to talk radio--except that his thing is a lot more interactive.