Richard Painter on Al Franken: We need more facts but much of this fits an old GOP playbook

[calimary]

66. Welcome to DU, Farmer-Rick!

And Happy Thanksgiving!

I hesitated when I saw the source for this story. KABC-AM (talk radio station here in L.A. that slants hard right) - which has NEVER been the dateline of ANY news story, EVER. I know because I used to work at their FM sister station which was literally across the hall. We shared the same little newsroom where the teletype machines were. They never broke news, because they never had an emphasis on a big full-service format with a vibrant, well-staffed news department. It was a talk format then and still is, now.

There was a two-host team in the morning, two men. One was a modified yuck-it-up type - who usually handled the kicker stories (lighter people-related news stories that tend to air at the end of the newscast), and his partner was an older man who was the guy who read the headlines at the top and bottom of the hour and any breaking news that might come up. At which time the next guy up would spend his whole time slot talking about whatever breaking news had come up, complete with lots of guests lined up on the phone from all over the nation (and the world), and listener calls, too. TERRIBLE signal strength, and lousy penetration in SoCal, and there were parts of the city of Los Angeles in which you couldn't even hear them! IN L.A.!

One Christmas, I was slated to work on the FM to fill in for one of the Monday-through-Friday people who did news in drivetime. I had the morning shift because the FM news director had Christmas week off. I took in a big platter of chocolate chip cookies I'd made. During a commercial break over on the AM, I went into their control room with the cookies. From the on-air both, they saw me in the control room standing next to the engineer, and motioned for me to come in. Which I did. With the cookies. And they put me on the air to chit-chat for a few minutes, introduced me by name, and as one of the FM folks from across the hall, and immediately started making jokes about my cookies - and what might be cooked into them (since you could regularly smell pot smoke in the hallways because the ventilation system went everywhere).

As it happens, I did NOT bake anything into them. Just to be safe. Besides, I'd only been there a few months. And who knows who would grab a cookie from farther up the hall where the executive-types and sales department and upper management all had their offices.

They weren't as hard-right back then. They slid downward that way over the years. They became the "poor second place" option you might have switched to if the BIG talk station across town, that carried limbaugh, was in a commercial break or something, and they had the ratings to prove it (or lack thereof). And they NEVER made any news or broke any stories or did any special reports or investigative reports or ANYTHING like that. Forty years in the L.A. market, more than half of it on the air, and I NEVER EVER saw KABC-AM step to the front as far as distinguishing itself as having an active, viable news department or break ANY big stories (or small stories, either). They were never the station you'd turn to for breaking news anyway, especially since L.A. for several decades had two VERY viable, very well-established, award-winning all-news AM stations. They didn't even have regular traffic reports except in drivetime.