Kansas City scribe Aaron Barnhart can’t stop talking about Shock Jocks, whether he’s writing about Bill O’Reilly as Ted Baxter or MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann:

One of the valuable insights in the new book by Rory O’Connor and Aaron Cutler called Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio is how even the most loathsome right-wing talk show host, if he or she is popular, has a peculiar genius that almost nobody else in our culture has. “Entertaining people with strong opinions about the news (without actually reporting or gathering any) sounds easy,” the authors write, adding that while “anyone can do it, very few people can do it well.”