Buzzflash interview: Thom Hartmann

With this interview, Buzzflash rolls out the first in a series of interviews with various progressive talk talents. In coming weeks, they promise interviews with Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller and Mike Malloy, among others.

This week, it's Thom Hartmann, where he talks about his radio background, how he's pulling back a bit from his local KPOJ show, his years with I.E. America Radio Network and self-syndication, his relationship with Air America and how he does a radio show. Here's an excerpt:

...IE America Radio went out of business the same week that Air America started. All the programs on IE America Radio went silent, except my program. Louise and I just went independent, and we bought satellite time on the Jones satellite. To this day, we have satellite time on the Jones satellite in that noon to 3 spot. We independently produced, distributed, and marketed the show for about a year before we entered into distribution with Air America...

...Very often talk radio hosts deal with issues as if they exist in a vacuum. They do political talk radio as if it was sports talk radio. I think that does us a disservice at a certain level. People have decided someplace -- at the RNC or the DNC or whatever -- that the liberal position on this topic is A, and the conservative position is B. And therefore we're going to take A or B -- whichever we are. It's basically my team versus your team. Again, I think that is a relatively lazy form of talk radio, and I just don't do that...

...I think progressive talk radio has just begun to find an audience. Consider it took Rush Limbaugh about three years before anybody really in the industry took his show seriously, and saw it as something that was good enough that it was worth imitating. Progressive talk radio has only been in major markets in a really significant way for about two years, or, arguably, three years. We're pretty much at that point where conservative talk radio was when Rush was just starting to catch his stride, and some of the imitators or additions to the genre, should we say, started coming along. So I'm honestly seeing the progressive talk radio as just begun...

Read more of this interview at Buzzflash.com.