The clout of Bruce Bradley

[Paul Hopfgarten]

I wonder though, how many "transformations" are due to "opportunitie$" as
opposed to some "heartfelt" swing from right to left or left to right...

-Paul Hopfgarten
-Derry NH



-----Original Message-----
From: boston-radio-interest-bounces@tsornin.BostonRadio.org
[mailto:boston-radio-interest-bounces@tsornin.BostonRadio.org] On Behalf Of
Donna Halper
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 1:30 PM
To: kvahey@comcast.net; Sheila McCarthy
Cc: (newsgroup) Boston-Radio-Interest
Subject: Re: The clout of Bruce Bradley

At 01:18 PM 3/1/2008, kvahey@comcast.net wrote:
>I remember one night Bruce went nuts over the Supreme Court when
>interviewing Fred Graham who covered the court for CBS. He was tilted
>far to the right. He later was on a small conservative station across
>the river in Illinois making Rush sound liberal.

And that happens.  Ed Schultz is one of today's most successful 
progressive/liberal talkers, but if you knew him before 2000, he was 
one of the most right-wing conservatives in the USA and did an 
ultra-rightie local talk show.  Several things happened in his 
personal life that changed him gradually, and today he is by all 
accounts genuinely a moderate, with some very left-wing positions on 
issues like workers' rights and health care, and he does a very 
sincere progressive talk show.  Prior to 2000, he was one of the most 
ardent and aggressive rightie talkers in radio.  Go figure.  The same 
is true of Keith Olbermann.  Like him or hate him, people who know 
him much better than I do tell me that in the 70s, 80s, and even the 
early to mid 90s, he was mainly interested in sports.  Yeah, he 
followed politics, but not in a particularly passionate way.  Yet 
look at him today-- one of the most polarizing figures in media 
(along with his right wing rival Bill O'Reilly) and one of the most 
vehement leftie/progressive commentators out there.  Colleagues of 
his who knew him in the 70s and 80s have been quite surprised by the 
transformation-- yeah, he was probably not a rightie even back then, 
but he wasn't exactly a big fan of politics either.  He knew 
something about it, but all he wanted to talk about was sports.  That 
was then...

So, I don't know what radicalized Bruce Bradley-- when I knew him, 
during my college years, he was a moderate, on the rare occasions 
when he talked politics.  I don't know if he was a Democrat or a 
Republican, but he absolutely was NOT extreme in any way.  People's 
life experiences change them -- look at Dennis Miller, a former 
leftie and libertarian and now an ultra-rightie.  It's an interesting 
time to be watching/listening to political commentary-- the person 
delivering it may have been on the opposite side a few years ago!