Mark Simone runs on charm before he runs on argument. He came up as a master of ceremonies and a music historian, the man at the microphone in the ballroom keeping a star-studded dais moving, and that training shows in everything he does on the air. Liz Smith called him the quickest and smoothest in front of a discerning audience, and Larry King praised his wit and humor as an MC. The voice he brings to WOR each morning is the voice of a man who has spent decades making rooms full of celebrities feel at ease. He sells warmth first and politics second.
\nListen to the timbre. He talks low and unhurried, a New York radio voice sanded down by years on WNEW and WABC, where he hosted oldies shows and ran what he liked to call a graduate course in music and the arts. That musical pedigree matters. He learned pacing from records and from interviewing entertainers, so he knows when to let a beat sit and when to push the tempo. He almost never shouts. Where Bob Grant barked and Curtis Sliwa crackles, Simone purrs. He keeps everything conversational, like a man telling you a story across a table rather than preaching from a pulpit.
\nThe diction is plain and clubby. He favors the insider register, the sense that he knows the rich and powerful and will let you listen in. His own station bills the show as an insider’s look at the rich, the powerful, and the famous, full of colorful wit and savvy insight. He drops names without strain because the names are real. He has sat with Sinatra scholars, hosted hundreds of PBS specials, and traded jokes with Carson’s old circle. So when he talks about a politician or a mogul, he frames it as gossip among people who know the game, not as a sermon from outside it.
\nThe rhetoric leans on the wry aside more than the frontal assault. His Twitter voice gives you the template. He writes that Obama can claim all day he never pushed the Russia hoax, but he seems unaware of the internet, where everyone can go back and watch him do it. That is the Simone move. Set up the target’s claim, then puncture it with one dry line. He likes the rhetorical question that answers itself. Only one living president went to Billy Graham’s funeral, he says, and asks what that tells you about the sanctimonious political creatures who stayed home. He builds the small ironic contrast, the kind a toastmaster uses to roast a guest of honor, and lets the audience supply the verdict.
\nHis monologues, the 10am and 11am set pieces that anchor each hour, work as quick news riffs rather than long essays. He moves through several items fast. One run takes him from Iran’s inflation to a Maine Senate race to a Trump coal investment to baseball expansion, all in a few minutes. He gives you the headline, his angle, a joke, and then the next thing. The form rewards his music-DJ instinct for momentum. He keeps the dial spinning.
\nThe interviews show the other half of the man. He brings on Bill O’Reilly to handicap the war, Michael Goodwin to talk New York politics. Here the MC training returns. He sets up the guest, hands over the floor, and steers with light touches. He keeps it moving, the thing Trump once praised in him as an emcee. He rarely fights his guests. He agrees, he amplifies, he draws them out.
\nThe manner has its flaws, and the audience names them. Listeners complain that he eats during the show, clicks and taps pens, scribbles while guests talk, and makes mouth noises that drive some of them to switch off. The same looseness that makes him sound like a friend at the table makes him sound, to some ears, like a man who forgot the mic was hot. The casualness is the cost of the warmth.
\nPut it together and you get a conservative talk host who got his polish from show business rather than politics. He persuades by being good company. He frames the news as a story he is letting you in on. He prefers the smooth jab to the roar. He runs on pace, wit, and the long memory of a man who knows where every body in entertainment is buried, and he would rather make you grin than make you angry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mark Simone runs on charm before he runs on argument. He came up as a master of ceremonies and a music historian, the man at the microphone in the ballroom keeping a star-studded dais moving, and that training shows in … Continue reading