Radio Reminiscence (From September 23, 2004 about Air America)
Ah, yes, this is somewhat apropro, as I’ve been listening to Fly On The Wall. (Al Franken, before he was on the tranwreck that was Air America was on SNL…)
The entry is up on the blog, but some of the links no longer work. I also talk about being in Orkut jail…..
I decided to look a bit more at Air America’s ratings now, since they’ve managed to be on the air six months now…..
Minneapolis/St. Paul
Air America is on KSMM/WMIN. KSTP and WCCO are the big talkers in the market.
Al Franken and his Public Radio gigglebitch are both from Minnesota.
KSTP and WCCO have a combined 12.8. KSMM and WMIN have a combined 0.8.
In New York City, WLIB is back to where it was before AA made it the flagship station (it was broadcasting in like Korean, I think), and WABC still has over three times as many listeners.
Yep, this is a successful operation.
And once again, it proves not that liberals can’t do talk radio — that’s not what it proves at all. It proves that radio amateurs can’t do talk radio.
Alan Colmes is a good talk show host. I much prefer him to some of the right-wing idiots (hello, mister weiner!). Al Franken is a shitty talk show host, saddled with a public radio leech who whispers into her tinny low-budget microphone.
Randi Rhodes is barely adequate. She’s maybe good enough to handle an afternoon show in a mid-sized market.
Don’t get me started on the other hosts, it’s just not worth the effort to type….
Franken lost his polemical career for pretending he grouped a sleeping woman on a USO tour plane.
I disagree with his politics, and thought Air America was shit, but his comedy is funny.
RIP, too, to Alan Colmes who I met sometime after I wrote that….along with Sean Hannity. Radio people were hit-or-miss in-person. The ones who were real misses, well, one is also dead, one has gone on to big cable TV success, another I have no idea about, and don’t care to look.
But it’s such a different world almost twenty years later. I went and looked at the cumulative numbers for the stations where I used to work a few months ago; if the stations had pulled numbers that small when I was there, everybody would have been firedlaid off.
Speaking of Tidewater, Chesapeake made big news for a shooting at a Walmart where I’ve shopped many times.
The shooter was a Walmart employee.
No assault weapons weren’t used.
Doesn’t seem to be motivated by bias of any sort…
And, since I started plunking away at this, the perpetrator has been identified. Kinda doubt he’s a supremacist of any sort. (Doesn’t managing a Walmart kinda exclude you from that….?)
But the typical politicians are still pushing hard for more gun laws.
What can you say? (When you think government is the solution to everything, you wind with a lot more people in prison than lives saved. Hello, Mr. President, Madam Vice President….)
Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I’m hoping it goes well.
Kinda craving fruitcake. I guess the podcast who’d been selling them as a fundraiser quit that after I’d stopped listening. I tried listening again a few weeks ago, and there just wasn’t anything to keep me around.
I try to forgive. It normally doesn’t work out. Maybe that makes me the bad person. But I don’t care. If I turned it off, most likely it’s because I was bored. But there are some that it was because of something egregious. This was the latter.
Seven more days.
But I think I’ve pretty much done what I was intending to do with this one.