Posted on 07/28/2005 5:49:39 AM PDT by Prov1322
On March 31, 2004, Air America Radio, promoted as the liberal antidote to conservative-dominated talk radio, was launched with great fanfare and prolific media coverage.
Since then, it has generated headlines while losing some stations and picking up others. In April, it fired head writer Lizz Winstead, cocreator of Comedy Central's Daily Show, who is suing for back pay (including money she says she is owed for flogging Vermont Teddy Bears).
Her show, which costarred ex-rapper Chuck D, has been replaced by TV talkmeister Jerry Springer, who is mulling a run for governor of Ohio.
Now that it's possible to compare ratings for this spring to last year's start-up, it's clear that the network 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.
Still, it isn't yet time to call the coroner for Air America Radio, even though some conservative pundits are gloating that AAR is DOA.
"Air America is going to take a long time to grow ratings," said Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of the trade publication Talkers magazine. "People unfamiliar with our industry think ratings are like box-office receipts. But they're not. Radio ratings are slow to build.
"The network got an initial bump from the enormous amount of free press it got. There was a curiosity factor. Now it is settling in."
Air America's programming is now carried in part or in whole on 67 stations. Most are in smaller markets, such as Albuquerque, N.M.; Albany, N.Y.; and Reno, Nev.
Here, it doesn't even register a pulse. The flagship show, hosted by author and former Saturday Night Live comic Al Franken, airs from noon to 3 p.m. weekdays on WHAT (1340 AM).
Both WHAT and the show have fallen off the charts, according to radio-rating service Arbitron, meaning there were too few listeners to measure during the second quarter of this year - the so-called spring book. Franken's show didn't start on the station until Aug. 30.
Franken named his show The O'Franken Factor to tweak his archrival, populist pundit Bill O'Reilly, whose TV show The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel outdraws all other talk shows on cable, and whose nationally syndicated The Radio Factor, with more than three million listeners nationally, is tied for ninth place.
Measured season-to-season - the most accurate way to assess audience preferences, because listening patterns vary throughout the year - Air America has lost audience in major markets, including New York and Boston, since April, May and June of 2004.
Franken, best-selling author of such anti-conservative tomes as Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, chose to go head-to-head with gabber Limbaugh in many markets. This, it turns out, was not such a good idea.
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.
"Talk radio is not for the faint of heart. You do not have impact over a short period of time," Jon Sinton, Air America president and head of programming, said in a phone interview yesterday.
Ratings for many conservative talk shows have dropped as well, editor Harrison said. "It's what happens after an election."
But while more seasoned hosts know how to shift the focus to other topics while awaiting the next election cycle, critics complain that Franken is still obsessed with bashing President Bush (when he is not baiting O'Reilly). In contrast to Limbaugh, who mocks his own pomposity, Franken comes across to critics as angry and not funny.
"Is Al Franken going to be the hottest thing in radio? I don't think so," Harrison said. "But it's too soon to say he's finished. A lot depends on how dedicated he is to the show.
"And I get the feeling he's not dedicated to radio broadcasting. He's dedicated to politics and his own celebrity. I think he'll drop out to run for office."
Or, perhaps, he will stay on the air while running for the U.S. Senate in 2008 from Minnesota, his home state. Air America signed Franken to a multiyear contract in November, the network's Sinton said.
Franken has been floating trial balloons about a possible Senate run from Minnesota, and he and his wife have bought a home there. In January the network will move The O'Franken Factor from New York to that state, an Air America spokeswoman said yesterday.
Franken, on vacation and finishing up a book, could not be reached for comment. His show is now "dark," meaning it's dishing up reruns in a "best-of-Franken" format. But a network spokeswoman said that this was only temporary, and that Franken would be back next week.
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Contact staff writer Beth Gillin at 215-854-2917 or bgillin@phillynews.com.
No, I was looking for the "W, Still The President" sticker, not the one with SKerry in it.
I don't know.
I'm sure that the graphic art with moi Kerry showing the sign, "W is still the president" will drive the libs into a deeper insanity/depression.
Perhaps, but I do not want SKerry's image on my vehicle.
Try this link.
http://www.georgewbushstore.com/201-6000.htm
DougfromUpland- you should post this on its own thread- it's too good to be missed by anyone who doesn't scroll down this one!
"They seem to also not understand that they have to be entertaining. None of their shows are even that."
Liberals do not understand the marketplace. I can still hear Randi Rhodes asking John Conyers to bring back the "Fairness Doctrine".
They just love the phrase "state owned".
For the most part, they can just afford to pay their bills and sit there and wait. None of the on-air guys have really taken off. No one has yet to stand and challenge Rush. They can't find any really hot topics that the audience will stick with them on. And for the most part, its still LA, SF, and New York that is paying the bills. It doesn't work in the south, and it really doesn't run well in the mid-west. Its amazing to me that its still running and you can tell...they just keep waiting for something to happen...and for it to really take off.
Franken would read something, she would respond, he would come back with another line, something about him buying stock. (No joke, (pun intended), the "joke" went on forever, and I wasn't really sure they ever got to the punchline. Whatever it was, joke or conversation, the point was making fun of Bush, oil, and Haliburton....I think.)
while watching, I couldn't help but compare. Rush would never commit such dreadful radio, and who ever heard of a talk radio show host who would expose the fact that he's reading a word for word script?
This correction just in...
Limbaugh, still the giant among talkers, with 14.75 million listeners on 600 stations, has squashed Franken like a bug a low-life snake full of venom.
Morbid Curiosity is rather short-lived,and highly overrated.
I admit I used to drop in on them just to hear the scrunched up hatered that they spew at us "Righties".
But big Eddy,and randy Roads cured me in no time a'tall.
"Franken named his show The O'Franken Factor to tweak his archrival, populist pundit Bill O'Reilly"
I'm not a fan of Bill O'Reilly. I think he's a phoney blowhard, but his show is good TV. How can O'Reilly be Stuart Smalley's "archrival"? Stuart isn't fit to clean O'Reilly's toilet.
"I used to laugh and mock Err America, now I just feel pity for them."
Stuart Smalley and co don't deserve pity. I'll stick to mocking the commies.
"has squashed Franken like a bug."
Because Al Franken is a bug. He is a smelly cockroach.
People like Franken all assumed that if an "idiot" like Rush Limbaugh could do it, it would be a snap for supergeniuses like them. As always with liberals, they mistook their own arrogance for talent, intelligence and ability. They also didn't take into account that if someone is going to welcome you into his life for three hours a day, five days a week, you have to be likable and have a lot of interesting and entertaining things to say. AA has none of that. They just spit one-sided partisan bile all day long, which they assumed would work because they mistakenly thought that's what Rush Limbaugh did. Problem is, Franken apparently wrote an entire book about Limbaugh without ever once actually listening to him, a fact that was apparent to me from the factual errors I spotted in the first two pages.
Radio, like the Broadway theater, is littered with the corpses of egomaniacal neophytes who were going to come in and show the pros how it should be done. The only question for AA is how long will partisan media figures and investors keep tossing them free publicity and paying to keep them on life support when hardly anyone is listening.
bump
"My consternation grew as I surfed again and again and again, hitting the ubiquitous broadcast of AIR AMERICA that seemed to appear 10 to 15 times across the AM dial in this chronically Leftist New England state"
I think that is one station in Western Massachusetts that broadcasts over three frequencies on the AM dial. Not that it does any good...even in Massachusetts, the conservative WHYN (joining FOX on Monday!!!) had a 7.7 in the last ratings cycle, where the combined trifecta of loony lib stations carrying Airhead America was in the gutter with a .8. Yes, that is a decimal before the 8, meaning the audience is miniscule.
And that's Massachusetts. There is a red element to this blue state, at least among radio listeners!
There's only one problem for people like Franken in assessing Rush Limbaugh III: Limbaugh actually had considerable experience working in the radio business long before he started his conservative talk show on KFBK in 1984. As a result, Limbaugh's show's clicked right from the beginning, and that's why when the show went national it quickly picked up stations to today's 600+ affiliates.
In my opinion, I think Air America could be out of business within the next 18 months unless they finally get some hosts with real radio experience; Air America could use hosts such as Bernie Ward and Ray Taliafero of KGO. (Mind you, Taliafero will never leave his ultra-cushy KGO job mostly because he's probably paid close to a seven-figure salary anyway.)
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