2005 Annual Report - Radio Content Analysis

One of the most anticipated launches of the past year was the first commercial liberal talk-radio network, Air America. The climate seemed right for such a venture, with Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and the talk show host Bill Maher demonstrating the popularity of political content that makes no apologies for leaning to the left.

The question continues to be whether it will work: Are so-called liberal sensibilities suited to the take-no-prisoners, pump-up-the-volume, complaint-oriented style that characterizes conservative talk radio? If not, can a different style be forged that would appeal to large numbers of liberals?

Matthew Felling, media director of the Center for Media Affairs, put it this way in an interview with The Boston Globe almost four months after the launch: "Air America is still figuring out how to be bombastic and entertaining and approachable all at once, which is the key to right-wing radio… To a certain degree, they're still locked into the language of the classroom."²³

On the other hand, perhaps the runaway success of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the attention drawn by books like "Bushwacked," "Bush World" and Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" indicate a growing desire among liberal audiences for their own brand of unapologetically biased and even angry voices.

Air America made its debut on March 31, 2004 with various technical difficulties slowing down the fledgling network's broadcasts in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Ore., and portions of southern California as well as on XM Satellite Radio.

And problems did not stop with the technical. The launch of Air America would also make news for a series of administrative and financial difficulties. Less than two weeks after the launch, it was pulled from the air at KLBA (Los Angeles) and WNTD (Chicago). Both stations were owned by Multicultural Radio Broadcasting and, according to an article in the April 14, 2004 Boston Herald, Arthur Liu, head of Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, yanked the network off of his stations in Los Angeles and Chicago yesterday, claiming 2-week-old Air America bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million."²⁴ (A New York Times article the following day, April 15, said Air America insisted it had stopped payment on the check to Multicultural Radio on the ground that Multicultural had violated their agreement by leasing airtime on KBLA to another programmer for the months of February and March. How this lease agreement interfered with the operations of Air America, which was not scheduled to start broadcasting until March 31st, is not quite clear.)

The Herald article also pointed to cash-flow problems reporting that a "general manager for a radio station in central New England who asked not to be named contacted Air America three weeks [before the MLBI incident] and proposed putting the entire network on a talk station that would reach the Boston market. The response: …'We've spent all our affiliation money.' "²⁵

Most accounts of the network's start-up focused on its difficulties. A Washington Post article in September portrayed the network's New York studios as a scene of struggle - "threadbare, with lousy air-conditioning and irascible equipment. '[It was] like a halfway decent college radio station,' " one frustrated tech was quoted as saying about the first day. Randi Rhodes, on seeing her studio for the first time, was said to have complained that "it was inadequate in half a dozen ways - no high-speed Internet hookup for research, no TV, no phone. No phone for a talk show host…"²⁶ Rhodes's producer had to rig up a computer keyboard to allow the host to take calls.

Roughly five weeks after the first broadcast, the staff learned that Air America was unable to meet its payroll. Its chairman and co-founder, Evan Cohen, and vice-chairman, Rex Sorenson, were asked by the board to leave an organization that had already lost co-founder and CEO Mark Walsh. Air America's bank account stood somewhere around $6 million, far less than the publicized $20 million or $30 million the board had been led to believe existed.

By June, however, the company had reorganized its structure under the corporate banner Piquant LLC. It found a new funding stream, about which little has been made public. The Boston Globe reported on July 21 that Air America had altered its original programming plan - converting stations to all-Air America stations -- and was allowing stations to pick and choose shows from its roster for individual broadcast.²⁷

It seemed that in spite of a difficult start, Air America might have found some footing. As of late September 2004, the network had expanded to 19 AM stations and onto the Sirius Radio satellite network. By early October, the number had risen to 36 affiliate stations, and Air America was being broadcast on both XM and Sirius Satellite Radio and streaming over its own Web homepage. In early December, the network announced that both Al Franken and Randi Rhodes had signed new contracts, after much speculation that Franken would leave following the Presidential elections.

December was also when the network announced that Rob Glaser, the chairman and CEO of the Internet media company RealNetworks, would become the chairman of the Air America board. The group had also secured $13 million in financing and signed on Geico and American Express as advertisers. It was on the air in 40 markets and that count was still growing.

Publicity about the network focused almost entirely on Franken and his fellow host Janeane Garafalo, even though neither had a history of hosting live radio. But talk radio is a medium that revolves around personalities. Early Arbitron ratings of Air America's signature show, The O'Franken Factor (now The Al Franken Show), showed the popular political commentator outpacing the ratings of Bill O'Reilly in markets where the two went head to head.²⁸ The Al Franken Show has even made the jump to cable television, following the lead of radio hosts like Howard Stern and Don Imus, with a show on the Sundance Channel.

Soon after the network's launch, Air America demonstrated that it was capable of assuming the classic talk-radio pose. On Friday, April 2, 2004, Randi Rhodes engaged in an aggressive verbal confrontation with the longshot presidential candidate Ralph Nader. While Nader continuously disparaged Rhodes's interviewing techniques, Rhodes likened the candidate to a great pair of shoes. She told him that she liked him but couldn't afford him. The loud exchange ended when Nader hung up on the host.

It may not have been the cool irony of Jon Stewart, but it may have approached the kind of heated exchange that makes some talk radio so popular. And if liberals are angry, they now have people willing to do some yelling.