The afternoon newsletter from Radio-info.com reports that Lynn Samuels has died. She was an entertaining woman of the leftist persuasion who enjoyed mixing it up with the Cosnervative men at WABC-AM.
She has recently being working on Sirius/XM and has been on a number of radio stations over the years. When she failed to show up for work on Saturday, police were sent to her house and found her dead.
The NY Times has a more complete story
While Lynn had strong opinions and could make people uncomfortable, she was not a liberal of the MSNBC/Air America type. She never tried to be a mirror image of Rush Limbaugh. More than likely when Rush gets back from vacation, he’ll mention her. They worked together at WABC when Rush did the show from New York and apparently liked or at least tolerated each other.
Lynn and Rush shared a desk for a time at WABC. Lynn and Matt Drudge became friendly while Drudge was doing his talk show there. She even served as his call screener on occasion.
I was going to come back later and mention the Lynn Samuels connection with Matt Drudge’s Sunday Night show on ABC Radio.
Drudge briefly linked to a newspaper story, but didn’t write anything about her. Frankly, I don’t know what Drudge is doing for the past couple years. Drudge report is very depressing lately – maybe it is just the state of the world…. but little obscure stories about some evil person / event just fill up most of the page.
In any case, I never quite understood the Drudge / Samuels deal. Her motivation was pretty clear – to filter out coherent Conservatives and only let the crackpots through to Drudge… Drudge is another example of a person with no radio experience whose first radio job was national syndication – so perhaps he needed her (and ABC management wanted her) there to be his training wheels and give the program some structure and direction. Drudge’s voice is close to a monotone and he tended to have his voice trail off at the end of a thought – the stuff people do in real life but one of those things people with radio experience learn not to do.
On a totally unrelated note, one of the stations running those “Golden Age of Radio Christmas shows” had a bit where one of the hosts (Gracie Allen?) used the phrase “Ghost to Ghost”…. Art Bell is enough of a fan of radio that he may well have heard that at some point, or it may just be that’s just pretty obvious. But utlimately, I’m sure Michael Savage came up with “Ghost to Ghost” and Burns and Allen stole his idea.