By Samuel G. Freedman
Salon.com

Two hours after American forces launched their “shock and awe” assault against Baghdad in March, Mike Malloy went on the air from a concrete office building outside Atlanta for his weekday syndicated talk show. “I don’t know if you saw it, but I did,” he said near the outset, his voice uncommonly subdued. “This is the United States attacking a truly defenseless Third World country.”

For the next five minutes and 19 seconds, Malloy wordlessly broadcast the noise of missiles shrieking, bombs exploding, antiaircraft fire rattling. He had taped the audio straight from CNN, but on radio the war was shorn of television’s video game visuals, its safe distance from danger. This soundtrack thrust Malloy’s listeners into a nocturnal Baghdad, reeling from concussions.

When the battle tape ended, Malloy switched to a sound bite of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference lauding the “careful, measured beginning” of the war. Then Malloy returned to the air, saying, “This is a dark day, this is a filthy day, this is a day for shame.” And finally, heading into a commercial break, he wove together more combat racket with a madrigal-like song by Pink Floyd, “Goodbye, Blue Sky.”

For nearly 20 years, Mike Malloy has been making talk radio like this: caustic, abrasive, inventive, confrontational and resolutely left of center. It has won him admirers and awards, and it has cost him jobs. At a time when the very genre of talk radio is widely seen as synonymous with strident conservatism, his career both ratifies and belies that premise.

Malloy has hosted shows on major stations in major markets — WSB in Atlanta and WLS in Chicago — defying the conventional wisdom that liberal talk radio barely exists. Yet the fact that Malloy, at age 60 a proven success with a numerous honors and much critical praise, now reaches only a handful of affiliates on a network run by a labor union attests to the structural obstacles liberal talk radio faces. The vast majority of his listeners hear him not on the radio at all, but from his own Web site , which streams live audio of his daily show and also links to an archive of recent broadcasts. The site attracts “tens of thousands” of listeners each day, Malloy estimates.

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