By the way, I've been told that calling this nasty theft of funds from the young, old, and sick
drives the already bats Left even battier...
Posted on 08/10/2005 2:37:55 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
David Reinhard, an associate editor of the Oregonian in Portland, pens a wicked essay on Air America and the hypocrisy of its founders and allies. Little by little, the cordon sanitaire errected by the New York Times is crumbling before the juicy hypocrisy on display. You just can't bottle up a corporate scandal - especially if you have been shouting "Enron" for years now.
The New York Times, which notoriously showered favorable publicity on Air America at its start-up, is making itself look foolish with each day that passes. This is news it deems unfit to print: bad news about its pets.
Once we understand the partisan basis of the word "fit", then "all the news that's fit to print" becomes an admission of systematic bias.
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin
Air scAmerica: "Every child left deprived!"
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/921epgjx.asp
The Air Out There
The mainstream media may be close to discovering the Air America scandal.
by Hugh Hewitt
08/04/2005 8:00:00 AM
WHAT DID AL FRANKEN KNOW, and when did he know it?
When Air America launched last year, it was the beneficiary of more free publicity than any radio show or network launch had ever received. So desperate was the mainstream media to find some left-leaning response to the Limbaugh-led revolution in talk radio that the many and obvious flaws in the network's offerings went largely unreported. Those of us who have been around radio studios for a few years know, though, that launch hype and selective reading of Arbitron results can never mask the key question: Is a show profitable? Do the ads sell? Do sponsors arrive and stay, year after year? Does the affiliate list grow and grow?
The answers to those questions are yes, yes, yes, and yes for Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and, yes, me. About Air America it is very hard to say because, well, the numbers are hard to come by. When the Philadelphia Inquirer took a hard look in July, the assessment wasn't rosy:
Now that it's possible to compare ratings for this spring to last year's start-up, it's clear that [Air America] has yet to climb out of the cellar.
Air America's overall ratings, which rose initially after all the free publicity, faded before the November election and haven't recovered. . . .
Limbaugh, still the giant among talkers, with 14.75 million listeners on 600 stations, has squashed Franken like a bug.
Franken's ratings have dropped 50 percent in Boston since spring 2004, and he is down 14 percent in New York, where his listeners now number fewer than 188,000.
To its troubles over audience decline must now be added the very strong smell of scandal. Though you, and apparently New York's publicity-addicted Attorney General Elliott Spitzer, may not have heard, Air America is in some serious trouble for its creative start-up financing.
The full details are available from bloggers Radio Equalizer, Michelle Malkin, and Ed Morrissey, and New York Sun reporter David Lombino is digging as well. Short version: Not-for-profits that exist to serve kids and Alzheimer's' patients, overwhelmingly via the funds obtained from government grants, should not be "investing" in incredibly risky start-up radio networks. But the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club--apparently now defunct--did just that last spring, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Air America's coffers.
Here's the most recent IRS Form 990 for the Club. Here's the one from the year before. The Club does not appear to have made any prior "investments" of this sort, and if there are "investment guidelines" from which the Club's Board of Directors was operating, I will be very, very surprised. My producer and I have spent a lot of time trying to get a member of the board on the record about the investment. The only one who agreed to talk to us referred us to Rubenstein Public Relations. An assistant to Richard Rubenstein called me to relay that he didn't know anything about the "Gloria Wise story." Odd.
But nothing is so odd as the black-out of the story in the mainstream media. It took about a week from the first television mention of Eason Jordan's Davos speech for that story to break out into the mainstream media. CNN's Inside Politics blog segment covered the Air America story on July 29, so we may be getting close to break-out day. There is every indication--conflicting accounts, big names, big money--that the story has legs.
We know a lot about the medications Rush Limbaugh has taken.
We know a great deal about Bill O'Reilly's troubles.
But thus far we don't know much about how Al Franken got paid the big bucks last year, when all of the mainstream media seemed to be cheering his debut.
Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.
Nice.
'I WUZ ROBBED TOO': FRANKEN ***August 9, 2005 -- AL Franken says 20,000 poor kids and old people weren't the only victims of an exec who allegedly arranged a Bronx charity's mega-buck "loan" to Air America. "About three weeks into the life of Air America, I became an involuntary investor — I stopped being paid," Franken told listeners yesterday on WLIB (1190 AM).
It was the first time the all-liberal network's biggest star addressed at length a controversial $875,000 loan from the disgraced — and now de-funded — Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club.
Since The Post first reported the story on July 30, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced an investigation into the social services agency whose development director, Evan M. Cohen, was also Air America's founder.
"He let us believe that we had enough funding to go three years before making a profit," Franken said.
"Turned out it was three weeks." ..............***
If this silly wretch accomplishes nothing else, she's done a nice job of unmasking MSM Liberal Bias.
BIAS!
It's as plain as the growing noses on their faces.
By the way, I've been told that calling this nasty theft of funds from the young, old, and sick
drives the already bats Left even battier...
Then Air Enron, it shall be!
Contact the NY Times Public Editor and ask him why they are conducting a blackout of the Air America scandal.
Byron Calame
public@nytimes.com
Phone: (212) 556-7652
Address: Public Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036-3959
And call and write news shows and ask the same question.
We're talking about Air America's emerging charity scandal. Liberals wish it would go away. It won't, not least because over the weekend it emerged that New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer has opened an investigation. Like the New York City Department of Investigation, his office wants to find out what happened to the more than $800,000 in tax dollars for inner-city children and the elderly that were apparently funneled through Air America by a former executive. It's unclear whether, or in what amounts, the money ended up supporting the flailing liberal radio network's operations, or whether and in what amounts it went to Evan Cohen, the executive who allegedly arranged the transfers. But it's perfectly clear that an unsavory abuse of the public trust has occured and that New York's self-appointed keepers of the trust -- no less than city investigators -- should get to the bottom of it.
As some blogger-observers have aptly pointed out, in the last two weeks, the New York Times has run over a dozen stories on Martha Stewart, who was accused of insider-trading her way to $51,000 savings in ImClone stock and convicted of perjury, whereas it has failed to run a single story on the Air America scandal, which involves sixteen times the amount of money, all of it tax dollars, all of it intended for the disadvantaged. A disconnect also exists considering the zeal with which the media swarmed Rush Limbaugh over his painkiller-addiction scandal. For the newspaper that lavished coverage on Air America when it began broadcasting, that is unconscionable. .............***
And he's proud of it!
"male-ponytail demographic"...is that a synonym for
the 'Paranoid schizophrenic, drug imbeciled,
tin foil hat, whiny temper tantrum throwing,
long past middle aged, Obstinant Crybabies Brigades'?
Harry Belafonte is a lying socialist Loser leftover.
Mick Jagger is a "finally walker-ed over the shark"
has-been...as are the rest of the Stones too.
I know that the DUmmies are studiously avoiding the issue most of the time. And when they cannot most of the postings you see are like: Yeah , divert news coverage from really important things like Rove, Phlame, the war, Bushco...etc etc. Very funny to read, though quite pathetic
I have been sending e-mailsincluding one to the NYT It is probably an exercise in futility
MSM coverage of conservatives. 
MSM unable to find evidence of LIBERAL scandal.
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