If you're trying to market a radio network, why would you care about gravitas, whatever that is. Franken is somebody almost everyone of a certain age had heard of due to his many years at SNL, his comedy movie work, and especially his bestselling, catchily titled, political books.
So from a PR standpoint, hiring Franken was one of only a few good decisions ever to come out of AAR. Others I can think of
1] Hiring Randi Rhodes
2] Syndicating Thom Hartmann
3) Running a special on election night.
Franken's reputation got them huge national publicity, which helped them get as many affiliates as they did in spite of AAR's horrendous record otherwise, under the control of a string of different people:
1] Announcing you're going to buy an entire network of stations when you can't afford even one.
2] Renting your way onto the air in major markets. Either your rent goes through the roof, or you lose your dial position.
3] Lying about your financing, scaring potential partners, employees, or advertisers.
4] Hiring people with no radio experience, to program and operate a radio network.
5] Hiring radio hosts with no radio experience. Just because you're articulate doesn't mean you're ready to do radio talk.
6] Paying those people salaries only exceeded by the most experienced, successful national talkers.
7] Hiring huge support staffs for some of those people, like a radio version of what is done in TV.
8] Offering a morning show that often sounds like it is a local New York show. (Morning Sedition.)
9] When that show fails replacing it with nothing in particular, just a couple of people given a couple of hours a day each.
10) When THAT fails, giving the morning show to the "not ready for terrestrial radio" club, the Young Turks.
11) Hiring hosts that have other ongoing interests that take time from the radio show. Call-in talk radio requires tons of outside reading.
12) Sending affiliates reruns or lame shows at night and weekends, when competing talk stations run their weakest shows, times when no one else on the local airwaves is discussing ongoing news, times when you have the best chance for people to sample your network.
13) Running a liberal network and never finding or hiring an African-American call-in talk host for general political talk.
14) Never coming up with a good local promotion strategy that low-budget local affiliates could plug into their stations. AAR should have run a promo factory so that stations' computers could pull localized promos right off an AAR ftp site onto the air.
15) Running a format that potentially appeals to listeners that are younger and more female than other radio talk, but only getting that format onto FM in one station in a rated market (Madison, who ironically just dropped the format despite okay ratings), and not coming up with a promotion strategy to deal with the fact that much of the target audience not only doesn't listen to AM, but in many cases has NEVER listened to AM, and in a few cases may not even know that AM is available on most of the radios they own.
16) Not coming up with an off-network promotion strategy at all.
I'm sure there's a few other aspects of running the network I forgot to mention. If you don't have enough info to form your opinion on any of them, your best bet is to assume that AAR handled it wrong.
