Coast to Coast AM with George Noory

Post Reply New Topic

Every night, when most of the world has drifted into unconsciousness, some 30 percent of the American population stays awake. They’re truckers, insomniacs, night-shift workers, or just people who like to stay up late. They tend to adhere to a different set of norms. For one thing, in an age of digital distraction, they connect with enthusiasm to a decidedly analog device: they listen to the radio for longer periods, with greater attention, and with greater loyalty than do audiences at any other time of the day. They tend to listen alone—alone in bed, alone on a highway, alone in the world—and find that a voice in the darkness offers a bond with a wider community. Perhaps you’re one of them. Or perhaps, if you’ve ever driven across country in the dark, or flipped on the radio because you couldn’t sleep, you know the feeling.

But those who keep vigil after 10 p.m. are of a more contemplative sort, and George Noory undertakes his duties more through faith than works. He has faith in his listeners, and his listeners have a surpassing faith in him.

For four hours every night, on holidays and weekends, Coast to Coast beams from a small, unmarked studio, down the hall to Premiere’s National Operations Center, then out to 525 affiliate stations reaching every major radio market, and into the homes of some 3 million people and counting. The show has no national competition on the nighttime airwaves.

“Freaks, geeks, and rebels have got a very, very strange advantage,” Bloom says. “In most things we’re sort of disadvantaged, but society needs us very badly—we’re its eyes and ears, we’re its antenna, we’re the way it stretches out and finds new things.”