Recent Adventures in Radio Activity | Sojourners

Recent Adventures in Radio Activity

Late last week, The Great Awakening book tour brought me to Seattle, Washington. On the media circuit we had a day packed with four back-to-back radio interviews. Almost more interesting than the interviews themselves was the diversity of listening audiences represented by each station.



Interviews ranged from a progressive Seattle rock station (the first to break the news of Kurt Cobain's death back in 1994), to moderate NPR, to conservative talk-show host Michael Medved, to Salem Christian radio. The appearances on these shows has become archetypal of the ways we are reaching people across the spectrum-all the way from left-wing Air America (the previous day in Portland), to NPR, to centrist AM talk radio, to right-wing talk radio, to conservative Christian stations.


I ended the day with Thor Tolo [you can download the mp3], a conservative evangelical radio talk-show host, and had perhaps one of the most thoughtful interviews I've ever engaged in on a Salem radio station-and one of the most interesting of the book tour so far.


When our discussion turned to the subject of poverty, I brought up how all too often our lack of relationship with the poor is a deeper problem than our ideological debates about how to solve poverty