by Ira Glass
(voice breaking a bit here)
And then June 4, the night following the Daryl interchange, turns out to be a climactic whirlwind of production challenges, logistical brinksmanship, meta-media outrage, Simpsonian minutiae, and Monster-grade stimulation. As is SOP, it starts around 7:00 P.M. in KFI’s large central prep room, which is where all the local hosts and their producers come in to prepare for their shows.
EDITORIAL OPINION Again, it’s nothing so simple as that he doth protest too much, but it would be less discomfiting if Mr. Z. didn’t feel he could so totally assure Daryl of this—i.e., if Mr. Z. weren’t so certain that his views are untainted by racism. Not to mention that the assurance resonates strangely against all the host’s vented spleen about a black man’s “selling out his race” by “pretending to be white.” Not, again, that Mr. Z. wears a pointy hood—but he seems weirdly unconscious of the fact that Simpson’s ostensible betrayal of his race is something that only a member of that race really has the right to get angry about. No? If a white person gets angry about a black person’s “pretending to be white,” doesn’t the anger come off far less as sympathy with the person’s betrayed race than as antipathy for somebody who’s trying to crash a party he doesn’t belong at? (Or is Mr. Z. actually to be admired here for not giving a damn about how his anger comes off, for not buying into any of that it’s-okay-for-a-black-person-to-say-it-but-not-okay-for-a-white-person stuff? And if so, why is it that his “selling out” complaints seem creepy and obtuse instead of admirable [although, of course, how his complaints “seem” might simply depend on the politics and sensitivities of the individual listener (such that the whole thing becomes not so much stimulating as exhausting)]?)
Is it wimpy or white-guiltish to believe that we’re all at least a little bit racist in some of our attitudes or beliefs, or at any rate that it’s not impossible that we are?
(Better than “the right” here might be “the rhetorical authority.”)
The prep room, which station management sometimes refers to as the production office, is more or less the nerve center of KFI, a large, complexly shaped space perimetered with battered little canted desks and hutches and two-drawer file cabinets supporting tabletops of composite planking. There are beat-up computers and pieces of sound equipment and funny Scotch-taped bits of office humor (e.g., pictures with staffers’ heads Photoshopped onto tabloid celebrities’ bodies). Like the studio and Airmix, the prep room is also a D.P.H.-grade mess: half the overhead fluorescents are either out or flickering nauseously, and the gray carpet crunches underfoot, and the wastebaskets are all towering fire hazards, and many of the tabletops are piled with old books and newspapers. One window, which is hot to the touch, overlooks KFI’s gated parking lot and security booth and the office of a Korean podiatrist across the street.
The standard of professionalism in talk radio is one hour of prep for each hour on the air. But Mr. Ziegler, whose specialty in media criticism entails extra-massive daily consumption of Internet and cable news, professes to be “pretty much always prepping,” at least during the times he’s not asleep (3:00—10:00 A.M.) or playing golf (which since he’s moved to LA he does just about every day, quite possibly by himself—all he’ll say about it is “I have no life here”).
Overall, the layout and myriad tactical functions of the prep room are too complicated to try to describe this late in the game. At one end, it gives on to the KFI newsroom, which is a whole galaxy unto itself. At the other, comparatively uncluttered end is a set of thick, distinguished-looking doors leading off into the offices of the Station Manager, Director of Marketing & Promotions Program Director and so on, with also a semi-attached former closet for the P.D.’s assistant, a very kindly and eccentric lady who’s been at KFI for over twenty years and wears a high-tech headset that one begins, only over time, to suspect isn’t really connected to anything.
There is also another large TV in the prep room, this one wired to a TiVo digital recording system so that anything from the day’s cable news can be tagged, copied, and loaded into NexGen and prophet. The TV gets only one channel at a time, but apparently certain cable stuff can also be accessed on one of the prep-room computers by a producer who knows what he’s doing.
Examples of volumes pulled at random from the tabletops’ clutter: Dwight Nichols’s God’s Plans for Your Finances, the Hoover Institution’s Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools, and Louis Barajas’s The Latino Journey to Financial Greatness.
(who’s usually long gone by the time the JZS staff starts prepping)
There are three main challenges facing tonight’s John Ziegler Show. One is that Emiliano Limon is off on certain personal business that he doesn’t want described, and therefore Mr. Vince Nicholas is soloing as producer for the very first time. Another is that last night’s on-air exchange with Daryl of Temecula is the type of intensely stimulating talk-radio event that cries out for repetition and commentary; Mr. Z. wants to rerun certain snippets of the call in a very precise order so that he can use them as jumping-off points for detailing his own “history with O.J.” and explaining why he’s so incandescently passionate about the case.
The third difficulty is that Simpson’s big anniversary Q & A with Ms. Katie Couric is airing tonight on NBC’s Dateline, and the cuts and discussions of the Daryl call are going to have to be interwoven with excerpts from what Mr. Z. refers to several times as “Katie’s blowjob interview.” An additional complication is that Dateline airs in Los Angeles from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., and it has also now run teases for stories on the health hazards of the Atkins diet and the dangerously lax security in U.S. hotels. Assuming that Dateline waits and does the O.J. interview last (which it is clearly in the program’s interests to do), then the interview’s highlights will have to be recorded off TiVo, edited on NexGen, loaded onto Prophet, and queued up for the Cut Sheet all very quickly, since Mr. Z.’s opening segment starts at 10:06 and it’s hard to fiddle with logistics once his show’s under way.
“You’re going to need to kick some ass tonight, bud,” Mr. Z. tells Vince as he highlights bites in a transcript of Daryl’s call, eliciting something very close to a salute.
Thus Vince spends 7:00-8:00 working two side-by-side computers, trying simultaneously to assemble the cuts from last night’s call, load an MSNBC interview with Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister directly into NexCen, and track down a Web transcript of tonight’s Dateline (which on the East Coast has already aired) so that he and Mr. Z. can choose and record bites from the Couric thing in real time. ’Mondo, who is back board-opping the ISDN feed of 7:00-10:00’s Phil Hendrie Show, nevertheless comes in from Airmix several times to stand behind Vince at the terminals, ostensibly to see what’s going on but really to lend moral support. ’Mondo’s shadow takes up almost half the room’s east wall.
John Ziegler, who is understandably quite keyed up, spends some of the pre-Dateline time standing around with an extremely pretty News-department intern named Kyra, watching the MSNBC exchange with half an eye while doing his trademark stress-relieving thing of holding two golf balls and trying to align the dimples so that one ball stays balanced atop the other. He is wearing a horizontally striped green-and-white golf shirt, neatly pressed black shorts, and gleaming New Balance sneakers. He keeps saying that he cannot believe they’re even giving Simpson air time. No one points out that his shock seems a bit naive given the business realities of network TV news, realities about which John Ziegler is normally very savvy and cynical. Kyra does venture to observe, quietly, that the Simpson thing draws even bigger ratings than today’s Scott Peterson, who—
Nobody ever ribs Mr. Z. about the manual golf-ball thing vis-à-vis, say, Captain Queeg’s famous ball bearings. It is not that he wouldn’t get the allusion; Mr. Z. is just not the sort of person one kids around with this way. After one mid-May appearance on Scarborough Country, re some San Diego schoolteachers getting suspended for showing the Nick Berg decapi
tation video in class, a certain unnamed person had tried joshing around with him, in an offhand and light-hearted way, about a supposed very small facial tic that had kept appearing unbeknownst to John Ziegler whenever he’d used the phrase “wussification of America” on-camera; and Mr. Z. was, let’s just say, unamused, and gave the person a look that chilled him to the marrow.
“Don’t even compare the two,” Mr. Z. cuts her off. “O.J.’s just in his own world in terms of arrogance.”
The designated JZS intern, meanwhile, is at the prep room’s John & Ken Show computer, working (in Vince’s stead) on a comic review feature called “What Have We Learned This Week?,” which is normally a Friday standard but which there may or may not be time for tonight. At 7:45 P.M. it is still 90° out, and smoggy. The windows’ light makes people look greenish in the areas where the room’s fluorescents are low. A large spread of takeout chicken sits uneaten and expensively congealing. Mr. Z.’s intern spends nearly an hour composing a mock poem to Ms. Amber Frey, the mistress to whom Scott Peterson evidently read romantic verse over the phone. The poem’s final version, which is “Roses are red / Violets are blue / If I find out you’re pregnant / I’ll drown your ass too,” takes such a long time because of confusions about the right conjugation of “to drown.”
(negotiated ahead of time with Vince as the price for letting a mute, unobtrusive outside party observe tonight’s prep)
’Mondo eventually starts taking plates of food back into Airmix with him.
(a UC-Irvine undergrad, name omitted)
“And to top it off,” Mr. Z. is telling Kyra as her smile becomes brittle and she starts trying to edge away, “to top it off, he leaves Nicole’s body in a place where the most likely people to find it are his children. It’s just a fluke that couple found her. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked by there, but it’s really dark at night, and they were in a, like [gesturing, one golf ball in each hand], cave formation out at the front.”
(meaning the Bundy Drive crime scene, which Mr. Z. has evidently walked every inch of)
Sure enough, Dateline runs the anti-Atkins story first. For reasons involving laser printers and a special editing room off the on-air news cubicle, there’s suddenly a lot of running back and forth.
In Airmix, ’Mondo is eating Koo Koo Roo’s chicken while watching Punk’d, an MTV show where friends of young celebrities collude with the producers to make the celebrities think they’re in terrible legal trouble. ’Mondo is very careful about eating anywhere near the mixing board. It’s always around 60° in this room. On the board’s channel 6 and the overhead speakers, Phil Hendrie is pretending to mediate between apoplectic callers and a man who’s filing sexual-harassment charges against female co-workers who’ve gotten breast implants. For unknown reasons, a waist-high pile of disconnected computer keyboards has appeared in the Airmix room’s north corner, just across the wall from KFI’s Imaging studio, whose door is always double-locked.
’Mondo can neither confirm nor deny that these supposedly outraged uninitiated callers are maybe themselves fakes, just more disembodied voices that Hendrie and his staff are creating, and that maybe the real dupes are us, the initiated audience, for believing that the callers are genuine dupes. ’Mondo has not, he confesses, ever considered this possibility, but he agrees that it would constitute “a serious mind-fuck ” for KFI listeners.
It is only right that John Ziegler gets the spot directly in front of the prep room’s TV, with everyone else’s office chairs sort of fanned out to either side behind him. Seated back on his tailbone with his legs out and ankles crossed, Mr. Z. is able simultaneously to watch Dateline’s are-you-in-danger-at-luxury-hotels segment, to hear and help rearrange Vince’s cuts from the MSNBC exchange, and to highlight those parts of the O.J.-Katie Couric transcript that he wants to make absolutely sure to have Vince load from TiVo into Prophet when the greedy bastards at Dateline finally air the interview. It must be said, too, that Vince is an impressive surprise as a producer. He’s a veritable blur of all-business competence and technical savvy. There are none of Emiliano’s stoic shrugs, sotto wisecracks, or passive-aggressive languor. Nor, tonight, is Vince’s own slackerish stoner persona anywhere in view. It is the same type of change as when you put a fish back in the water and it seems to turn electric in your hand. Watching Vince and the host work so well as a team induces the night’s first strange premonitory jolt: Emiliano’s days are numbered.
(which Vince was able to find online, but which had to be specially reconfigured and printed in order to restore the original line breaks and transcript format of, this being one cause of all the running around between 8:00 and 8:30, as well as another reason why it took the JZS intern so long to finish his quatrain, which he is even now fidgeting in his chair and trying to decide on just the right moment to show to Mr. Z.)
The broadcast studio is strange when no one’s in here. Through the soundproof window,’Mondo’s head looks small and far away as he inclines over the spot log. It seems like a lonely, cloistered place in which to be passionate about the world. Mr. Z.’s padded host chair is old and lists slightly to port; it’s the same chair that John Kobylt sits in, and morning drive’s Bill Handel, and maybe even Dr. Laura back in the day. The studio wastebaskets have been emptied, but the banana scent still lingers. It might simply be that John and/or Ken eats a lot of bananas during afternoon drive. All the studio’s monitors are on, though none is tuned to NBC. On the Fox News monitor up over the digital clock, Sean Hannity and Susan Estrich are rerunning the Iowa Caucuses clip of Howard Dean screaming at the start of his concession speech. They play the scream over and over. Ms. Estrich is evidently filling in on Hannity and Colmes. “They have hatred for George W. Bush, but they don’t have ideas,” Sean Hannity says. “Where are the ideas on the left? Where is the thinking liberal?” Susan Estrich says, “I don’t know. I don’t have a full-time job on TV, so I can’t tell you.”
Sure enough, within just weeks Emiliano Limon will have left KFI for a job at New York ’s WCBS.
It is a medical commonplace that bananas are good for ulcers.
Vince’s broad back is now to the TV and everyone around it as he uploads real-time TiVo feed into NexGen and edits per his host’s written specs.
All multitasking ends when Dateline, after two teases and an extra-long spot break, finally commences the interview segment. It is Katie Couric and O. J. Simpson and Simpson’s attorney in a living room that may or may not be real. One tends to forget how unusually, screenfillingly large O.J.’s head is. Mr. Ziegler is now angled forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled just under his nose. Although he does, every so often, let loose with a “Katie Couric sucks!” or “Katie Couric should be fucking shot!,” for the most part a person seated on the host’s far flank has to watch his upper face—his right eye’s and nostril’s dilations—to discern when Mr. Z.’s reacting strongly or thinking about how he’ll respond to some specific bit of Simpson’s “sociopathic BS” when it’s his turn to talk.
It’s odd: if you’ve spent some time watching Mr. Z. perform in the studio, you can predict just what he’ll look like, how his head and arms will move and eyes fill with life as he says certain things that it’s all but sure he’ll say on-air tonight, such as “I have some very, very strong opinions about how this interview was conducted,” and “Katie Couric is a disgrace to journalism everywhere,” and that O.J.’s self-presentation was “delusional and arrogant beyond all belief,” and that the original trial jury was “a collection of absolute nimrods,” and that to believe in Simpson’s innocence, as Ms. Couric says a poll shows some 70 percent of African Americans still do, “you have to be either crazy, deluded, or stupid—there are no other explanations.”
To be fair, though, there truly are some dubious, unsettling things about the Dateline interview, such as for instance that NBC has acceded to O. J. Simpson’s “no editing” condition for appearing, which used to be an utter taboo for serious news organizations. Or that
O.J. gets to sit there looking cheery and unguarded even though he has his lawyer almost in his lap; or that most of Katie Couric’s questions turn out to be Larry King-size fluffballs; or that O. J. Simpson responds to one of her few substantive questions—about 1994’s eerie, slow-motion Bronco chase and its bearing on how O.J.’s case is still perceived—by harping on the fact that the chase “never ever, in three trials that I had, it never came up,” as if that had anything to do with whatever his behavior in the Bronco really signified (and at which nonanswer, and Ms. Couric’s failure to press or follow up, Mr. Z. moans and smears his hand up and down over his face). Or that O.J.’s cheerful expression never changes when Katie Couric, leaning forward and speaking with a delicacy that’s either decent or obscene, inquires whether his children ever ask him about the crime. And when someone in the arc of chairs around John Ziegler says, almost to himself, that the one pure thing to hope for here is that Simpson’s kids believe he’s innocent, Mr. Z. gives a snort of reply and states, very flatly, “They know, and he knows they know, that he did it.” To which, in KFI’s prep room, the best response would probably be compassion, empathy. Because one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in—believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.
All of this John Ziegler will and does say on his program—although what no one in the prep room can know is that a second-hour Airwatch flash on the imminent death of Ronald W. Reagan will cut short Mr. Z.’s analysis and require a total, on-the-fly change of both subject and mood.
(who is in so many ways the efficient cause, ideologically and statutorily, of today’s partisan media, and whose passing will turn out to be June’s true Monster . . .)