Alas, the noble radio show has gone the way of the Afghan warlords’ union:
As John Hinderaker reported earlier on Power Line, the six year run of our volunteer participation at The Patriot has come to an end. I won’t go into all of the details behind the move, John does a good job of that in his summary. I will say that it did come as a surprise when we were informed earlier this week that our time slot was going to be immediately turned over to more, shall we say, revenue generating friendly programming.
It’s too bad sufficient revenue couldn’t have been raised from our program alone. From my perspective as a radio listener, it was at least the equal of what the competing talk stations were putting up during that time. In terms of the quality of national guests and commentary featured, no shows on other local stations came close to providing it.
I enjoyed my phoned-in visits to the show, although I think the Fraters guys tended to view my libertarian extremism with far more delight than the Powerline guys did. (I’m not sure the latter ever got over my brutal depantsing of Michelle Malkin in their own house.) But I appreciated their willingness to host my non-debate with PZ Myers and I always considered it to be a very entertaining and intelligent show that routinely operated at a much higher level than most of the superficial chatter that passes for talk radio these days. Of course, it was the way in which they took politics seriously that ultimately deprived them of a sufficiently large audience since most Minnesotans want to hear about sports and celebrities, not politics and world events. But it was a solid six-year run, and I congratulate Brian, Chad, JB, King, Mitch, Ed, John, and Scott for their impressive accomplishment.
And let’s face it, NARN without Chad the Elder was like the United Front without Massoud.