A post that will interest only about ten people in the world

A treasure from Jim Earl in the form of a video of part of the last broadcast morning of the late, great Morning Sedition.

For the uninitiated, Brendan MacDonald (guy in navy shirt) is now the producer of Marc Maron's hit podcast, WTF. Give it a listen. The guy with the scruffy beard is Dan Pashman, now of The Sporkful, whose writings can also occasionally be seen in Vanity Fair. You've seen Kent Jones on The Rachel Maddow Show.

I still miss this show every day of my life.

Blogrolling In Our Time

Say hello to Morning Remembrance, the great Jim Earl's resurrection of the Morning Sedition comedy bit of the same name. We're blogrolling Jim's creation in the -- where else? -- "In Memoriam" category.

Original clips can be found here. Look for the ones with "MR" in the file name.

The last great journalist at CNN is out

First it was Christiane Amanpour jumping ship to ABC:

Now , via Nicole Belle, comes the news that the last great journalist from CNN, Michael Ware, has been tossed out on his ear, after having bled and torn open his soul doing courageous and brually honest coverage of the Iraq War:

In addition to having taken a break recently in order to work on his book, it is no secret that he has been grappling with PTSD, brought on from the hellish years he worked in Baghdad. I was told that, unfortunately, when he needed more time off in order to deal with things, his request was denied. So he will not be returning.

While it is a huge loss for us (and for CNN) I am extremely relieved that he chose to take care of his own needs first. And while I sincerely hope that he will return to US television someday on another network, it is far more important that he gets the care he needs.

His work for CNN over the past four years has been an astonishing and brutally honest look at the causes and results of war. Not easy subject matter to watch… but he made us care. His urgency and passion burst through our television sets and made us pay attention, made us want to understand.

Personally, I will never forget the first time I heard him, speaking with Anderson Cooper via telephone to discuss Saddam Hussein’s trial as well as an article he had just written about an embed he had been on in Ramadi. It wasn’t even five minutes of airtime, but it was riveting. When it was announced that he would be joining CNN, I was delighted, because it meant we would be getting even more insight from him. And that we did — he worked like a stevedore, appearing on CNN at all hours of the day and night to make sure that we knew what was really going on in Iraq. As a viewer, you could tell that it mattered to him that the American people understood the issues in this far-away war of ours. He didn’t give a damn about the politics; he cared about what the grunts were going through and what the innocent Iraqi citizens (whose blood, he had to keep reminding us, is no less valuable than ours) were suffering.

His work was always insightful and informative, and on the too-rare occasions when he was able to do longer-format programs for them, it was like being in a classroom. He knew the material cold and presented it in a way that made it easy to comprehend. He is far from the average buffed-and-polished pretty boy posing for the camera. He’s real. He’s a guy — sorry; a bloke — you’d want to sit down and have a beer with, to ask how he’s doing and how he copes with all the craziness he reports on. And want to ask more about what he knows, what he’s seen, what he’s witnessed … no matter how unpleasant the answers would be to hear.

And exactly how does a news organization justify (to themselves, even!) not giving their war correspondents whatever they need in order to deal with their wounds, whether they are visible ones or not? If ABC had treated Bob Woodruff so callously, there would have been hell to pay. I don’t doubt they wanted him back in the field ASAP — doubly so after losing Christiane Amanpour — but don’t force him to make a choice between getting better and getting paid. That just sucks. Surely it would be better to have him off the air but still yours once he is ready to come back than to have him off the air and someone else’s upon his return? So not only has CNN made a callous move here, they have made a stupid one, as well.

I remember Michael Ware doing reportage for the late and still lamented Morning Sedition. The thing with Ware was that his style was so intense that you often couldn't tell whether he was doing parody or the real thing -- until he went to CNN and we found out that it was all for real. Ware, like Greg Palast, is what investigative journalism that seeks out truth used to be about. Palast can't get work in the U.S. It remains to be seen if Ware will either. Inconvenient truthtellers are usually not wanted here.

No I will not just let it go

If you weren't one of the people who turned on the radio on March 31, 2004 at noon and had the sense of "Yes! I'm home!", you can go read something else. Because there is no way you can possibly fathom what the millions (and yes, there were millions) of people who were Air America listeners went through as they watched various permutations of management run something fresh and potentially wondrous into the ground because they couldn't see past their own noses.

Melina, who knows more about the business of radio than you and I ever will, for reasons it's up to her to reveal, wrote about the final stake in the rotting heart of Air America yesterday. But there is something else going on that has angry Air Americans, specifically Morning Seditionists, coming out of the woodwork like zombies risen from the grave.

As Melina wrote, Danny Goldberg, who is perhaps the person most responsible for wrecking the programming that Air America offered in the early days, must have been feeling pretty guilty lo these last four years (assuming he has a conscience, which is doubtful), because he posted this laughable screed over at Down with Tyranny. Now, here at B@B, we loves us some DWT, but giving space to this revisionist scumbag has to have grown of nothing but the chumminess of two music industry vets and nothing approaching reality.

95 comments later, insiders from Air America in general and Morning Sedition in particular are starting to tell their stories, and they aren't pretty. From original producer Jonathan Larsen (now a producer on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, proving beyond a doubt that living well is the best revenge) to the zany Jim Earl (of Sammy the Stem Cell, Morning Remembrance, and Rapture Watch fame), to the anonymous staffers, the people who were there are using Goldberg's Variations as a springboard to finally, after four years, tell their stories.

WWRL here in New York is showing signs of a revamped drive-time lineup that includes ex-late-AAR-er Jack Rice until 6 PM, followed by, yes, Morning Sedition's straight man, Mark Riley, from 6-8, which would be a not-half-bad lineup if the memories of Randi Rhodes, Marty Kaplan, and Sam Seder weren't still so fresh and raw.

So go read what really happened, then come back and click the audio player in the right-hand sidebar....and listen to the Best Damn Show Ever on Radio as its sounds hopefully haunt Danny Goldberg to madness. Then maybe you'll understand why, after four years, we're still angry.