Although we haven't spoken in a long time, I consider Mike Malloy a friend, and one of the best broadcasters in America.
Back when Mike was on the late, lamented IEAmerica Radio Network, I (along with my TBTM partner Mike Stinson) were the guys who did the top of the hour news for Mike and the resy of the IEA lineup. Though I never met anyone else from the station in person (and we went on after IEA's demise to do the news service for Thom Hartmann's independent broadcast), I met Mike on a few occasions - among them in Washington, DC at the State Of The Union Address that led up to the Iraq War. He and his wife and me and my wife walked together from the Capitol building, among the barricades and armed guards and helicopter flyovers that made DC in 2003 seem like Moscow in the 50s. We talked with Anita Drobny, who at the time was planning a liberal radio network, and it was no secret that Mike was gunning for a job on that network (to a certain extent, so were Mike Stinson and I, but we didn't have the resume that Mike Malloy had). Even though I was a relative noob at broadcasting (despite it being my major in college, I never persued a job in radio and landed where I did through the years largely by luck or mistake), Mike treated me and my news team as contemporaries and friends. That was huge in my book, and I never forgot it.
As the Drobnys' brainchild took shape and morphed into what would eventually become Air America Radio, a lot of people got hired as on-air talent, but Malloy was not one of them. For a good long time, people considered AAR to be incomplete simply because a great, roaring voice like Mike Malloy was not part of it. Eventually, they did hire him, and he was the late-night guy behind the microphone, giving Freepers and other monkeys the red-ass and holding Team Thug's feet to the fire. He did it every night, and he did it with the excellence that has defined his career. The good news a couple of weeks ago was that AAR found a new flagship station in New York City, and it was announce that Mike Malloy's contract had been renewed. All was right with the world.
Until tonight.
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