Talk radio and the Mass. Senate race

Perhaps Coakley did herself a favor making herself scarce on the radio airwaves, for there is no more boring radio than Coakley's weekly appearance on the Egan and Braude show.

Between the friendly nature of the forum, the heavily screened callers, the boring nature of the calls selected to go on air, and Braude not letting anyone but himself talk for more than eight seconds at a time, perhaps Martha was lulled into thinking that was how all talk radio would be.

Did I miss the part where the panel discusses the importance of the issues other than party separating Coakley from Brown, i.e. Brown's support of waterboarding, and his rejection of the climate crisis. I'm more interested in that as a Massachusetts first, rather than who wears what kinds of bikinis.

The reason this lifelong Democrat ended up supporting Brown's candidacy had absolutely nothing to do with local talk radio. I never listen to it. Instead I was hoping that a win by Brown just might send a message to the President and Congress, that a lot of us, including some of us Democrats, are not very happy with his, and their, performance this past year. And I do think the message was received by the Administration, as in the last couple of days we've seen Mr. Obama scrambling to change the focus to his old stand-by Wall Street bashing and now, finally, a little more emphasis on jobs creation[we can only hope].

Emily,are you, like Martha, so out of touch with the non-eitists in this state. Biased comments and dis-belief surrounding the election of Senator-Elect Scott Brown and the citizens who have elected him are beyond belief. This is not the first time that you have been observed putting and talking down to others. Martha lost because she ran a campaign of Entitlement and in a desperate move near the end allowed outsiders to run a smear campaign. To their credit the citizens of Massachusetts rejected that brand of campaigning. Come out from under the bubble, meet the real people of Massachusetts, take a chance, ride the Red and Orange lines, make conversation with people you meet...widen your horizons, laugh a little, snarky is not becoming.

Talk radio shrewdly capitalized upon Scott Brown's deft public stand to its political and corporate benefit. There's no denying Scott Brown earned his election and hopefully we will all ultimately benefit from his being in the Senate. However it's scary and sad to hear some of what transpires on these "talk" radio shows. I couldn't agree more with Dan Kennedy's assessment of the Dennis & Callahan radio segment on WEEI recently- lots and lots of pure vitriol. I believe Talk radio/tv/blog can be healthy for our political discourse. But Talk radio is seemingly rife with decidedly partisan hosts with a penchant for sniping.

This is rich coming from a program on PBS. Where is the balance in PBS political programming? How about the balance on Beat the Press which usually features a panel made up of left leaning contributors and Joe Sciacca as the token voice from the other side? It seems to me that the most ugly rhetoric during this campaign could be found in the Coakley ads and Keith Olbermann's comments about Scott Brown.

Emily, why do feel so sad for Martha? She did not deserve the office of US Senator from MA. If you look at her record you will find that she was very soft on political corruption here in MA. She tried to let a rapist loose after he raped a 23 month old girl. She tried to prevent the parole of Amirault(sp?) after it was widely relaized that he had been wrongly convicted of child molestation. She made some very poor decisions while the Middlesex and MA AG.

Yes, many of the talk shows came down hard on her and rightly so. You should speak to Tom Finneran who reached out to her time and time again to come on his WRKO morning show. He even tried to get her to appear when Todd Fineberg was away but she would not.

If someone wants to serve in publc office then that person must be willing to meet with the public. Martha does not want to do this.

The election was Martha Coakley's to lose, she lost it dramatically.

The snarky remarks and subtle tee hees that Ms Rooney and Mr. Kennedy provide throughout the show are indicative of the contempt that they each hold for those of opposing views.

Beat the Press is rapidly drawing away from a critique of the media's performance of the past week into Ms Rooney's not-so-subtle political agenda.

No one critiqued the news media's inability to understand the actual dynamic of the Brown campaign. It would have been interesting to hear a discussion of how most news outlets missed the tsunami that swept Coakely away. Miss it, they did.

Unfortunately, we hear about the pin-up photos and the association with teabaggers.

Wonder if this is symptomatic of what is wrong with the press today?

Curmudgeon, I agree that the press should have covered “the actual dynamic of the Brown Campaign”. So what would that “dynamic” be? The prototypical “I will cut your taxes” promise made by every Republican running for any office anywhere nationwide for the last 30 years despite the nation’s financial circumstances or the number of wars we are fighting? Or perhaps this would be his outright blatant lies about health insurance reform. The Republicans have taught us that if you want to lie, just say it over and over again (seems to work). I suspect that you would not be interested in the press exploring his position on waterboarding, or climate change, so I won’t even go there. Scott Brown won because he is pretty and had nice commercials. What’s wrong with the press today Curmudgeon, is that we have yet to learn about the real Scott Brown; sadly, too late.

I, too, am concerned that BTP is shifting more to having the panel comment on the news event or person itself, rather than how the press covered it. The last thing we need is another set of "pundits" giving their views on the news item itself, regardless of the politics--we need more analysis and discussion of the press coverage of the news, please. Otherwise, BTP becomes another "us, too" panel and I have no compelling reason to watch it, we have too many of those already in medialand. Stick to your charter and unique mission, please!

I share Bill S's opinion, and thank him for stating it so succinctly.

Martha says she went on shows and was attacked. What shows? Emily, you failed to name them because the shows did not exist. Martha made it up. (Please do not throw in Dan Rea;'s show because that was late in the game when she was already in trouble). This was a typical Martha lie. Another example, the point about Schilling/Yankee fan was unimportant but she said she was making a joke. If you listen to the tape that is clearly not true. She said she was not privy to the incident in Washington where her goon pushed a reporter to the ground but the picture shows her looking right at the poor guy. (Wayne Woodlief wrote it best. If she helped the guy up, dusted him off, apolgized for the goon's actions, answered the legitmate question - why was she meeting with DC lobyists - maybe it would have turned her campaign around). But she could not do it because she is as arrogant as Emily, Payne and Kennedy. Early in the process I read she responded "I am not going to answer that" to a harmless question. She felt entitled and was not going to subject herself to basic queries or shaking hands with the unwashed outside Fenway Park