Heh - Air America folds
When the chips are down, Liberal Talk Radio doesn't pay but Rush goes on forever.
From
CNN/Money:
Air America going dark
Liberal talk radio network Air America is planning to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the company said Thursday.
"The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America's business," according to a statement on the network's Web site. It cited a "perfect storm" in the media industry and plummeting advertising revenues.
Starting at 6 p.m. ET Thursday, Air America will broadcast "encore programming" though Jan. 25 and then cease to air. Current employees will be paid through Thursday, and severance packages will be offered Friday to full-time employees with more than six months of tenure.
Formerly known as Air America Radio, the network launched in 2004 with personalities including Rachel Maddow and Al Franken, now a Democratic U.S. senator from Minnesota.
In October 2006, Air America Radio filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but was able to stay on the air while it reorganized. Green Family Media bought the network in March 2007, and it eventually grew to 100 radio outlets nationwide.
The network called itself "the only full-time progressive voice in the mainstream broadcast media world" at the time of its launch, according to its statement Thursday. Air America presented dissenting views on issues like the Iraq War at a time when such statements "were often denounced as 'un-American,' " the statement continued.
Emphasis mine -- denounced as un-American? Those dissenting views were tame and the only dissent from people like Hannity, Beck and Limbaugh was fact checking, not smears. The thing that you need to keep in mind is that while progressives can take things out of context and get away with it in the Mainstream Media, if Hannity, Beck or Limbaugh uttered a smear, the media would have a field day and in many people's eyes, they would be discredited.
The Conservative Talk Radio hosts have people on staff to fact check everything they say -- when they criticize something that was broadcast on Air America, they will play a sound bite, recite the statements and then rebut with the facts of the issue -- a straight point/counterpoint fisking.
Air America only kept going as long as it did because people donated money to keep it running. It was never able to support itself through advertising sales -- something that the rest of the mainstream media is discovering now. When you veer off to one side of the spectrum, you are going to attract fewer and fewer people willing to cough up the money. The majority of Americans are fairly conservative except for the liberal pockets of San Francisco, LA, Madison, Boston, NYC, etc.
A lot of the deep progressive pockets are headquartered in these cities and if they do not take a good hard look at the rest of America, they are destined to fail and fail again. An Echo Chamber can be very seductive but it is not the truth...
Posted by DaveH at January 21, 2010 4:51 PM
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