There’s an old joke in the radio business: “You have a face made for radio.” It usually refers to radio types who think — almost always mistakenly — that they’ll “make the jump” to TV some day.
“Very few people make the jump successfully to TV,” nationally syndicated radio talk host Dr. Dean Edell told me the other day. The puckish and funny Edell, a fixture for years on San Francisco TV (and radio) who also had a daytime NBC-TV doctor show, added, “Rush didn’t do it. Neither did Dr. Laura.” (Thank God for that). ” I managed to.”
Radio artifact Larry King did, too. You can’t win them all.
When yours truly did a radio talk show in the San Francisco area, my take was: “I have a voice made for print.”
Where were we heading? Right, Rachel Maddow.
It’s been interesting to this media critic to watch this bright, personable former Air America radio host — who came to national radio out of the “backwoods” of rural Massachusetts — transition so well to television these last few months. It’s not an easy learning curve, but Maddow has done it a lot better than anyone could have reasonably expected. She has worked on her game, and it shows.
On Maddow’s MSNBC show, she’s funny, opinionated without being annoying, and shows a real knack for explaining complicated economic issues — and how so many of the GOP’s absurdities about it are (to use Rachel’s polite term) “bull pucky.” Her segment tonight on “ConservaDems — weasels like Sen. Evan “Smooth Operator” Bayh — who are threatening to scuttle Obama’s budget — was both timely and important.
Now, if Air America’s clever and witty Ron Reagan Jr. could make the transition, MSNBC would have an even stronger youth corps.