Talk Shows: Is It All Just Blah, Blah, Blah — Or Does it Mean Something?

From What Do You Say to That?” by Walt Bodine
Westport Publishers, 1988

The relationship of the host with the call-in audience is similar to a romantic relationship involving lovers who are never sure of each other or the relationship. It is a moody affair all the way around. Audiences can be happy, deadly earnest, or loony, and they change with the day, the moon, the tides, or something.
(Page 21)

Some people think call-in shows exist first of all for the callers. They don't. They exist for the listening audiences, 98 percent of whom have never called a radio show.
(Page 24)

Talk shows also have a constructive role in our society. Consider the ordinary citizen who picks up the phone and raises a little hell with City Hall. Very often this is a person who either will not or cannot come to public meetings and hearings. Lots of people are too shy to stand up in public meeting and give their views, but will pick up a phone and tell the same views to a much wider audience.

When a public servant, congressperson, school board member, or county executive comes on the show and people call in, we have a people conference rather than a news conference. In this way, the public eliminates the journalistic middleman, who usually attends the news conferences and asks the questions. Citizens can do it themselves on a talk show.

From the perspective of the newsmaker, the talk show is his or her purest means of communication. These people cannot be misquoted because they are quoting themselves. Often in newspaper and TV interviews, the time constraints are such that a leisurely half-hour chat gets reduced to only the most news- worthy paragraphs. Sometimes when time and space are really limited, their words may end up as a single quote or what is called in TV news, a "sound bite."
(Page 33)