Radio: America Still on the Air

“You’ve accomplished so much,” Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (aka (Robert Smigel) told Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder, hosts of Air America Radio’s “Majority Report,” on the network’s first anniversary last Thursday. “A year ago today we had a tyrannical president leading us into a costly war. And look at today. The war’s going much better.”

Triumph’s chronology may have been off — George W. Bush invaded Iraq two years ago — but the pooch’s sarcasm was on target. If Air America‘s ultimate intent was to end war and change administrations — and it was — the network failed. AAR was founded and funded by liberals who saw the need for a liberal alternative in a wildly energized political season when arguing over Bush and his policies had become the national pastime. The network’s founders had three dreams (not necessarily in this order): 1. provide talk radio with a countervailing force to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the other right-wingers who saturate the airwaves; 2. make money; 3. defeat Bush in the 2004 election. “He is going down,” promised Al Franken, the network’s signature host, on its very first broadcast on March 31, 2004.

As you may have noticed, this didn’t happen. Bush won the election, for a change with more votes than his Democratic opponent. The party it supports couldn’t unseat a President who launched the implausible invasion of an unthreatening country that most Americans wish we would get out of. The federal government is essentially a one-party system. In making their decisions, the conservatives who run the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives need not, and do not, consider the minority Democrats. For now, all potent opposition will come from disgruntled Republicans. Though the President’s approval ratings have ebbed lately, the dip has more to do with political missteps (a Social Security overhaul, the Terri Schiavo adventure) than with any radio chorus of nattering nabobs of negativity.

PROGRESSIVE GAINS

But Air America Radio has achieved something significant: survival. As poignantly revealed in the HBO documentary Left of the Dial, the network had to endure media scorn, its own amateur flounderings and, nearly, financial ruin. Yet it is still on the air — not in three big cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago) and three smaller ones, as it was when it went on the air, and not on the severely reduced network it became two weeks later (after bounced checks led to L.A. and Chicago dropping out), but on 52 stations, including 15 of the top 20 markets (L.A. is back, Chicago still MIA). It has added Sirius Satellite Radio to its original XM satellite connection. In February, AAR inked a deal with industry behemoth Clear Channel, which put the network back in L.A., and which plans to bring the Air America format to 25 of its lower-rated AM affiliates.

Clear Channel, a major funder of Bush and the Republicans, isn’t a liberal philanthropy. It’s picking up “progressive radio” because this is the fastest growing format in the country; and that is because Air America has proved it attracts listeners and advertisers. From an original audience of 120,000, the network more than tripled to 400,000 within three months, and now, according to the latest Arbitron ratings, reaches 2.137 million listeners a week, with 129,900 tuning in for the average quarter hour. Now and again, at least in New York City, Franken’s midday show has out-pulled his right-wing nemesis Bill O’Reilly’s; Randi Rhodes has lured more listeners than Hannity; Garofalo and Seder topped the rabid Michael Savage.

And, as Carolina Miranda reported for an item I wrote in the Apr. 4 issue of TIME, AAR is enjoying monthly double-digit ballooning in ad sales revenue — a rate that Jon Sinton, AAR’s president, expects to continue for the next two years. Commercials for national brands like Geico and Volkswagen can now be heard along with spots for Verbal Advantage vocabulary builders (one of Limbaugh’s early sponsors), sexual potency pills and “clinical hypnotherapist” Wendi Friesen’s promises of happiness, weight loss and freedom from nicotine addiction if you’ll just let her talk in your sleep.

Other stats are encouraging and amusing. Ratings show a younger, more diverse audience. “The average talk-radio listener is 60 years old, but the average Air America listener is 48,” Sinton told Carolina, adding that during nighttime programming, “in a format that is generally two-thirds male and one third female, Air America is 52/48. We are almost precisely evenly balanced between men and women.” The network is also doing well in terms of brand recognition. A study issued last month by the consulting firm Paragon Media Strategies indicates that Limbaugh’s is the name most familiar to talk radio listeners, followed by — drum roll, please — Al Franken.

Certainly Air America’s numbers don’t come close to the 600 stations that currently Limbaugh’s daytime program, or to the 20 million listeners that tune into his show each week. But, it’s growth, and in a highly competitive industry, that’s an achievement. “It’s a tough business no matter what your programming is,” Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, told our Carolina, saying that Air America has “begun to compete. They have some ratings to show, they get publicity, they’re selling ads. Selling ads in radio is not easy, but they’re doing it.”

How did they do it? What did they do to themselves? How are they doing now? Here’s a first-term report from a long-time listener — and (to indulge in its hosts’ obsessively confessional tone) a radio fan and radic-lib who is glad the medium’s political spectrum is now a little less narrow.

AIR AMERICA UNDERCOVER

Create an instant, full-time radio network around an ideology? So far as I know, the Air America scheme had no precedent. There had been stations with congenial formats, like the left-wing Pacifica and Amy Goodman’s invaluable news-and-interview hour “Democracy Now” has built an informal network on radio and TV stations. There are many, many evangelical Christian radio stations, which bolster the right-wing talk count by hundreds. (If the Unitarians or Episcopalians have a radio network, it’s not on my dial.) But these all grew organically, adding like-minded affiliates over the years. No network based on dogma had hit the air running. And with the radio right dominant, the odds of a bunch of liberals thriving, or for that matter surviving, were pretty long.

“The industry at large said, ‘Liberals aren’t funny. They aren’t engaging. They’re too nuanced. A concept of a liberal network is stupid,'” Sinton told Carolina. “I guess we were just stupid enough to press on.” Sinton — one of the few executives who has remained at AAR since its conception two years ago — acknowledged that even he at times doubted if the network would ever get off the ground. “I never thought we’d get on the air to start with,” he said. “Around my house, this was always a day-to-day project.”

And for a while, the skeptics were right. The network experienced intense birthing pains. Raising the seed money was no picnic, as founder Sheldon Drobny spells out in the memoir Road To Air America: Breaking The Right Wing Stranglehold On Our Nation’s Airwaves. Drobny raised the loot, beat the drum, rounded up political support, then saw the project mismanaged and nearly torpedoed. (He was not at New York headquarters for the startup, and is not mentioned in the documentary.)

Fearlessly ignoring the right’s prediction that a liberal network would be stocked with Jews, gays and blacks, Air America filled most of its air time with people who answered to one or more of these descriptions. (Right-wing radio is basically guys of the Christian persuasion.) It also flouted the received radio wisdom that listeners want one strong voice, and created teams of complementary hosts — typically a comedian for energy and a radio veteran for stability.

Here’s the original cast of characters. 6 to 9 A.M, “Morning Sedition”: the Jewish comic (Maron), the thoughtful black (Mark Riley), the BBC-sounding British woman (Sue Endicott). 9 A.M. to noon, “Unfiltered”: the woman comic (Lizz Winstead, who was also he network’s program director), the elder statesman of black rap (Chuck D.), the Jewish lesbian with some radio experience (Rachel Maddow). Noon to 3, “The O’Franken Factor”: Franken and NPR refugee Catherine Lanpher. 3 to 7 P.M.: Randi Rhodes (“I’m Jewish, I’m from Brooklyn”), who had built strong ratings in South Florida. 7 to 8 P.M., “So What Else Is News?”: a magazine-show-style survey hosted by Hollywood producer Marty Kaplan. 8 to 11 P.M., “The Majority Report”: comic Garofalo and comedian-director Seder.

A year later, Air America has recognized the value of star quality. Maron, who before the network went on-air said, “In my head, it’ll be called Air Marc,” got his wish, at least for three hours a day; the morning drive show is essentially his, with Endicott gone and Riley assuming Lanpher’s function of the star’s hand-holder, cheerleader and occasional reality-checker. “The Factor” is now just “The Al Franken Show.” “Unfiltered” soon recognized Maddow as the show’s breakout personality; the network exiled Winstead, whom Sinton used to call the “heart of our programming,” and last week chucked the show to make room for Jerry Springer, a name brand if there ever was one, but also another middle-aged Jewish guy.

The network now looks —sounds, actually, since it’s radio — more homogenous. Most of the black voices have disappeared (news reader Joanne Allen), faded into the background (Riley) or been exiled to a weekend slot (Chuck D.). The three female hosts on the two morning shows have all been purged. Demographically, the network’s lineup is similar to that of the political columnists on the New York Times op-ed page: one black man, one woman, and a lot of Jewish guys. Note to conspiracy theorists: it’s not a plot, folks, more a use of the available brain pool.

AIR HYSTERICA

If getting the money was an ordeal, and getting the staff a challenge, getting on the air was downright primal. Technologically, this national network was more like a college radio station, with glitches galore. Temperamentally, it was a snake pit. The documentary, directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, shows Maron prowling the corridors like a prima donna permanently on the verge of im- or ex-ploding. Thursday, on his first anniversary show, a more focused, less manic Maron recalled, “There was a lot of ‘Is this gonna work? Are we on?'” His producer chimed in: “I remember a lot of yelling,” and Maron said: “I do have to own up to that’s who I was at that time.”

Franken is more sensible, the star who’s a team player. His fame led the media to the network; a cover story in the New York Times Sunday magazine gave Air America priceless free publicity. He also kept his head while those about him were losing theirs. But Franken and the other name-brand hosts — like Garofalo, his fellow comic and Saturday Night Live alum — were audio amateurs. In their in-public, on-the-job training, three hours a day, they learned that comedy is easy, radio is hard.

As it happened, Air America came close to folding for a reason conservatives couldn’t have guessed: the network didn’t have enough liberal fat-cats, and went broke in two weeks. Evan Cohen, the original boss, had bragged that the network had two years’ worth of seed money, but it turned out that some of the seeds had been spilled, or had never been in the jar. Though he denied it, and sent his friend, Air America counsel David Goodfriend, to fight it in court, Cohen had bounced checks to the Chicago and Los Angeles outlets. Just as it was picking up listeners, and gaining broadcasting competence, the network was close to going off the air. “We’re in great shape,” said executive producer John Manzo, “except for we’re about to go out of business.” Staffers went for months without pay or health insurance. It was as if they were living their own nightmare of the Bush Administration future.

Left of the Dial, part of HBO’s America Undercover series, tells most of the story. Winstead, who returned to the air for Thursday’s final edition of “Unfiltered,” noted that the documentary had been “heavily edited for legal reasons.” Yet there’s enough left to give plenty of ammunition to fans and enemies of the network. The film isn’t quite as highly charged as Control Room, the doc on the Arab news network Al Jazeera during the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, but both are media war movies, tense with foreboding.

After all the tsimmes, tsouris and geshrei, Air America is doing, as Franken might say with a gulp, okay. Harrison the media watcher thinks so. “Al Franken and Randi Rhodes are wonderful assets,” he told Carolina. “Rhodes is a proven commodity, and I’m very high on Franken. He’s proven to be a very important media figure. He’s shown courage and originality.” Al and his pals have demonstrated, at least to Harrison, that talk radio does not have to list endlessly rightward. “I give them every benefit of the doubt. They’ve done their job. They’ve opened the door to the industry recognizing that there are many different kinds of politics in talk radio and there’s a market for very many points of view.”

RATING THE HOSTS

Morning Sedition. Maron is still running things. He straddles the Air American style with the rudeness typical of Morning Zoo radio. He’s a more leftward Howard Stern, with Riley as his Robin Quivers. This week, while 24-hour cable news lionized Pope John Paul II, Maron said that “he came off like a baby bird dying on the sidewalk.” Maron’s take on Catholicism: “The entire religion is hung up on the death trip, as are most religions.” His suggestion for all that treasure in the Vatican basement: “Why don’t we have a yard sale and feed the poor with the proceeds?”

Unfiltered. Easy for me to say, now that it’s gone, but this was the sharpest, best-produced show on the network. Its useful segments included Talking Points (political arguments to pass along to your friends), buried ledes (important stories that got ignored) and interviews with Iraq war veterans (leading to poignant call-ins from other vets on the subjects of health care and the reintegration blues). Maddow, with a Stanford undergraduate degree and a doctorate from Oxford, is a natural radio personality: sensible, charming, with an easy-going commitment and flashes of impish wit. Auditing Condi Rice’s live Senate testimony last August, Maddow opined, “Maybe if she lies under oath, she’ll get her own radio show.” She’d please any listener, make any parent proud. And she’s cute too.

The pessimist in me says the show was too good to last. It had to give way to Springer’s syndicated skein. On the last “Unfiltered,” a slightly unbuttoned Maddow said, “We’re breakin’ the rules, because what are they gonna do to us, cancel the show?” I got a little verklempt. I didn’t mind that the network picked up Springer, who, whatever the geek-freak factor off his TV show, has long been a thoughtful liberal, and one of the few Democrats who make a strong cast in early 2003 against the Iraq invasion. So far Springer has shown a low pulse and not much radio savvy; he’ll have to learn mastery of the medium as the other AAR hosts did. The good news: Maddow will be back, anchoring a news-and-views roundup at five each weekday morning, starting Monday the 11th. As president of the Tribeca branch of the Rachel Maddow Fan Club, I’ll be there.

The Al Franken Show. In the documentary there’s a sweet moment when, just before they go on the air for the first time, Franken gives Lanpher a Stuart Smalley hug. Learning and hugging: that’s what distinguishes Franken from the right-wing guys he’s written best-selling attacks about. They throw out bogus stats off the top of their heads at the top of their lungs: twist-and-shout radio. Franken has a wonkish bent (as a teen he dreamed of being a certified public accountant), so he’s good schmoozing strategy with Media Matters.com’s David Brock, Christy Harvey of the Center for American Progress, The New York Observer’s Joe Conason (who has the voice and poise to make a good weekend host). A politician as well as a polemicist, he builds the occasional bridge to conservatives; one afternoon, he and Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy teamed for a joint airing of their shows.

The humor pieces don’t tickle me much, and I’m happy to vote against the Limbaugh-bashing “Dittohead” segment. Franken has to be weaned from his obsession with Limbaugh, O’Reilly and other radio hosts, now that he’s one of them. Otherwise, this is a good, solid show, with frequent flashes of Franken foolery. Last Thursday, announcing Terri Schiavo’s death, he noted that the right had painted the left as death-lovers and Mengeles. Given this, he said, lefties should not rest on their laurels; they should start a new crusade, to pull the plug on the Pope. This week, he billboarded a visit from another old leftie: “Jane Fonda, who’s gonna pose for photos with our anti-aircraft gun.”

The Randi Rhodes Show. The network’s one true radio veteran, Rhodes is also the most belligerent of the hosts, and the closest in tone to the Hannity-O’Reilly-Savage crowd (which partly explains her popularity in the talk-radio jungle). She bugged me big time on her Air America debut show, when she played it cozy with the reactionary Pat Buchanan because he had opposed the Iraq invasion, then hectored ideological soul-mate Ralph Nader because he planned to run for the White House again. She was so rude and interruptive to Nader that he hung up. I nearly did too. Rhodes sounded ready to sacrifice most of her (and my) liberal principles to elect John Kerry — and way too eager to play the all-too-familiar role of radio bully.

As the campaign season wore on, as the Bush camp scored points attacking Kerry’s heroic war record and he challenger was revealed as a lame campaigner, I grew to value Rhodes. Off with the gloves, I figured, on with the brass knuckles. No question, Rhodes is a savvy radio professional — preternaturally articulate, as William F. Buckley Jr. once described Limbaugh — who can fill four hours of air time on any political topic. (Last week she did most of a whole show on Operation Rescue mischief-maker and Schiavo adviser Randall Terry. Why? Because she could.)

A bumper ad for Rhodes’ show calls it “Radio, only smarter.” And she is scary smart. If she gets on my nerves by telling everybody, especially callers with a contrary take, that’s she’s always right, she earns my respect by being mostly always right. (“You’re the best,” said a caller she actually let finish his comments today. “I know,” she answered.) In the documentary you can see Randi in action on the air, where during a mega-rant she’ll flashes a smile that doesn’t transmit aurally. Seeing that, I’m readier to believe that she’s having fun playing the Bitch from Brooklyn — as Limbaugh (more clearly) radiates the pleasure he takes and gives as the preeminent conservative blowhard.

The Majority Report. “I get very, very inarticulate when somebody asks me a direct question,” Garofalo admits. But at times, she’s way too articulate. Voluble, anyway. I wish that, during an interview, she’d give some air time to the guest instead of cramming in all her talking points. Garofalo attacks “the right-wing radiocracy” that is “used to lull the dullards.” But she can’t always control her stand-up instinct to get the first and last words in. Most of the time, though, she and Seder show good rapport and keep the left-wing motor purring through the evening.

The Mike Malloy Show. This Atlanta-based host, who now occupies the 10 P.M. to 1 A.M. slot, has a cool shtick. He begins his opening monologue in the soft, cuddling tones of liberal gentility, then rapidly escalates in volume and urgency, until by the end of the segment he’s a raving looney, railing against “the Bush crime family” and shouting, “I hate this country!” He’s like the Peter Finch character in “Network,” and I always wish I were a teamster, driving through the night, propelled by Malloy’s berserk bromides.

NOW WHAT?

In the despair of Nov. 3, the morning after the election, program director Carl Ginsberg considered the upside: “Easy programming decisions, though.” As Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 gave Limbaugh eight years of Democratic rule at which he could aim his bombs and bombast, so Bush’s election guaranteed Air America four years of something big to pick at. The network has been doing just that, with increasing proficiency, the past five months. Now it needs to be come a full-service, 24-hour network. How about an overnight show? At the moment the milkman shift belongs to ESPN’s Todd Wright, to the paranormal “Coast to Coast” (with George Nouri on weeknights and Art Bell on the weekends) and, on many public stations, BBC World News. Late-night is too vast a slot to bequeath to Brits, jocks and UFOs. A sassy host ready to take on callers of all opinions could bring liberal dominance to the one segment of the talk-broadcast day not owned by the political right.

Air America also has to fill its weekend slots with original programming. Granted, Kaplan’s show is on Saturdays now. Robert Kennedy Jr. and lawyer Mike Papantonio energetically pick over corporate malfeasance. Pacifica veteran Laura Flanders can make a strong point while breaking a talk-radio taboo by acknowledging the occasional doubt. Cult rocker Steve Earle and Chuck D. colleague Kyle Jason have shows that play music and talk a little revolution. That leaves most of the weekend filled with reruns of Maron’s, Franken’s and Rhodes’ weekday stints of Maron, Rhodes. I suppose it’s a cheap way to introduce Air America’s stars to dial drifters. But it’s too cheap. News happens on the weekend; Americana don’t run out of opinions on their days off. The network should fill some of that Saturday and Sunday airtime with young, hungry liberals.

Or it could buy, at low cost, shows from good leftie broadcasters not on its own slate. A decade ago, when WABC had already gone into the right-wing rant biz, it used the weekends for a feeble stab at equal time by picking up syndicated lefties Bernie Ward and Jim Hightower. They’re still around, as are other hosts. One rising star of liberal radio is Ed Schultz, a Dakotan whose views are leftish but whose every intonation is so Rush-like that Limbaugh might be able to sue him for voice theft.

I know, I ask too much of a network that is still a year or more from breaking even financially. I should be grateful, and I am, that there’s an intelligent, entertaining half of the country that didn’t vote for Bush. I hope that those on the other side of the great ideological divide tune in too. I was a fan of Rush the radio spellbinder (not Rush the political pundit), and fans of pinwheeling polemics should give it a shot, even if their on (but not in) the right. I asked my cousin Mert Nason, an encyclopedically informed, sharply pugnacious conservative, if he had ever listened to Air America. Yes, he replied, the day after the election. My first response was, Ouch. My second: If Mert did, he heard the hosts speak through their gloom with a surprising resilience. They promised, threatened, that the left isn’t going down without another four-year fight.

And I’m glad that the hosts still proudly parade their neuroses: Franken in his “Oy, Oy, Oy Show” guise of a harried married elderly Jew; Rhodes blithely discussing her history of plastic surgeries and her recent hysterectomy; Maron checking himself after uncharacteristically saying something nice about the Pope and musing, “Am I being too giving?”; Garofalo replaying, on her anniversary show, the clip of a segment where she broke into great heaving sobs, miserable that some bloggers had called her fat. It’s not for everyone, this use of radio as a wailing wall. But the combination of pugnacious politics and primal screams has people listening. Often, it makes for excellent radio.

Keep at it, Air America. Have a terrific Terrible Twos.