Los Angeles Times - April 19, 2004
David Shaw: Media Matters All-left radio is lacking the right stuff for success
The first time I turned on Air America, the new liberal radio network, I heard a commentator arguing that Republicans did not initiate impeachment proceedings against President Clinton because of Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, lying or obstruction of justice. No, the man said, Republicans knew Clinton had committed no impeachable offenses, but they pursued impeachment anyway, in a diabolically clever ploy designed specifically to make the general public so disenchanted with the very idea of impeachment that they would not tolerate impeachment against the next (Republican) president - who, of course, deserves to be impeached immediately.
OK. That's about what I expected - liberal paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy to match the conservative paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their ilk have used to turn talk radio into a powerful forum that liberals now blame for every social and political malady this side of tooth decay.
Unfortunately, I greatly overestimated Air America's potential. Granted, Air America is only a few weeks old - and at midweek, it was off the air, at least temporarily, in L.A. and Chicago, amid a dispute with the owner of the stations in those cities over payment for air time. But paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy would be a big improvement on what Air America has been broadcasting.
After a few random samplings - on KBLA-AM (1580), one of six stations nationwide now carrying Air America - I realized that such in-and-out, drive-by listening wasn't the fairest way to judge it. I decided to listen to one entire day's original programming, all 17 hours.
So at 6 a.m. on Good Friday - the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, the day after Condoleezza Rice testified before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks - I tuned in to 1580, turned on my computer to take notes and sat with both until 11 p.m.
It may have been the most boring day of my life.
My fellow liberals have long argued that they haven't been able to match the conservative success on talk radio because the medium is ideally suited to conservatives. According to this self-serving argument, conservatives are more willing than liberals to engage in nasty name-calling and to see everything in black and white, while liberals - concerned with nuance and complexity - are inevitably reasonable, willing to consider both sides of an issue. But President W's policies - especially in Iraq - have now so enraged liberals that they are willing to play dirty too. Hence, Air America.
Not.
Not, at least, during the 17 hours I listened. Oh sure, the new network's assorted hosts, guests and callers did engage in a bit of obligatory name-calling. Henry Kissinger was "a war criminal." Rice was "reptilian," "a liar" and "a perjurer." President Bush was "an idiot," "a liar," a "lazy sack of crap," "a fake Christian," "a murdering scumbag" and - amid a discussion of Janet Jackson and the Super Bowl - "the biggest boob of all."
But Limbaugh does his name-calling so creatively and hilariously that it usually winds up being entertaining. As repellent as I find his politics, Limbaugh is an entertainer as well as a polemicist, and after liberal talk-show experiments with such policy wonks as former Govs. Jerry Brown of California and Mario Cuomo of New York all failed, the folks behind Air America promised that they'd learned their lesson. They too would find ideologues who are funny.
Nice try.
No laughing matter
Al Franken, a "Saturday Night Live" veteran, is certainly funny. And he's the host of Air America's 9 a.m.-to-noon program, a head-on competitor to Limbaugh. Franken's show is called "The O'Franken Factor" - a deliberate jab at Bill O'Reilly, the popular Fox commentator of"O'Reilly Factor" fame. Comic actress Janeane Garofalo and Randi Rhodes, a talk-show host from south Florida, are also professionally funny. Garofalo co-hosts Air America's 8-to-11 p.m. "The Majority Report," and Rhodes hosts the network's drive-time show, from 3 to 7 p.m.
But I laugh easily, and I didn't get a single laugh from Franken, Garofalo or Rhodes - or from any of the other Air America hosts I listened to. Rhodes is the best of them, but unlike Limbaugh - who has a rich, mellifluous voice - her voice is so grating that I found myself wincing, no matter how vigorously I agreed with what she said. (Even Rhodes says, "I hate my voice.")
Funny jokes and easy listening are not the primary objectives of Air America, of course. They're simply the lure with which liberals hope to engage and convert the body politic. Most of the programming was as earnest as C-SPAN, though - and as dreary as a lecture on agriculture price supports, albeit filtered through a liberal sensibility.
Thus, Bush-bashing dominates the network, much as Clinton-bashing dominated conservative shows during his administration. Air America hosts also espoused predictably liberal views on race relations, gay rights, the 2000 presidential election and other issues.
That's what I would expect of a liberal radio network. And I was most pleased to hear black and gay voices among the network's hosts. What I didn't hear, though, was anything especially original in any of the host's attacks and observations.
That may not be necessary for an audience of true believers who are convinced that, as Rhodes said, "Liberals have always occupied the moral high ground." But conservatives turned talk radio into their medium in large measure because many people who considered themselves conservatives felt that their interests and their values were either ignored or denigrated by a liberal mainstream media. One recent poll showed that only 19% of the American public now identify themselves as liberal. That means that if a liberal network wants to be successful, politically or economically, it must also convert a significant number of the 39% of the public that the poll said considers itself moderate.
Good luck.
In a country in which 64% of the public say they attend weekend worship services at least once a month, mocking religion might not be the most effective way to win converts - and yet, on Good Friday no less, that's exactly what the various Air America hosts repeatedly did.
Two of the hosts gratuitously announced that they're Jewish, and one - Marc Maron of the network's "Morning Sedition" program - went on to make fun of Easter and Christmas rituals. Then, in a segment he called "morning devotional," Maron began his prayer for divine guidance on behalf of President Bush by saying, "Dear Lord, what the hell is going on up there?"
Another host - I think it was Rachel Maddow on "Unfiltered," though I couldn't always distinguish her voice from that of co-host Lizz Winstead - called Easter "an odd celebration" and said that a taxi driver had told her that "someone in a Jesus suit" would carry a cross along 42nd Street in New York in a reenactment of the events of Good Friday, "but in this case, he'll stop to buy a fake Louis Vuitton bag."
Huh?
The Air America hosts seemed equally shortsighted in their preoccupation with sex, another subject not designed to win over moderates. Shortly after opening his show, Maron, one of three hosts who felt compelled to mention his sex life, started talking about having sex with his "much younger" wife and thinking, "Wow, I'm really good at this" - only to suddenly feel very old when she said, "Don't kill yourself."
Maron also ticked off a mock list of chores the president would do that day - including ordering "an extra inch" for his penis.
All Maron's comments drew hoots of supportive laughter from co-hosts Sue Ellicott and Mark Riley. In fact, I think what ultimately annoyed - and disappointed me - the most about Air America was all the false, aren't-we-funny, aren't-we-smart laughter that virtually all the hosts gave each other. Four of Air America's six weekday programs have co-hosts - and two have three co-hosts apiece, liberal collectives that stand in stark contrast to the individual, every-man-for-himself approach of the conservatives. Maybe that's one reason they don't work as well as, say, Limbaugh's solo effort.
It shouldn't take a village to raise a radio program.
David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw at latimes.com