> It's pretty funny that the Democrats pumping up O'Franken radio can't
> seem to buy a time slot in the nation's capital....
I don't see what the joke is. In fact, it's very difficult to get anything that doesn't appeal to the lowest common denominator on the air in the major markets.
When the all-classical-music station WFLN in Philly was sold to a new owner some years ago, and was immediately switched to pop music, CM fans tried to find another station, but all the FM stations were way too expensive to buy, and a college station in Trenton that already played CM and had a small repeater station or two in the Philly area couldn't even get permission to put more repeaters in, because the geographical distribution of the areas where all the stations were allowed to aim their antennas was already completely full. Eventually, the Temple University station, which was all-jazz and had a good following among African Americans, agreed to do CM for half its schedule and jazz the other half. This angered a lot of African Americans for a while, who complained that "the rich white Main-Line folks are taking away our station" (as seems to be happening with the WLIB situation in New York) but eventually things calmed down, and quite a few fans of each kind of music found that they actually liked the other kind, too.
Left talk radio is such an unfamiliar concept to the broadcasting powers that be that it has to start out small; hopefully, once it gets its toe in the door, a good number of listeners will find that they like it, too, as the classical and jazz folks did, and it will be able to expand.
BTW, I think it's probably smart to start out with someone like Franken, who has some name recognition and is at least entertaining, rather than someone whose political stance would be more to the liking of radicals, but who would probably send everyone ly promptto Beddy-Bye Land.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax