Late night listening:

For those of you in the Los Angeles area looking for something like Air America, there is a two hour nighttime liberal talk-radio program which airs Monday through Friday. It's on AM 1540 from 11:00 PM to 1:00 AM. During the day it's a sports talk station ("The Ticket") but at night they run the Free Speech Show (http://freespeechshow.com) which has some highly informed hosts and guests. The style is youthful and free-form with a positive attitude (as much as is possible these days).

Currently the station is running nighttimes with 10,000 watts, but it is expected to go to 40,000 watts later this year. As it is, a few people can get the station as far north as Santa Rosa, but reception in Southern California is alleged to be spotty. That's typical for an upper-frequency station with modest power.

In any event, it's the only AM liberal talk we know of in Los Angeles. The three big talk radio stations are thoroughly conservative:

• KFI - AM 640 - Rush Limbaugh, Laura Schlessinger, John Ziegler
• KABC - AM 790 - Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Larry Elder
• KRLA - AM 870 - William Bennett, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage (Phew! What a roster.)

Anything to break that uniformity is welcome, so give the Free Speech Show a listen.

NOTE: For FM, there is KPFK (90.7) which seems to have become much more pragmatic these days (though there still is a Nader-like contingent). The only other FM talk is KLSX, home to Howard Stern, but it's not political like the other stations mentioned in this post.

posted by Quiddity at 11/10/2004 07:12:00 PM