I was thinking of "clear channel" without the capital letters. Both the Seattle and Miami clear channel stations you cite were, and are, regional clear channel stations (and, in the case of Seattle, not a very good regional one as most of its signal is pointed west towards the Pacific Ocean to protect Calgary, BC, and the 1090 in Rosearito, BN). National (or near national) non-directional clear channel outlets (such as KFI, WLW, WLS, and WABC) never aired any Air America talk shows though their footprints were much broader than the stations you cite.
But, out of the roughly 5,000 AMs at that time, only 24 were 1-A clears. And each, at the time, already had a very successful format that nobody could expect would be changed for an unproven concept.
And the way radio has worked for five or six decades is based on local home markets. Stations in LA don't get extra revenue if they cover the Inland Empire, for example. In the cases I cited, as well as with many... but not all... of the Air America affiliates, the stations were adequate for their markets.
And the network failed because it could not sustain its significant initial momentum. We can debate whether it was badly managed, badly programmed, had the wrong hosts or whatever, but the fact is that it got on some pretty good stations.
Does this mean that I think Air America would have survived if it had gained access to some of these national clear channel frequencies? Sadly, I would have to say probably not.
No, because the success of a station in the early part of this Millennium was based on its "home" market ratings, not skywave listening hundreds of miles away.
Outside of the argument you made in your last post (which applies to conservative as well as liberal talkers), there was a genuine, almost militant backlash to Air America by conservatives--a backlash that you really didn't see from the left against conservative hosts.
I was involved in talk radio as the national manager of all the HBC / Univision AM stations when Air America came on the scene, and I never sensed any kind of significant backlash by anyone. Sure, just as Rush and his cohorts were criticized by liberals, the hosts on Air America got bashed by vocal conservatives, but that happens with all controversial subjects.
The biggest criticism I heard within the industry, such as at Talkers conventions, was that the hosts were "campaigning" and not "entertaining". Hoist on their own petard, I think.
In addition, people on the left (like yours truly) 1) prefer nice intellectual arguments over the kinds of arguments pushed by their counterparts on the right; and 2) many people on the left don't actually listen to talk radio.
The analysis of "the left" finds that, for radio, there are too many subsets of liberals. There are those who are purely environmentally motivated, those that are racial equality motivated, those that favor bigger government ownership of the economy and so on.
I studied this deeply about 25 years ago, as I was programming stations in NYC, Miami, Chicago, LA, Dallas, Houston, LA, San Antonio, McAllen and several more.
