Why Listen To Talk Radio?

Friedersdorf's reasoning:

I try the patience of some readers by regularly writing about talk radio hosts. It isn’t a fun beat, for all the obvious reasons (hate mail, gratuitous insults, having to listen to their shows)...It is nevertheless important to engage prominent talk radio show hosts by setting down their words on blogs, because otherwise their most indefensible nonsense just drifts off into the air unchallenged, a convenience that allows them to grow lazy in their call-screener-maintained cocoon while retaining more respect than is deserved from their ideologically friendly colleagues outside of it. The good folks at National Review or The Weekly Standard, which have covered this story well from various perspectives, might read Liberty and Tyranny, and being people that work a lot during the day, assume without ever thoroughly checking that the quality of argument on Mark Levin’s radio show is comparable.