Beating the odds and predictions of its demise, Air America not only stays afloat, but helps swing an election and spawns a new industry in progressive talk radio.
~ By DEAN KUIPERS ~
A rare moment of repose: Harrison on the Edge leads the live and local talk radio at KTLK-AM Progressive Talk ~
Harrison, the one-named host of Harrison On The Edge, is on the air celebrating the life of satirist Molly Ivins in a way Ivins might appreciate – by relating a funny story about how telling the truth got him fired. A great Texas wit and progressive hero, Ivins died earlier this day of breast cancer, but Harrison is anything but solemn behind the mic. Instead, the host of KTLK’s evening progressive talk show is animated, his boyish blond hair and blue eyes flashing at producer Linda Blake as he explains to his audience that he lost a job like this with CBS in Chicago when President Bill Clinton was in town, and Harrison was on the air talking openly about the fellatio Clinton had apparently received from Gennifer Flowers. Clinton heard the show – liberal host or not, he was angry to hear this on the air – and called from the limo. Harrison was canned.
Not long after, Harrison won a journalism award for losing his job this way, and at the ceremony Ivins encouraged him to keep talking. “She said three things to me,” says Harrison. “‘Do good’ – meaning being an inciting and healing force, ‘tell the truth, and have fun.’” That, says Harrison, has become one of his mantras.
It is also a reasonable mission statement for Air America, the progressive, largely Democratic Party-identified radio network for which KTLK 1150 AM is the Los Angeles affiliate. The other big buzz in the studio this evening is that Air America finally found a buyer, after about three months in bankruptcy proceedings, which will keep it on the air and move it into a new era. Host Al Franken, whose photographs dot the station’s hallways, will be leaving on Valentine’s Day, February 14, allegedly to run for the Senate from his home state of Minnesota. But money will flow in, bills will be paid, and liberal talk will stay on the air.
Not that there was much chance of it disappearing now, even if Air America did go under. A friendly liberal competitor, Jones Radio Network, has huge hits on its hands with Ed Schultz, the converted Republican with a steak-and-potatoes approach out of South Dakota, and Stephanie Miller, whose show is produced in the same L.A. studio as Harrison’s and which is the second-highest rated morning show in L.A. and O.C. after KFI’s right-of-center Bill Handel. A new liberal syndicator, Nova M, was launched in October out of Phoenix by Mike Malloy, one of the original hosts who helped create Air America, and features Howard Dean campaign guru Joe Trippi and pollmaster John Zogby.
Despite a tsunami of criticism – including some from the Left – the format looks like it’s here to stay.
And guys like Harrison are certainly part of the reason why. He takes Ivins’s advice to heart. He laughs a lot. He’s a “live and local” show for KTLK, not part of the Air America network, but he certainly fits the overall vibe. During the show he airs the famous scene from the film Network, in which character Howard Beale explains to a live TV audience that he’s “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” – interrupted with liberal sprinklings of Howard Dean’s infamous scream from the 2004 presidential campaign speech in Iowa. An openly gay man (one of his bumpers calls him “the openly gay son of a neo-nazi”), Harrison calls Blake “Lindalicious,” his “pitbull producatrix,” and a “Buddhist sex kitten.” His show is a crazed Chinese fire drill of producers and engineers windmilling for two hours in a process that has him wrestling with a pre-recorded interview with Howard Zinn, delivering a rap song mocking a CNN reporter who asks gangbangers how they “roll,” airing his regular “Activism A-Go-Go” segment, and celebrating with Oakland-based journalist Sarah Olson, who successfully resisted a subpoena to testify in the court martial of Iraq war critic and active soldier Lt. Ehren Watada.
“You gotta have fun in life. Many of us liberals are so beaten-down, and so depressed, and so emasculated,” says Harrison, bouncing around his studio in a Key West sweatshirt, white jeans, and flip-flops.
“It is a party,” says Blake. “It’s fun to be liberal and you should be proud of it. In the words of Molly Ivins, she’s ‘openly liberal.’” ?
That, says Blake, is what’s going to get the youth involved. She imagines college kids working for Barack Obama like they did for Bobby Kennedy, because it matters and because it’s fun. Not because they’re motivated by fear of the future.
“We had a reporter in here give me a packet of Iostat, which is potassium iodide, for my thyroid, when the nuke plant melts down. So I could survive it,” says Harrison, incredulous.
Blake starts laughing, remembering this. “That’s so fuckin’ tragic,” Harrison continues, “but you know what? If we can show each other that life is worth living, and remind each other that we have this power and this youthful energy and this desire to have a better world, and fuckin’ laugh our way through it, we’re going to be a lot more effective. Because we have always been the creative ones. So let’s recapture that power, and create the planet upon which we want to live.”
~ The sound and the fury ~
If you want to watch producer Linda Blake reacting to a Left in depression, just watch the HBO film about Air America, Left of the Dial. She was working at Air America almost from the beginning, and she’s in there on Election Night 2004 – the beauty with the curly red hair – when Kerry loses to Bush and the fledgling network is stunned.
The 2004 campaign is a dramatic arc in that film, to be sure, as Air America was launched explicitly to counteract the booming popularity of right-wing talk stars like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity and thus push the Democrats over the top in that election. And it’s clear from the film that everyone involved truly believed it could happen. Just coincidentally, however, the film crew captures another incredibly intense drama – and sources say it’s accurate – that pretty much hijacks the film: After being on the air only a few weeks, the Air America staff discover that CEO Mark Walsh and Chairman Evan Cohen have been hiding the fact that they are stone broke and the health insurance has been cancelled and no one’s getting paid. The network’s embarrassed brass slink away and take several other top staffers with them and the whole network teeters precariously on the brink of collapse.
Where it more or less remains today. Undercapitalized from birth, Air America lost over $41 million in its first two-and-a-half years, along with several CEOs and some of its local affiliates. That wouldn’t be such a big deal – all media startups lose a lot of money – but the lineup of progressive donors who would ride to its rescue was apparently short, and it went into bankruptcy in October 2006.
“It just was underfunded,” says Danny Goldberg, the legendary record company executive who left Air America in April 2006 after being CEO for one year. “The company that I was going to run was just not funded and the job became about cutting costs and trying to raise money rather than running something, and that’s not something I’m particularly good at. It was a plan that should have cost $50-60 million; there was like half that amount, and there was a sense of ‘if we build it they will come, and rich liberals will fund it.’ And that’s just not the way the world works.”
One look at the 25 pages of creditors listed in the bankruptcy filings reveals that Goldberg is among those who didn’t get paid; his claim is for $133,000, though it is marked as “disputed.” Of the $20 million in liabilities, Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, is the single biggest creditor and is owed $9.8 million. It reaches all the way down to the hosts: they’re into Franken for $360,000 and even Chuck D for almost $11,000. Many of the creditors are businesspersons, and they know about not getting paid; but it just seems bad karma to not pay Chuck D, doesn’t it?
The man who’s apparently inheriting that karma is Stephen L. Green, founder and chairman of SL Green Realty Corp., a $12 billion company that controls 27 million square feet of real estate. On January 29, Air America signed a letter of intent to sell the whole ballgame to Green, who is the brother of Mark Green, a fill-in host at Air American and a longtime Democratic Party principal in New York with two terms as public advocate – an ombudsman-like elected position that is first in line to the mayor.
Air America spokesperson Jamie Horn explained that neither current CEO Scott Elberg nor anyone else at the network were able to comment on the impending sale, but a company press release quoted Elberg as saying only that the deal will “solidify Air America’s future.” Mark Green goes further, claiming, “With the Democratic take-over of the 110th Congress and prospects in the next presidential election, it’s the perfect time for Air America 2.0. If progressive values were a stock, now is the time to buy.”
Stephen Green is certainly hoping so. But it’s not the longshot bid it would have seemed even a year ago, when the impression was that any money pumped into Air America was simply prolonging the network’s inevitable demise. Whether or not a network like Air America will be the big winner, or only certain syndicated shows will pan out, progressive talk radio is making plenty of money.
“It’s good enough that a good sales manager should be able to make it sell,” says Sean Ross, VP of music and programming at Edison Media Research, a radio consulting firm. The ratings in many major markets are very competitive, he confirms. Air America hosts Franken and Randi Rhodes do very well in a lot of towns. But it still takes skill to sell the ad space. “Whether it’s urban radio, whether it’s Spanish-language radio, whether it’s liberal talk – having the numbers and having somebody who can sell them effectively is not always the same thing.”
“After Franken and Rhodes got some decent ratings, radio embraced the format, particularly Clear Channel, because there’s a shortage of formats,” says Goldberg, who points out that too much was made of Air America having to buy its way into big markets. Of the 80-plus affiliates, he claims, the network only had to pay its way into New York City, where the network leased a station for its flagship, and into L.A. (though he won’t disclose how much that cost). Most stations saw the logic in the standard business arrangement: Of the 16 minutes of ad time per hour, five go to the network and 11 go to the local station. “The vast majority did it because they were persuaded to it [by ratings], and not because of any money changing hands.”
In fact, highly-rated radio stars have emerged from the liberal talk universe, such as Schultz, Miller, Randi Rhodes, and Thom Hartmann, an Air America-syndicated host out of Portland, Oregon, who seeks to reclaim the “radical middle” and is now slated to take over Franken’s noon-to-3 p.m.(ET) Air America time slot.
“People sometimes confused the business problems that Air America is having, or has had, and fail to distinguish that from relatively good ratings in many cities. Those ratings are all the more impressive in that they threw all these shows onto the air,” says Larry Rosin, president of Edison Media Research.
The L.A. Weekly’s Marc Cooper, who was involved with the Nation magazine-affiliated show Radio Nation before it migrated to Air America, is one of those critics. On his blog, he has repeatedly assailed Air America as a money-hole, pointing out that $41 million could buy a lot of politicking, writing: “Just imagine the number of full-blown real world congressional campaigns that could have been funded with that chunk of change (in round numbers, maybe 20 or even more). Or the number of magazines that could have been funded. Maybe even a serious, daily liberal newspaper.”
But why not take a clue from people who know money-making radio when they see it: Clear Channel. They bought in, and bought in big, and their involvement is a hard-to-swallow lesson for ideologues of all stripes: The Man does not care whether you buy at Trader Joes or at Wal-Mart just as long as you buy. Clear Channel Radio, the biggest corporate owner of radio stations across the United States with over 1,200 stations, snapped up Air America and plunked it down right in the same buildings where it runs Rush Limbaugh. Just another steaming chafing dish in the big market-share buffet. Given the heat and passion that is unleashed in these stations, it’s sobering to see the call signs all butted up against one another on the outside of Clear Channel’s Burbank offices. In amongst a raft of music formats, KTLK 1150 AM Progressive Talk hangs there right next to station KFI 640 AM, which airs Handel, Limbaugh, and afternoon hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou who (though allegedly not claiming allegiance to any particular political party) have taken glee in bashing gay radio hosts and illegal immigrants and supporting the controversial Minutemen border vigilante group.
“There’s over 10 million people living in Los Angeles and Orange County, so I don’t think KTLK is a huge competitor any more than any other station,” says Robin Bertolucci, program director at KFI. She points out that she thinks of competition more globally, meaning if you’re doing anything other than listening to her station, then KFI isn’t doing its job. But the arrival of progressive talk? “It doesn’t change what we do,” she says.
Bertolucci, in fact, sounds a lot like her counterparts at KTLK when she talks about the goal of her radio station: she disagrees with calling it right-leaning, but instead says it’s about truth.
“We’re not beholden to any brand of politics or any group of politician,” she adds. “Everybody here is a smart, free-thinking person who calls it like they see it. We don’t have any political agenda other than the agenda of truth.”
As much as many of John and Ken’s stunts seem custom-engineered to make a big publicity splash that is good for Clear Channel, they’re also the reflection of real political beliefs. Radio is an extremely intimate medium, and deeply held convictions are the commodity. The mostly libertarian views of John and Ken have famously caused internecine wars even with several of their KFI colleagues. Yes, it’s all entertainment, but Harrison and Blake say being on the big Clear Channel team with them doesn’t mean it’s all buddy-buddy.
“Once I think one of the producers at KFI asked me if I wanted to do fill-in work, call-screening,” says Blake, “but I made it clear when I came here: I will not give five minutes of my time to any of the shows at KFI. And that was that.” (Later, she made it even more clear in an e-mail: “I will never work for a show that’s de-constructive rather than constructive.”)
So is there an upside to being part of a megalith like Clear Channel? Yes, there is: anything in that mix is necessarily for mass consumption. It’s not Pacifica or Radio Nation or even NPR. It’s the commercial big leagues. And that does matter.
~ To network or not to network~
The problem with Air America as a business – most everyone agrees – is that it tried to do too much at once. It tried to be a 24/7 network when a couple of syndicated shows might have actually paid for themselves. It tried to be the radio equivalent of Fox News and match the juggernaut of right-wing talk with a kind of catholic emergence as the go-to place for round-the-clock relief. As the KTLK bumper sticker says, “It’s All That’s Left.”
How you judge that approach, however, depends on whether you’re making money or swaying votes. Air America might not have won the 2004 election, but it can take a lot of credit for the explosive growth of its format.
“Conservative talk radio, for all the conspiracy theories, grew very organically,” says Rosin. “It wasn’t like people suddenly started firing up conservative talk radio stations in one big shot. What Air America tried to do is so much harder, which is to put on an entire format, an entire station of shows, and yet they kind of pulled it off, up to a point.”
Goldberg points out that, yes, syndicating a few shows would have been cheaper, but the thinking was that wouldn’t have enough impact. The founders of Air America took this financially wobbly approach in order to build a format bigger than just Air America, and it seems to have worked.
“The idea was to create a format called liberal talk or progressive talk,” he says. “Their theory was that they needed to create a full slate of programming so that a station could commit to that format because there just weren’t enough liberal shows that existed at that time. And that was an investment and sort of a start-up cost that was very burdensome, financially.”
Still, he says, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea.
“There’s all sorts of ideological media that don’t make money,” Goldberg adds. “The New York Post, for example, loses tens of millions of dollars a year, but Rupert Murdoch continues to fund it because he likes its strategic value I guess and he likes the political message. Fox News took a huge investment before it started making money, much more than Air America’s consumed. But Rupert Murdoch didn’t start the New York Post and the Weekly Standard and say, ‘I’ll put up 30, 35, 40 percent of the money and the conservative community will fund the rest of it.’ He funds it 100 percent. So there was a little bit of naiveté about it, a little bit of getting high on your own supply, drinking your own Kool-Aid – with the best of intentions.”
Part of that naivete was thinking that TV stars would make good radio hosts, but now, almost three years into the experiment, the focus is turning toward true radio talent.
Comedienne/actress Janeane Garofalo, for example, was part of the original crew and figured to be one of the top draws, but her shrill attack didn’t really catch fire and she left her show Majority Report in July 2006. Similarly, the network has developed shows with all manner of well-known personalities, such as Robert Kennedy Jr., Public Enemy’s Chuck D, radical country musician Steve Earle, TV poverty pimp Jerry Springer, and journalist Laura Flanders, but few of them have become vehicles for serious ratings. Comic Marc Maron tried two different shows over two years but proved how difficult it can be for even a fairly good radio host to connect with an eager audience, as he really never found a rhythm.
It was radio vet Randi Rhodes who first broke through, with her relentless flow of investigative reportainment, sound clips, and research ferreting out missteps and untruths by the Bush administration, especially in the prosecution of the Iraq War. The show is not just opinion but fresh facts listeners really use in forming their own polemic, and thus indispensable listening for a certain crowd.
Of the TV people, Franken transcended. The former Saturday Night Live comic and writer developed his own style somewhere between skit comedy and the dead-serious reportage of NPR.
So that makes two successful shows, which would be a phenomenal start for a new syndication company, but Air America had aimed much higher than that and so, like a trash-talking prize fighter, invited critics to view every glove laid upon them as lights out. Instead, the kid has moved up in the standings.
“It’s marquee value, right?” says Harrison. “It’s like Broadway: They’ll get guys who can’t sing – Richard Burton doing Camelot. He talked it. But they knew getting Burton was going to sell out for a whole year and it did. Later, you massage it into what it’s supposed to be.”
“Making money … was like a false measuring stick designed to belittle the impact of something that threatened the conservatives and for good reason, because they had monopoly on that particular medium and now they don’t,” Goldberg adds.
Even better, say many Air America fans, the network is achieving its original goal: informing the electorate and swinging elections. It didn’t work in 2004, but did it have an effect in 2006?
“It’s measurable by the outcome,” says Harrison. “The average American, the year before that election, they were all convinced that Saddam Hussein had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center. Because there was no contravening voice.”
Right around the time that Air America debuted, in March 2004, the print media in particular was waking up to its own complicity in the war in Iraq. For example, the reporting by Judith Miller of The New York Times, in which she claimed weapons of mass destruction had been found and an active nuclear program uncovered in Iraq, were found to be largely Bush administration fabrications right down the line. Many in the White House press corps had been similarly duped and were angry. And Air America was right there for the big turn-around as President Bush began to sink.
Linda Blake cuts in: “You have to understand what it was to be at [Air America]. It was an honor. You weren’t thinking: Is this viable? You were thinking: This is necessary. People need this. They need the truth. It was more than providing an alternative voice; it was providing access to information that journalists were not allowed to express.”
“We had Jello Biafra on, and he said, ‘Good god, man, you’ve hijacked the AM band!’” says Harrison.
Linda nods. “It’s highjacking the commercial band.”
02-08-07
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4991&IssueNum=192
~ By DEAN KUIPERS ~
A rare moment of repose: Harrison on the Edge leads the live and local talk radio at KTLK-AM Progressive Talk ~
Harrison, the one-named host of Harrison On The Edge, is on the air celebrating the life of satirist Molly Ivins in a way Ivins might appreciate – by relating a funny story about how telling the truth got him fired. A great Texas wit and progressive hero, Ivins died earlier this day of breast cancer, but Harrison is anything but solemn behind the mic. Instead, the host of KTLK’s evening progressive talk show is animated, his boyish blond hair and blue eyes flashing at producer Linda Blake as he explains to his audience that he lost a job like this with CBS in Chicago when President Bill Clinton was in town, and Harrison was on the air talking openly about the fellatio Clinton had apparently received from Gennifer Flowers. Clinton heard the show – liberal host or not, he was angry to hear this on the air – and called from the limo. Harrison was canned.
Not long after, Harrison won a journalism award for losing his job this way, and at the ceremony Ivins encouraged him to keep talking. “She said three things to me,” says Harrison. “‘Do good’ – meaning being an inciting and healing force, ‘tell the truth, and have fun.’” That, says Harrison, has become one of his mantras.
It is also a reasonable mission statement for Air America, the progressive, largely Democratic Party-identified radio network for which KTLK 1150 AM is the Los Angeles affiliate. The other big buzz in the studio this evening is that Air America finally found a buyer, after about three months in bankruptcy proceedings, which will keep it on the air and move it into a new era. Host Al Franken, whose photographs dot the station’s hallways, will be leaving on Valentine’s Day, February 14, allegedly to run for the Senate from his home state of Minnesota. But money will flow in, bills will be paid, and liberal talk will stay on the air.
Not that there was much chance of it disappearing now, even if Air America did go under. A friendly liberal competitor, Jones Radio Network, has huge hits on its hands with Ed Schultz, the converted Republican with a steak-and-potatoes approach out of South Dakota, and Stephanie Miller, whose show is produced in the same L.A. studio as Harrison’s and which is the second-highest rated morning show in L.A. and O.C. after KFI’s right-of-center Bill Handel. A new liberal syndicator, Nova M, was launched in October out of Phoenix by Mike Malloy, one of the original hosts who helped create Air America, and features Howard Dean campaign guru Joe Trippi and pollmaster John Zogby.
Despite a tsunami of criticism – including some from the Left – the format looks like it’s here to stay.
And guys like Harrison are certainly part of the reason why. He takes Ivins’s advice to heart. He laughs a lot. He’s a “live and local” show for KTLK, not part of the Air America network, but he certainly fits the overall vibe. During the show he airs the famous scene from the film Network, in which character Howard Beale explains to a live TV audience that he’s “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” – interrupted with liberal sprinklings of Howard Dean’s infamous scream from the 2004 presidential campaign speech in Iowa. An openly gay man (one of his bumpers calls him “the openly gay son of a neo-nazi”), Harrison calls Blake “Lindalicious,” his “pitbull producatrix,” and a “Buddhist sex kitten.” His show is a crazed Chinese fire drill of producers and engineers windmilling for two hours in a process that has him wrestling with a pre-recorded interview with Howard Zinn, delivering a rap song mocking a CNN reporter who asks gangbangers how they “roll,” airing his regular “Activism A-Go-Go” segment, and celebrating with Oakland-based journalist Sarah Olson, who successfully resisted a subpoena to testify in the court martial of Iraq war critic and active soldier Lt. Ehren Watada.
“You gotta have fun in life. Many of us liberals are so beaten-down, and so depressed, and so emasculated,” says Harrison, bouncing around his studio in a Key West sweatshirt, white jeans, and flip-flops.
“It is a party,” says Blake. “It’s fun to be liberal and you should be proud of it. In the words of Molly Ivins, she’s ‘openly liberal.’” ?
That, says Blake, is what’s going to get the youth involved. She imagines college kids working for Barack Obama like they did for Bobby Kennedy, because it matters and because it’s fun. Not because they’re motivated by fear of the future.
“We had a reporter in here give me a packet of Iostat, which is potassium iodide, for my thyroid, when the nuke plant melts down. So I could survive it,” says Harrison, incredulous.
Blake starts laughing, remembering this. “That’s so fuckin’ tragic,” Harrison continues, “but you know what? If we can show each other that life is worth living, and remind each other that we have this power and this youthful energy and this desire to have a better world, and fuckin’ laugh our way through it, we’re going to be a lot more effective. Because we have always been the creative ones. So let’s recapture that power, and create the planet upon which we want to live.”
~ The sound and the fury ~
If you want to watch producer Linda Blake reacting to a Left in depression, just watch the HBO film about Air America, Left of the Dial. She was working at Air America almost from the beginning, and she’s in there on Election Night 2004 – the beauty with the curly red hair – when Kerry loses to Bush and the fledgling network is stunned.
The 2004 campaign is a dramatic arc in that film, to be sure, as Air America was launched explicitly to counteract the booming popularity of right-wing talk stars like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity and thus push the Democrats over the top in that election. And it’s clear from the film that everyone involved truly believed it could happen. Just coincidentally, however, the film crew captures another incredibly intense drama – and sources say it’s accurate – that pretty much hijacks the film: After being on the air only a few weeks, the Air America staff discover that CEO Mark Walsh and Chairman Evan Cohen have been hiding the fact that they are stone broke and the health insurance has been cancelled and no one’s getting paid. The network’s embarrassed brass slink away and take several other top staffers with them and the whole network teeters precariously on the brink of collapse.
Where it more or less remains today. Undercapitalized from birth, Air America lost over $41 million in its first two-and-a-half years, along with several CEOs and some of its local affiliates. That wouldn’t be such a big deal – all media startups lose a lot of money – but the lineup of progressive donors who would ride to its rescue was apparently short, and it went into bankruptcy in October 2006.
“It just was underfunded,” says Danny Goldberg, the legendary record company executive who left Air America in April 2006 after being CEO for one year. “The company that I was going to run was just not funded and the job became about cutting costs and trying to raise money rather than running something, and that’s not something I’m particularly good at. It was a plan that should have cost $50-60 million; there was like half that amount, and there was a sense of ‘if we build it they will come, and rich liberals will fund it.’ And that’s just not the way the world works.”
One look at the 25 pages of creditors listed in the bankruptcy filings reveals that Goldberg is among those who didn’t get paid; his claim is for $133,000, though it is marked as “disputed.” Of the $20 million in liabilities, Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, is the single biggest creditor and is owed $9.8 million. It reaches all the way down to the hosts: they’re into Franken for $360,000 and even Chuck D for almost $11,000. Many of the creditors are businesspersons, and they know about not getting paid; but it just seems bad karma to not pay Chuck D, doesn’t it?
The man who’s apparently inheriting that karma is Stephen L. Green, founder and chairman of SL Green Realty Corp., a $12 billion company that controls 27 million square feet of real estate. On January 29, Air America signed a letter of intent to sell the whole ballgame to Green, who is the brother of Mark Green, a fill-in host at Air American and a longtime Democratic Party principal in New York with two terms as public advocate – an ombudsman-like elected position that is first in line to the mayor.
Air America spokesperson Jamie Horn explained that neither current CEO Scott Elberg nor anyone else at the network were able to comment on the impending sale, but a company press release quoted Elberg as saying only that the deal will “solidify Air America’s future.” Mark Green goes further, claiming, “With the Democratic take-over of the 110th Congress and prospects in the next presidential election, it’s the perfect time for Air America 2.0. If progressive values were a stock, now is the time to buy.”
Stephen Green is certainly hoping so. But it’s not the longshot bid it would have seemed even a year ago, when the impression was that any money pumped into Air America was simply prolonging the network’s inevitable demise. Whether or not a network like Air America will be the big winner, or only certain syndicated shows will pan out, progressive talk radio is making plenty of money.
“It’s good enough that a good sales manager should be able to make it sell,” says Sean Ross, VP of music and programming at Edison Media Research, a radio consulting firm. The ratings in many major markets are very competitive, he confirms. Air America hosts Franken and Randi Rhodes do very well in a lot of towns. But it still takes skill to sell the ad space. “Whether it’s urban radio, whether it’s Spanish-language radio, whether it’s liberal talk – having the numbers and having somebody who can sell them effectively is not always the same thing.”
“After Franken and Rhodes got some decent ratings, radio embraced the format, particularly Clear Channel, because there’s a shortage of formats,” says Goldberg, who points out that too much was made of Air America having to buy its way into big markets. Of the 80-plus affiliates, he claims, the network only had to pay its way into New York City, where the network leased a station for its flagship, and into L.A. (though he won’t disclose how much that cost). Most stations saw the logic in the standard business arrangement: Of the 16 minutes of ad time per hour, five go to the network and 11 go to the local station. “The vast majority did it because they were persuaded to it [by ratings], and not because of any money changing hands.”
In fact, highly-rated radio stars have emerged from the liberal talk universe, such as Schultz, Miller, Randi Rhodes, and Thom Hartmann, an Air America-syndicated host out of Portland, Oregon, who seeks to reclaim the “radical middle” and is now slated to take over Franken’s noon-to-3 p.m.(ET) Air America time slot.
“People sometimes confused the business problems that Air America is having, or has had, and fail to distinguish that from relatively good ratings in many cities. Those ratings are all the more impressive in that they threw all these shows onto the air,” says Larry Rosin, president of Edison Media Research.
The L.A. Weekly’s Marc Cooper, who was involved with the Nation magazine-affiliated show Radio Nation before it migrated to Air America, is one of those critics. On his blog, he has repeatedly assailed Air America as a money-hole, pointing out that $41 million could buy a lot of politicking, writing: “Just imagine the number of full-blown real world congressional campaigns that could have been funded with that chunk of change (in round numbers, maybe 20 or even more). Or the number of magazines that could have been funded. Maybe even a serious, daily liberal newspaper.”
But why not take a clue from people who know money-making radio when they see it: Clear Channel. They bought in, and bought in big, and their involvement is a hard-to-swallow lesson for ideologues of all stripes: The Man does not care whether you buy at Trader Joes or at Wal-Mart just as long as you buy. Clear Channel Radio, the biggest corporate owner of radio stations across the United States with over 1,200 stations, snapped up Air America and plunked it down right in the same buildings where it runs Rush Limbaugh. Just another steaming chafing dish in the big market-share buffet. Given the heat and passion that is unleashed in these stations, it’s sobering to see the call signs all butted up against one another on the outside of Clear Channel’s Burbank offices. In amongst a raft of music formats, KTLK 1150 AM Progressive Talk hangs there right next to station KFI 640 AM, which airs Handel, Limbaugh, and afternoon hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou who (though allegedly not claiming allegiance to any particular political party) have taken glee in bashing gay radio hosts and illegal immigrants and supporting the controversial Minutemen border vigilante group.
“There’s over 10 million people living in Los Angeles and Orange County, so I don’t think KTLK is a huge competitor any more than any other station,” says Robin Bertolucci, program director at KFI. She points out that she thinks of competition more globally, meaning if you’re doing anything other than listening to her station, then KFI isn’t doing its job. But the arrival of progressive talk? “It doesn’t change what we do,” she says.
Bertolucci, in fact, sounds a lot like her counterparts at KTLK when she talks about the goal of her radio station: she disagrees with calling it right-leaning, but instead says it’s about truth.
“We’re not beholden to any brand of politics or any group of politician,” she adds. “Everybody here is a smart, free-thinking person who calls it like they see it. We don’t have any political agenda other than the agenda of truth.”
As much as many of John and Ken’s stunts seem custom-engineered to make a big publicity splash that is good for Clear Channel, they’re also the reflection of real political beliefs. Radio is an extremely intimate medium, and deeply held convictions are the commodity. The mostly libertarian views of John and Ken have famously caused internecine wars even with several of their KFI colleagues. Yes, it’s all entertainment, but Harrison and Blake say being on the big Clear Channel team with them doesn’t mean it’s all buddy-buddy.
“Once I think one of the producers at KFI asked me if I wanted to do fill-in work, call-screening,” says Blake, “but I made it clear when I came here: I will not give five minutes of my time to any of the shows at KFI. And that was that.” (Later, she made it even more clear in an e-mail: “I will never work for a show that’s de-constructive rather than constructive.”)
So is there an upside to being part of a megalith like Clear Channel? Yes, there is: anything in that mix is necessarily for mass consumption. It’s not Pacifica or Radio Nation or even NPR. It’s the commercial big leagues. And that does matter.
~ To network or not to network~
The problem with Air America as a business – most everyone agrees – is that it tried to do too much at once. It tried to be a 24/7 network when a couple of syndicated shows might have actually paid for themselves. It tried to be the radio equivalent of Fox News and match the juggernaut of right-wing talk with a kind of catholic emergence as the go-to place for round-the-clock relief. As the KTLK bumper sticker says, “It’s All That’s Left.”
How you judge that approach, however, depends on whether you’re making money or swaying votes. Air America might not have won the 2004 election, but it can take a lot of credit for the explosive growth of its format.
“Conservative talk radio, for all the conspiracy theories, grew very organically,” says Rosin. “It wasn’t like people suddenly started firing up conservative talk radio stations in one big shot. What Air America tried to do is so much harder, which is to put on an entire format, an entire station of shows, and yet they kind of pulled it off, up to a point.”
Goldberg points out that, yes, syndicating a few shows would have been cheaper, but the thinking was that wouldn’t have enough impact. The founders of Air America took this financially wobbly approach in order to build a format bigger than just Air America, and it seems to have worked.
“The idea was to create a format called liberal talk or progressive talk,” he says. “Their theory was that they needed to create a full slate of programming so that a station could commit to that format because there just weren’t enough liberal shows that existed at that time. And that was an investment and sort of a start-up cost that was very burdensome, financially.”
Still, he says, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea.
“There’s all sorts of ideological media that don’t make money,” Goldberg adds. “The New York Post, for example, loses tens of millions of dollars a year, but Rupert Murdoch continues to fund it because he likes its strategic value I guess and he likes the political message. Fox News took a huge investment before it started making money, much more than Air America’s consumed. But Rupert Murdoch didn’t start the New York Post and the Weekly Standard and say, ‘I’ll put up 30, 35, 40 percent of the money and the conservative community will fund the rest of it.’ He funds it 100 percent. So there was a little bit of naiveté about it, a little bit of getting high on your own supply, drinking your own Kool-Aid – with the best of intentions.”
Part of that naivete was thinking that TV stars would make good radio hosts, but now, almost three years into the experiment, the focus is turning toward true radio talent.
Comedienne/actress Janeane Garofalo, for example, was part of the original crew and figured to be one of the top draws, but her shrill attack didn’t really catch fire and she left her show Majority Report in July 2006. Similarly, the network has developed shows with all manner of well-known personalities, such as Robert Kennedy Jr., Public Enemy’s Chuck D, radical country musician Steve Earle, TV poverty pimp Jerry Springer, and journalist Laura Flanders, but few of them have become vehicles for serious ratings. Comic Marc Maron tried two different shows over two years but proved how difficult it can be for even a fairly good radio host to connect with an eager audience, as he really never found a rhythm.
It was radio vet Randi Rhodes who first broke through, with her relentless flow of investigative reportainment, sound clips, and research ferreting out missteps and untruths by the Bush administration, especially in the prosecution of the Iraq War. The show is not just opinion but fresh facts listeners really use in forming their own polemic, and thus indispensable listening for a certain crowd.
Of the TV people, Franken transcended. The former Saturday Night Live comic and writer developed his own style somewhere between skit comedy and the dead-serious reportage of NPR.
So that makes two successful shows, which would be a phenomenal start for a new syndication company, but Air America had aimed much higher than that and so, like a trash-talking prize fighter, invited critics to view every glove laid upon them as lights out. Instead, the kid has moved up in the standings.
“It’s marquee value, right?” says Harrison. “It’s like Broadway: They’ll get guys who can’t sing – Richard Burton doing Camelot. He talked it. But they knew getting Burton was going to sell out for a whole year and it did. Later, you massage it into what it’s supposed to be.”
“Making money … was like a false measuring stick designed to belittle the impact of something that threatened the conservatives and for good reason, because they had monopoly on that particular medium and now they don’t,” Goldberg adds.
Even better, say many Air America fans, the network is achieving its original goal: informing the electorate and swinging elections. It didn’t work in 2004, but did it have an effect in 2006?
“It’s measurable by the outcome,” says Harrison. “The average American, the year before that election, they were all convinced that Saddam Hussein had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center. Because there was no contravening voice.”
Right around the time that Air America debuted, in March 2004, the print media in particular was waking up to its own complicity in the war in Iraq. For example, the reporting by Judith Miller of The New York Times, in which she claimed weapons of mass destruction had been found and an active nuclear program uncovered in Iraq, were found to be largely Bush administration fabrications right down the line. Many in the White House press corps had been similarly duped and were angry. And Air America was right there for the big turn-around as President Bush began to sink.
Linda Blake cuts in: “You have to understand what it was to be at [Air America]. It was an honor. You weren’t thinking: Is this viable? You were thinking: This is necessary. People need this. They need the truth. It was more than providing an alternative voice; it was providing access to information that journalists were not allowed to express.”
“We had Jello Biafra on, and he said, ‘Good god, man, you’ve hijacked the AM band!’” says Harrison.
Linda nods. “It’s highjacking the commercial band.”
02-08-07
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4991&IssueNum=192
This post first appeared on Support Progressive Radio In SoCal, please read the originial post: here
