Do you have a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio? I don’t. Never listened to it either. Until yesterday, when I was invited to be a guest on “The Blog Bunker.” It airs on Sirius Indie Talk Channel 110, which is described as “political talk for people who hate political talk.”
Sirius is headquartered on the 36th floor of the McGraw-Hill skyscraper in midtown Manhattan across the avenue from Rockefeller Center’s “30 Rock” and Radio City Music Hall.
Ushered into a studio, I passed a long row of 20-somethings sitting on stools at a counter. For a moment it looked to me like an espresso bar and I wondered, where’s the barista? They were all mousing away on their laptops. “Who are they?” I asked. “Oh, producers, people like that,” said my escort, a 20-something producer himself.
The host of “The Blog Bunker” is a 20-something, too. His name is Joe Salzone, and he looks like a nerd minus the glasses and pocket protector. Anyway, he wanted to talk about three topics: 1) “Cable news and the Internet: Implications on the election and news in general”; 2) “Saturation coverage of a single story — does it annoy you?”; and 3) “Impeach Bush: Is it too late? Why should he be impeached?”
Could have been interesting. We had half an hour. But Salzone, a self-described conservative, kept wanting to talk about “the impeachment of Clinton” — duh? — and it all sounded like, well, “talk radio,” a media cliché. That was the mood, and there was no escape from it. I’m sure my comments must have been clichés as well. I’m told the show airs again today at 1 p.m. So if you have a subscription, you’ve been warned.
