Aside from the shows themselves, which are mostly nationally syndicated, both stations field a stable of local talent that read the traffic, local news, and weather, and in a couple of cases, these snippets are as riveting as the shows themselves, sometimes not in the way they intend.  Take Nancy Bond, who reports on the always interesting subject of LA traffic every fifteen minutes on KTLK.  Her voice is low, bordering on breathy, and elegantly alluring as she relays, say, the usual disasters in the bewildering confluence of ten-lane freeways they call the “Orange Crush,” an errant mattress blocking lanes on the 405, or the latest spectacular multicar pileup in Cahuenga Pass.  But there’s an added twist for the careful listener; a minor speech impediment that just occasionally reveals a slight trace of Elmer Fudd with certain L’s and blended R’s, which are particularly arresting when she tries to say “Sigalert,” which is obviously rather often, or “Sepulveda,” somewhat less so.  The poor thing must have been beside herself when, after the 2006 elections, the station adopted “Progressive, the new mainstream” as its tag line, and she had to attempt to say it at the end of every report, sometimes less than successfully.  I know I almost fell off a ladder the first time I heard her purr, “Pwogwessive, the new mainstweam.”  Everyone else clearly loves this as much as I do, because she’s been there for years, providing needed entertainment for stuck-in-traffic Angelenos as they wait raptly for the next flub.

Replacing a colorless Clear Channel drone, KPOJ recently, in a stroke of pure genius, hired Christina Hernandez to do the traffic here in Portland, and her voice is so kittenishly sexy that by the time she gets to her sign-off, “…and online at  620 KPOJ, dot com,”  which she languidly sighs as though there were a pole handy,  lefty men all over the metro area are undoubtedly rearranging their shorts and loosening their ties (in the unlikely event that they’re wearing them), especially when lack of major tie-ups and the clock require her to stretch out that “dot com” a bit.  She doesn’t need a speech impediment to be riveting, and can certainly look forward to a long and lucrative voice-over career selling Viagra, or perhaps ice to Eskimos, if for some reason the KPOJ traffic thing doesn’t work out for her.

Sadly, my favorite talent of all was jettisoned when Air America stopped doing its own news and threw in ABC’s pathetic excuse for a news feed instead.  Given that the whole point of progressive talk was to offer an alternative to the M$M, I considered that a pretty dumb cost-cutting move, and some great talent was lost.  When the excellent Joanne Allen  was off duty or on vacation, her fill-in was Emily Hoffman.  Hoffman apparently studied her craft by listening to the female news anchors of the 70′s, who strove to sound tough and hard-boiled, like real reporters in a male dominated industry;  her tone was so urgent and portentous, those R’s in “Air America Radio” so hard and drawn out for effect, that I constantly wondered whether it was serious or a consciously comic shtick.  Unlike Allen, who wrote her news straight up, Hoffman wrote hers with an edge, peppering reports with things like “Holy conflict of interest, Batman” and when she read the news, you knew you were listening to a proudly liberal station.  Some days, her 60 seconds was the best part of the hour.

They say that talk radio essentially saved AM from irrelevance when it emerged in the 1990′s;  more importantly, it revived the craft of the voice, as each of these fine talents show.  Before right-wing radio and consolidation turned the AM dial into a homogenized wasteland, popular radio personalities at local stations gave everyone a common frame of reference, which progressive talk is now doing in more liberal enclaves like Portland and LA.  That’s a great development; as Nancy Bond would say, it’s the new mainstweam.