Ruth Off The Radio

Over the years whenever anyone asked how my radio show was going my stock answer always has been: "Well, they haven't told me to stop."

Earlier this month, they told me to stop. As a master of nuance, I took it as an inkling things weren't going well.

So last Saturday, after nearly eight years of holding forth for three hours from 9 a.m. to noon on WFLA, 970-AM, I concluded my final broadcast.

Some friends have suggested I was canceled because of the perception that I am some kind of liberal, as if pointing out on a regular basis we are led by a buffo in the White House and believing in the U.S. Constitution somehow defines me as a radical, liberal, troublemaking wisenheimer.

It is true that some listeners have accused me of being a pinko Commie, usually right after I suggested that Global Warming was a serious problem, or maybe it's a bad idea to execute people who might be innocent, or perhaps it might be nice if after torturing terrorism suspects we let them talk to a lawyer and see the evidence against them.

You know, crazy, wacky, insane, extremist ideas like that.

Marx & Engels

On the other hand, since this is the dollars-and-cents business of radio, I also know if I went before the microphone every week and starting reading the complete works of Marx & Engels, including "The Communist Manifesto" (in the original German), and I was pulling in huge ratings, not only would Clear Channel have left me on the air - they would have syndicated the show across its more than 1,110 stations across the country.

In all fairness to my moonlighting employers, although it's disappointing to lose my radio perch, I can't really complain too terribly much.

For nearly eight years I was given a forum to shoot my mouth off on whatever annoyed me at the moment. In case you're curious, not once in all that time did anyone from station management ever tell me what I could or couldn't talk about.

Talk Radio? Really?

I was treated very decently by Clear Channel. I worked with a number of first-rate broadcasters and a litany of terrific board-op/call screeners, most notably my last partner Kevin Green.

If I have any beef, it is this: "Talk radio" remains something of a misnomer.

Call it the "Limbaugh Defect," but all too often the last thing many callers were interested in was talk, or (at the risk of being accused of heresy) a conversation.

More often than not callers merely wanted to give a speech, or a sermon, or a diatribe.

To disagree, to have a different point of view was to invite accusations of being a dreaded liberal, although in my experience 99.9 percent of the time the caller couldn't even provide a definition of what a "liberal" is. These were hardly Algonquin Roundtable moments.

Callers who decried the "liberal" New York Times, for example, would, with some prodding, admit they've never read The New York Times. Is it any wonder why I drink?

Still the job was great fun. I'll miss it, although I now get to sleep in on Saturday mornings.

Oh, and one more thing - I still believe we need to get rid of all the guns.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.