There is alot of truth to what you say - there is so much zeal in the voices of those who announce the demise of air america that their analysis might not be that helpful. AA will likely be around for a long time, not because they're doing much of anything right, but simply because they are there, and they are a well-financed propoganda arm of the Dems, and because there will be an increasing need for content as new infrastructure comes online over the next few years.
Its true that AA is failing right now by traditional standards - Clear Channel Providence, one of their big market affiliates, is also dropping them after a year which saw half their audience disappear - but that doens't mean that in time they won't learn the format and start doing a better job. And their gameplan might not care much about traditional standards, ie audience and revenue, during the period that they're being funded by political interests.
But the world is big enough for all of us. Whether the fringe is occupied by AA or Salem (which also doesn't use (solely) traditional standards to judge success), its good to see the business growing, isn't it?
> > Rush Limbaugh was once an unknown talent on stations like
> > WILB and KTLK.
> >
> > It would be foolish to say AAR will eventually achieve
> > Limbaugh status, but they are still figuring things out.
>
>
> What we know as "conservative talk radio" had something like
> a 30-year gestation period, from the beginnings of the first
> all-talk stations (KABC and KMOX),
>
> to the appearance of the first combative proto-conservative
> hosts
> (Joe Pyne, Bob Grant, and their counterparts around the
> country),
>
> to the decisions by hurting AM medium-market music stations
> in the 70s to experiment with talk shows at night, to the
> arrival of satellites,
>
> to the wholesale abandonment of AM by music listeners,
>
> to the arrival of cheap satellite time
> in the mid-80s making ad hoc (one show) networks possible
> and creating a business opportunity for people like Ed
> McLaughlin and the so-called "EIB network",
>
> to the move by "full service" AMs to leap into the lifeboat
> of talk in the late 1980s before the A.M. Titanic sank
> entirely,
>
> to the relentless efforts by Ed McLaughlin to get his boy
> Rush on those big-stick AMs that were just jumping into
> talk,
>
> to the conclusion by some of those program directors that
> they could keep some of Rush's audience by filling the day
> with people who sounded just like him.
>
> If the so-called liberal media had scrutinized and
> microanalyzed talk radio during this 30-year maturation
> period the way the blogosphere has microanalyzed Air America
> in its 18 months of existence, it would have dissolved into
> dust before Limbaugh could rattle his first sheet of paper
> in his formerly nicotine-stained fingers before the golden
> EIB microphone.
>
