I confess I should post more than I do, but there's an honest answer for my tardiness. I work and the hours are sometimes longer than I'd like. It's good to have skills in demand, something to be thankful for, too.
Air America fell off the dial for good yesterday. The ultra-lib, conservative-hating firestarters fell by the curb for one reason. No one was listening, at least not enough to keep advertisers and investors to keep buying. The syndicate had run through a litany of buyers and investors and staved off bankruptcy in 2006. A six-year run of live programming ended abruptly last night when Air America started playing rerun programming and announced it would formally sign off Monday.
The New York Times quoted Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers Magazine, a talk media pub: "It would be a shame if the world sees the failure of Air America as representing the failure of progressive talk radio."
I ask how could you not see it as a failure of the platform? Air America is dead because America stopped listening.
Look, I didn't think George Bush was a very good president and I watched him ignore Michigan for eight years while the state's overwhelming majority democratic leadership sat idle and twiddled thumbs, presumably whistling Dixie with all the other out-of-work, transplanted southerners. The tired, played-out political process both parties engage in forced my family and I to move to Maryland, a state better-suited to confront an ever-changing economic climate.
Does Bush deserve all the blame for that, too?
The lesson here is obvious, and it's rooted in Air America's crash: Bashing Bush, Republicans, conservatives and FOX News might make for good radio for a few fleeting moments, especially when fire-filled passions are stoked high, but in the end, Air America was a lot like the movie Groundhog's Day, replaying the same blather, every day, over and over and over. There's an oft-retold children's story about this platform of crying wolf repeatedly, but Air America refused to heed it.
Say what you want about Rush Limbaugh and FOX News, but they are franchise models of staying power. Lib talkers Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Al Franken and Randi Rhodes won't admit it, but as Barack Obama and his agenda of change becomes more and more mired in the politics he promised to leave behind, America is tuning out.
Regards...
I can't say any better than you did. Air America was simply the radio version of what's now MSNBC News. That too will die a slow death.
Posted by: Statman24 | January 23, 2010 at 09:20