John Batchelor

John Calvin Batchelor (born 1948) is an author and host of The John Batchelor Show radio news magazine.^[1] Based at WABC radio in New York for five years from early 2001 to September, 2006; the show was syndicated nationally on the ABC radio network. On October 7, 2007, Batchelor returned to radio on WABC New York, and later to other large market stations on a weekly basis. As of Nov. 30, 2009, Batchelor was once again hosting a daily show on WABC, airing seven days a week in New York City between 9 PM and 1 AM EST, and in many major markets across the country. A podcast of the show is available at WABCradio.com.

Early years

Batchelor was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania to an Assyrian/American family,^[2] and was raised primarily in Lower Merion Township of Montgomery County, in Pennsylvania's 13th congressional district. His mother and father both served in the United States Army during World War II; his father also served in the Korean War. Batchelor is the eldest of five brothers. He is a 1970 graduate of Princeton University and a 1976 graduate of Union Theological Seminary.

Broadcasting

Batchelor and Alexander

John Batchelor and his original co-host, Paul Alexander, broadcast Batchelor and Alexander on WABC in New York. On September 8, 2001, John Batchelor and Paul Alexander presented a four-hour WABC show that was devoted to multiple guest interviews on the USS Cole bombing [1] in October 2000 by the major suspect, the Saudi renegade Osama bin Laden and his gang, al Qaeda [2]. For two years, in the show, Batchelor performed the role of Republican; Alexander took the role of Democrat. They focused on international issues with a focus on Middle East-based terrorism. He described their approach as, Our model is the BBC World Service, with music and live interviews, but without English accents. Alexander quipped: We're not NPR, where they do setups to things on tape. Well, we could be NPR on drugs.^[3]

Paul Alexander left the show in December 2003 to pursue work as a playwright [2] and biographer.

The John Batchelor Show

The John Batchelor Show was syndicated nationally in April 2003. It carried nightly (Mon-Fri) the "Loftus Report" featuring the intelligence commentator John Loftus on current, war-related, open-source intelligence. Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WorldNetDaily, was also a regular and served as a co-host. Other regular contributors included Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations[3]; the New York attorney and taste-maker Ed Hayes; Larry Kudlow of CNBC's Kudlow & Company: Bill Whelan of the Hoover Institution: John Fund, Bret Stephens, Dan Henninger, Rob Pollock and Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal; Jim McTague of Barron's Magazine; Chuck Todd then of the Hotline, now NBC Political Director; Fiona Harvey and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times; Jodi Schneider of the Congressional Quarterly; Matt Bai and A. O. Scott of the New York Times; Katrina vanden Heuvel and Steve Cohen of The Nation; Victor Davis Hanson, Henry Miller, and Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution; Adrian Wooldridge, Robert Guest, and John Parker of the Economist; Monica Crowley; as well as David Grinspoon [4], resident expert on the planet Mars and outer space, and Robert Zimmerman, award-winning NASA observer. The program daily featured reports from journalists who also filed with the world's most respected press outlets, and the show was reliably a few days ahead of the news cycle.

When John Batchelor occasionally took a break for several evenings, the show was often hosted by Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events in Washington, D.C.; sometimes by the former BBC journalist John Terrett, who now works for al Jazeera; and by Larry Kudlow of CNBC's Kudlow & Company and WABC's Larry Kudlow Show.

Batchelor's show featured multiple guests, and shows were preceded by and interspersed with news clips and music. The show focussed on myriad topics, including politics, the war on terror, nuclear proliferation, the U.N., African civil wars, American history, space exploration and even Hollywood scandals. The Jerusalem Post has an audio archive of "Batchelor and Alexander" segments from 2002 and 2003 that deal with Israel and the Middle East. [5]

To report on breaking news, Batchelor and a small staff traveled to Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, and Taiwan, landing in Taipei to broadcast for the week leading up to the 2004 elections, when, on the last day of electioneering, both the president and the vice-president were shot and wounded by an unknown assailant.

Show cancellation and subsequent return

On Monday, August 25, 2006, Batchelor announced on air that his last show on ABC Radio Network would be on Friday, September 1.[6]

WABC's manager, Phil Boyce, wrote in e-mails to listeners that ABC Radio Network simply had discontinued Batchelor's syndication, but Boyce didn't give any hint why that happened.

Batchelor indicated he would seek to return to a regular radio program in late fall of 2006, but had not returned to a full-time position as of September 2007. His first radio appearance since his departure from ABC was as a substitute host for Matt Drudge on July 22, 2007. The show was nearly identical in format to his ABC show, including contributions from Klein and Loftus, among many other guests. He returned to fill in for Drudge on September 2, 2007.[7]

John Batchelor was a guest on the C-SPAN Q&A program on September 23, 2007 and indicated to host Brian Lamb that the chances that he will return to radio are "very good." Batchelor went on to say "Well, I mean, show business, Brian. You’re number one for five years in the toughest market on the planet, you don’t go away. You don’t ever go away. I can’t get away from the fact that I did the show." [8]

John Loftus, a frequent contributor to Batchelor's show, now has his own radio show on the Talkline Communications Network. Batchelor has also been a co-host on Loftus' radio show. Batchelor's first appearance on the Loftus Report was met with great enthusiasm.

Batchelor returned on WABC as the host of a weekly version of the previous show on October 7, 2007, from 7-10 PM Eastern Time. He then proceeded to host a second show as a guest host on KFI in Los Angeles, filling the vacancy caused by the departure of Matt Drudge, in the next three hours from 7-10 PM Pacific time. His first program featured an interview with Nick Grace of ClandestineRadio.com that broke the name of al Qaeda's extranet, Obelisk, and the news that the extranet's security tightened following a press leak in September 2007.[9]

In 2009, Batchelor expanded his show to Saturday and Sunday nights, from 9 PM to 1 AM, on most of his affiliates. The Saturday show focuses more on authors of history books, while the Sunday show focuses on breaking news and a wider range of topics.

On November 24, 2009, WABC announced that the Batchelor show would be also airing weeknights from 9 PM to 1 AM effective November 30.^[4]

Bibliography

Writing as John Calvin Batchelor

• The Further Adventures of Halley's Comet (1980)(novel)
• The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica, Dial Press (1983)(novel)
• American Falls (1985)
• Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing (1993)(novel)
• Father's Day, (1994)(novel)
• "Ain't You Glad You Joined the Republicans?": A Short History of the GOP (1996) (nonfiction)

Writing as Tommy "Tip" Paine

• Gordon Liddy Is My Muse (1990)(novel)
• Walking the Cat (1991) (novel)

Affiliates

The John Batchelor Show is broadcast every day from 9 PM to 1 AM Eastern time, 6 PM to 10 PM Pacific time. It is broadcast on a network of affiliates, and originates from 77 WABC in New York, New York. Neither Batchelor's nor Cumulus Media Networks' websites has a complete affiliate list, so this list may not display all stations that carry the show.

All times listed below are local to the market served. Not all stations broadcast the show in its entirety.

• Indicates live broadcast of entire show
• Indicates a delayed broadcast

Frequent Guests

• John Avlon (CNN; author: Wingnuts)
• Jeff Bliss (The Bliss Index)
• John R. Bolton (former United States Ambassador to the United Nations; American Enterprise Institute)
• Gordon G. Chang (Forbes.com; noted anti-Communist Chinese)
• Simon Constable (Marketwatch.com)
• David Drucker (Roll Call)
• John Fund (The Wall Street Journal)
• Charlie Gasparino (appears less often than before)
• Taegan Goddard (Political Wire)
• Malcolm Hoenlein (Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations)
• Larry Johnson (No Quarter blog)
• Larry Kudlow (CNBC; late Reagan Administration)
• Thaddeus McCotter (R-11th Michigan. McCotter has appeared less frequently recently)
• Marc Morano (Climate Depot)
• Devin Nunes (R-21st California)
• Arif Rafiq (Pakistan Policy Blog)
• Bill Roggio (Long War Journal)
• John Tamny (RealClearPolitics)
• Bob Zimmerman (author: Leaving Earth)
• Salena Zito (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

Batchelor is a rare conservative radio host who often invites liberal guests (all amiably), including Katrina vanden Heuvel and Markos Moulitsas.

Regular segments include "Hotel California" (introduced by an instrumental version of the Eagles song), which is, of course, a discussion of California's current fiscal discombobulation as well as its political environment, including the gubernatorial and Senatorial races. Nunes generally is included in the roundtable.

Zimmerman frequently comes on to talk about NASA and the space program, preceded by the music from the Star Trek end credits. The show's last segment (c.12:55 AM EST) invariably features Al Bowlly's Midnight, the Stars and You, ending in a brief (<30sec) valediction/good-night, sometimes with a few moments with a guest (time for one question). The singer is sometimes mistaken for Al Jolson, as Batchelor introduces the singer simply by "here's Al," and the song dates from the time of Jolson's late career.

John Avlon, Jeff Bliss, Gordon Chang, Simon Constable, Taegan Goddard, Malcolm Hoenlein, and Larry Kudlow have frequently guest-hosted or co-hosted.

References

1. ^ O'Connor, Anahad (February 19, 2006). "He Takes the Shout Out of Talk Radio". The New York Times: p. 14WC.1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/19wepers.html. 
2. ^ "John Batchelor, Novelist & Radio Talk Show Host". Q&A.org. http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1146. Retrieved 5 October 2011. 
3. ^ Collins, Glenn (November 21, 2001). "PUBLIC LIVES; Like the BBC Without Accents, or 'NPR on Drugs'". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E0DF163AF932A15752C1A9679C8B63&scp=1&sq=john+batchelor+paul+alexander&st=nyt. Retrieved May 6, 2010. 
4. ^ "Curtis Sliwa is leaving WABC 770 AM". Daily News (New York). November 24, 2009. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2009/11/25/2009-11-25_curtis_sliwa_says_so_long_at_wabc.html. 
5. ^ Market Rank according to Arbitron Market Rankings

External links

• The John Batchelor Show home page
• NY Times portrait on Batchelor and Alexander show, November 21, 2001
• John Batchelor's KFI webpage with On Demand link to show's podcast and mp3 downloads
• New York Sun op-eds archive
• Human Events op-eds archive