 It hasn’t exactly been an American dream. Since Air America Radio’s inception, the liberal talk network has struggled to stay alive. Last week, speculation swirled that the troubled network was preparing to file for bankruptcy and its most recognizable star Al Franken revealed he hadn’t received a paycheck in a while. On Friday, an Air America spokeswoman dismissed the bankruptcy rumors, saying the broadcast network was undergoing “the the normal financial pressures of a start-up.”
| I've heard Chapter 11, but I'd bet on Chapter 7, myself... |
Air America was launched with a bang of publicity, but, over two year later, itÂ’s still short on bucks. So what went wrong?
| It recruited a bunch of people nobody's particularly fond of, to include their Moms, utterly lacking in sense of humor or proportion, and ostentatiously set out to take over the airwaves from the hated right wingers, who've spent a generation building their audience. |
| People sometimes don't recognize how long Rush spent in the boonies building his skill set and experience. Most of the other conservative voices did the same. Al Franken thought he could do it without any preparation or training; after all he'd written jokes for Saturday Night Live, so how hard could it be to talk into a microphone every day? |
ThereÂ’s a lot of differing opinion on the matter.
| I don't think there are a lot of differing opinions. You could probably count them all on a single hand... |
One theory often cited is that there just isnÂ’t a market for left-wing punditry on the radio dial.
| Larry King and Jim Bohannon made a good living for quite a few years precisely because they didn't try and shove their views down their listeners' throats. Even while they were making regular trips to the bank Mort Sahl — who could actually be funny, when he stayed away from politix — was showing that shrill doesn't sell... |
“America is a conservative country,” said Peter Smyth, chief executive and president of Braintree-based Greater Media Inc., which owns 19 radio stations in the Boston, Detroit, New Jersey and Philadelphia markets.
| Then where does the 50-50 split come from? |
“When you put your flag in the ground and say . . . ‘we’re going to be the rebuttal of Rush Limbaugh,’ you have to ask ‘Well, does the market want that,’ ” he said.
| The market would take that if the guys planting that flag had some facts to back up up their rebuttal. Like him or dislike him, Limbaugh's chock full of facts. He also reserves a special whiney voice for when he's describing touchy-feely mushy liberal stuff. |
Conservative talk show hosts, and even whole stations dedicated to right-wing talk, are all over the place. But there doesn’t seem to be much demand for left-of-center radio, said Jason Wolfe, program director for the oft-conservative chatter WRKO-AM (680). “There’s an overwhelming amount of conservative talk radio or talk radio that is more to the right than the left,” Wolfe said. “The view of the right . . . provides more of a compelling and entertaining product than what Air America does.”
| Who'd you rather listen to? Laura Ingram or Susan Estrich? The abrasively right-wing jerks, with few exceptions, don't make the talk radio big time. I can't think of lefties pleasant enough to listen to for three hours. They all seem to go nuts at the sight of a microphone. |
But Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, said Air America’s woes have little to do with its political bent and everything to do with the company’s business sense. “Somehow they have created the impression that they are the lone voice of liberalism in a dark sea of conservatism,” Harrison said. “It’s not that they’re liberal, it’s that it’s radio and radio is very, very competitive.”
| It's not that they're liberal, it's that they're abrasively, irritatingly, shrewishly liberal. |
The network’s main problem is that it spends more time trying to affect elections than it does concentrating on the bottom line, Harrison said. “The ultimate business plan is to generate ratings and revenue, not to get anybody elected,” he added.
| But that's the principle Air America was founded upon... |
A shortage of real radio talent might also be keeping Air America in the red. When the company launched, it nabbed some recognizable figures, like Franken and actress Janeane Garofalo. But radio can have a way of breaking down some uninitiated celebrities, as David Lee Roth’s disastrous stint replacing jock Howard Stern for CBS Radio demonstrated. “They thought that big names would bring big audiences,” Smyth said. “Great actresses don’t usually make great radio talent.”
| Radio talent's different from talent on the terriblevision or in movies. Radio paints a word picture, you're seeing the entire scene in your mind. The picture of Al Franken smirking or Janeane Garofalo looking like that chick you wouldn't go out with in college even when you were broke and had no beer were not pictures many of us wanted stuffed into our minds. |
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