Pre-election tryout pairs up a couple of political junkies
A last-minute addition to public radio’s pre-election coverage is Down to the Wire, a four-hour special airing the Sunday before Election Day that pairs onetime CNN anchor Aaron Brown with former NPR national correspondent Elizabeth Arnold.
Independent producers Mary Beth Kirchner and Sean Collins launched the production Oct. 4 [2008] with co-producing stations KJZZ in Phoenix and KSKA in Anchorage, Alaska. Public Radio International, the Minneapolis-based distributor, announced the program offer Oct 17.
The live broadcast, Nov. 2 from 1 to 5 p.m. Eastern time, tries a new twist on The Aaron Brown Show, a weekend-series pilot that KJZZ made in May. The shows share a goal of bringing perspectives from the Western United States to the news via a national program. This incarnation bring the co-hosts’ combined political reporting expertise to pubradio’s election coverage and gives their chemistry a test run.
“They’re both incredibly smart and real political junkies, and that makes them great for a show like this, Kirchner said. “And there’s an edge of interesting irreverence in what they do.”
Arnold, who freelances from Alaska, loves field reporting, and Brown, who now teaches at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University, “is a masterful anchor who loves being in the studio,” Kirchner said.
Kirchner, one of three producer-partners in Launch Productions, approached Brown and Arnold separately about their interest in hosting public radio programs. At the time Launch was involved in an early phase of Public Radio Talent Quest, the CPB-backed project that recruited talent and cultivated ideas for public radio programming, but Kirchner began developing projects for them outside of the quest because they didn’t fit its objective of finding undiscovered talent.
“We were thinking about what we could do with Aaron and Elizabeth and their experience in political reporting, and something connected with the election made sense,” said Collins, a veteran of NPR News who headed pilot production for the Aaron Brown Show (Current, May 12). “Something at the end of campaign season would have some energy to it and have some import.”
When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin moved onto the national political stage as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, “we all looked at each other and said, ‘Maybe this is the moment to put this to the test and see how they sound as hosts,’” Kirchner said.
Collins recruited two former colleagues from his stint as senior producer of NPR’s All Things Considered: Matt Martinez, who helmed The Bryant Park Project until NPR canceled the daily show last summer, is working with Brown, and Jeff Rogers, former e.p. of Day to Day, is producing Arnold’s reportage from Alaska.
One planned feature of the broadcast will be Arnold’s take on oil drilling and energy resources in Alaska, a topic that came to public attention when Palin joined the Republican ticket, Collins said. Other topics include health care, foreign policy and “the role that political satire has played in this election,” he said. “We’ll also talk about the circles of people the candidates have surrounded themselves with and the campaign itself”—in particular, the observation that Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama embraced negative campaign tactics after promising they wouldn’t.
To build interactivity into the broadcast, producers are working with participating stations to set up local “listening rooms” where people will gather to hear the program together and submit questions via Twitter and e-mail, Collins said. Listening groups that register to participate at downtothewireradio.org may be called on to join the on-air conversation.
Arnold’s hometown station in Anchorage, KSKA, secured partial production funding for the special from the Rasmuson Foundation, and KJZZ matched funding from local donors, according to Scott Williams, KJZZ program director.
“Because of the economy, we found this is the worst time to be asking for grant money” to launch weekly production of the Aaron Brown Show, Williams said. “That’s why we backed up and focused on this.”
Web page posted Oct. 29, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
