Calling Air America--The Nation

The article gets more interesting as it continues....


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050523&s=vonhoffman

Calling Air America

Nicholas von Hoffman


A year ago March, Air America, the liberal/progressive talk-radio network, took off from New York into the wild blue yonder with an HBO documentary film crew in the cockpit and a mighty blast of publicity acting as a tail wind. The craft was barely airborne before it hit turbulence. Its Los Angeles and Chicago outlets pulled the plug on the fledgling network over money squabbles. Paychecks were late, rumors abounded, the original set of pilots left, to be replaced by others. The plane, it turned out, had been allowed to take off with an insufficient fuel load--meaning working capital--and was going to have to be refueled in midflight, never an easy operation.

The frail craft, though buffeted by violent winds and sudden air pockets, stayed aloft. Now flying into its second year, Air America says it has enough new investor money to stay airborne at least until we hear otherwise. Stations in some fifty cities are broadcasting the network's programming nineteen hours every weekday with repeats and additional programming on the weekends.

As of this writing Air America is still not yet back on the air in Chicago, but it has returned to Los Angeles, where, given the number of very rich, very liberal people, silence would have been next to fatal. When asked about what it cost to return to Los Angeles, Danny Goldberg, Air America's new CEO, did a small leap over the question and replied, "We're certainly going to spend a lot less money to get profitability than Rupert Murdoch spent to launch Fox News or the New York Post. It's not going to cost as much money to get a self-sustaining vehicle on the left as it did on the right, but it costs some money to start a new business, whether it's ideological or nonideological."

Goldberg, who comes to the network after a long career in the music business, predicts Air America will start taking in more than it's paying out by the end of 2006, a tall order if it has to buy its way onto stations in other major metro areas. The most common arrangement in the industry is that a syndicator or, in this instance, a network supplies the programming in return for which a station allots it a certain amount of air time for broadcasting whatever ads it can sell. However, Air America is half business, half crusade and thus cannot be judged by conventional measures.


MORE, which is more interesting...praises Jon Stewart

I bought Sirius just for AA. I am so angry that it is not going to be on it anymore. I thought the last day was going to be the end of April. I need to call them and find out.

with them. XM stepped up to the plate and agreed--Sirius didn't want to. XM is far more dominant in the satellite radio market--think of XM as being VHS and Sirius as being Beta.

I'll be a rotten SOB! I've had my Sirius for about a month now and only went with them because they offered two lefty talk channels verses only one on XM. I feel ripped off and won't even bother trying to cancel my subscription because they'll just tell me to go pound sand. And to think XM also has MLB. Boy did I get screwed!!!

They should have talked to them before publishing this article.

Excellent.