Posted on 03/26/2004 2:36:00 AM PST by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
NEXT WEEK, Air America Radio debuts its around-the-clock radio station of the left. Al Franken will play the marquee role, filling the noon-to-3:00 p.m. slot. Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead will run the morning program with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D. And comedienne Janeane Garofalo will be punching the clock at 8:00 p.m. Opening Day is March 31.
Which raises a good question: Why don't they just wait 24 hours and do the launch on April Fool's Day?
Suddenly the idea that liberals can have a successful talk-radio franchise has become something other than a joke. It's hard to say why, but in the accumulated success of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, the left sees a mirror-image of what conservatives call liberal media bias. It's not the same thing, of course, but persecution envy has set in, and now various influential and/or rich liberals want their own vibrant alternative media and legions of devoted fans. The left wants dittoheads, and bad.
Aside from the obvious problem with this scenario (the left already dominates the networks, NPR, CNN, Hollywood, and so on), there are several ways in which the basic idea doesn't add up.
THE RUSH LIMBAUGH RIDDLE.
What made Rush Limbaugh successful? Like Rush himself, many on the left have settled on the answer that it was a simple matter of talent and recognizing an opportunity. This theory of course contradicts others about Rush advanced by critics, for one that he is a success mainly because he tells conservative listeners what they want to hear--but never mind that. If success on radio is basically a question of being entertaining, well, then the left can do that. The left, after all, can claim the allegiance of the vast majority of working entertainers. Besides, all Rush did was realize there was an audience for conservative talk and, like any good businessman would, decide to use his radio talent to cater to this market.
All sorts of comforting thoughts go along with this. For example: "Rush wasn't terribly political before the birth of his show in Sacramento," Jason Zengerle wrote in the New Republic in his piece on the coming rise of liberal talk radio.
Perhaps, but not really. Limbaugh, as Paul Colford reported in his 1993 book The Rush Limbaugh Story, was not even registered in the first 12 years he was eligible to vote and so (insincerity catch!) never went to the polls for his hero Ronald Reagan. Colford also quotes a producer who worked with Rush: "I don't think it was his intention to become this big, conservative icon for so many people. A lot of it was just shtick. Still is shtick."
Except Limbaugh's shtick didn't take aim in some random, but bipartisan, fashion. Covering the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Rush got it in his head that the hotel bar was a gay bar. He went in to do some interviews, Limbaugh's KMBZ colleague Ray Dunaway told Colford. Rush "tried to tape an interview with one of the patrons, thinking the guy might say it was a gay bar, and that way Rush could then say that homosexuals were supporting Walter Mondale." At this time, Limbaugh was still doing radio in Kansas City, before he even got hired to replace Morton Downey Junior in Sacramento.
Another theory of Rush has it that "Limbaugh rose as a reaction to Clinton," as Russell Shorto put it in a recent New York Times Magazine cover article about Franken. Actually, Limbaugh was a very big deal before Clinton. Which is why he was already being called a kingmaker at the 1992 Republican National Convention, where he hosted then-president George H.W. Bush on his show. And he has remained a big deal after Clinton.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM (providing yet another self-serving theory) holds that the quality of, and market for, opinion journalism both increase in moments of political opposition. Which sounds true, except when it's not. For every American Spectator that sees its circulation soar under Clinton, there are many other publications and shows and stations whose progress follows a totally different pattern. Take the huge inroads made by Fox News during the Bush administration.
Now consider The O'Franken Factor, which is the comparison-begging name of Franken's radio show. The reason he might be the next Rush is that Franken, it is argued, has a singular bond with liberals. A recent New York Times Magazine cover article describes Franken receiving a Beatlemania girl shriek when he appeared at a John Kerry rally. Even as John Kerry, also on stage, owned the spotlight, following his big win in Iowa. Franken has also become a player in the Democratic party behind the scenes.
He hosted a get-to-know-you cocktail party for Kerry and a crowd of media elite at his Manhattan apartment. This was in December, before Kerry dethroned front-runner Howard Dean. Time magazine's Jim Kelly, who attended, told the Times: "It may have been the actual beginning of the new approach [Kerry] took."
But as a well-known quantity, Franken follows in the footsteps of already famous lefty bigwigs such as Mario Cuomo and Jerry Brown who thought they had the juice to match Rush. Another ill omen, of course, is the fate of Phil Donahue's failed television comeback as an answer to the seeming conservative domination of political talk. Franken is friends with the Clintons. He's a best-selling author who seems to appear at whim on late night talk shows. The man is a Saturday Night Live alum. He may be too much of an insider and too cool to pull this off.
When you look at the conservative personalities of the twentieth century who fundamentally changed the art and sport of political debate in the mainstream, you find a history of outsiders. Whittaker Chambers was socially awkward, spiritually tormented, overweight--in short an outcast who thought he was committing political suicide by joining the right. Silver-tongued and elegant William F. Buckley took the world by storm, but as something of a loner. In Cavett by Dick Cavett and fellow Yalie Chester Porterfield, Porterfield says that "even when we arrived four years later [in 1954] professors were still shaking their heads over Buckley and saying that if only he possessed the common touch he'd be truly a dangerous man." Though of different order of seriousness, Rush Limbaugh was (and is) another overweight, socially awkward one-of-a-kind. Fired several times from radio jobs, he burned through a couple of marriages and was in hot water with his employer for cracking jokes while reading the news when he began his ascent as the most significant radio talent of his generation.
None of these pioneers rode into town on a wave of popularity. Rather, it was in hiding, during off years, and without the whole world calling that they rediscovered the language of conservatism and delivered it anew to wide acclaim.
Al Franken and cast are trying to capture turf the left has never held. And they are not content to work slowly. Franken has signed only a one-year contract and has made it clear that his real goal is simply the unseating of George W. Bush. Maybe it's possible that he can charge away, on the air for three hours every day, for a few months. But, after the fuel of Election Day runs out, what? Other talent will have to break through, and on the double. Because anti-Bush venom is a pretty shallow pool from which to draw a large popular audience, reminding one of perhaps the darkest omen for the Air America Radio Network: the fate of the Howard Dean campaign.
Regards,
TS
The question should be, will they allow conservative callers at all? I think, most likely not.
I'm guessing you're right about that.
CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974
http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art7.html
The CAT (Civil Air Transport) / Air America Archive
http://www.utdallas.edu/library/special/cataa.html
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