Pot-stirring

Don Shelby is retiring from WCCO radio. I didn’t even know he was on the radio. I know him as news anchor of WCCO-TV. An article in the St. Paul paper yesterday reminded me he’s been on TV since 1978 and I vaguely remember him coming and the end of the career of Dave Moore, who I liked a lot. In 1978 I was 23 years old and Angie wasn’t born yet. Realizing such things is just plain weird. But that’s not why I’m writing about him.

He never impressed me as a TV anchor. I quit watching local news almost entirely about 15 years ago, so I haven’t seen a lot of him lately. But he said something in this article that I appreciated. He said, “People have told me, ‘I never watched you on television – didn’t like you at all, but I listen to your radio show, and now I’m watching because now I know what kind of person you are.’”

Shelby talked about how tightly scripted TV news is and says that on the radio, “He’s able to let his personality shine through and connect with listeners.” He said, “After nine years of listening, they can tell what you’re made of.”

I imagine you wouldn’t have to listen for nine years. Sometimes you can listen for nine minutes, when a person is just being themselves, and get that sense of knowing what they’re made of.

In the closing comments of the article, Shelby says, “I have an overall hope that has nothing to do with WCCO radio. I have an overall hope that we bring back gentility, that we take hate out of the equation, that we take fear out of the equation. There are so many pot-stirrers in the business today who say things that are designed only to inflame or designed only to get people on your side … I like when you turn the heat off and say, ‘Let’s taste this and see if it needs a little of that or it needs a little of this.’ Because at some point, you have to stop stirring the pot and you’ve got to serve it.”

Of course he mentions some “celebrity personalities” we all know even if we don’t listen to them – the ones who get way too much air-time stirring the pot with hate and fear.

It’s definitely a pot-stirring time – a time when something new is getting cooked up. You can’t always rush the meal. But you can stir without making a mess, and without banging things around too much. You can stir with love rather than hate. And I guess what struck me was that when you are who you are, and you’re not scripted by outside forces, and you’re not pandering to the dramatic side of things that sells or that gets people “stirred up,” just to get them stirred up, then you can still be passionate and stand up for your views, and you can do it without alienating because they’re your views, and you claim them and, if you’re made of the right stuff, you walk gently with them.

Quotes from “Shelby signing off,” by Amy Carlson Gustafson, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1A, 12-7-09.