Air America bids adieu to south Florida

The changeover happened just over an hour ago, as Miami's Air America affiliate, WINZ, switched its format to sports talk radio instead of progressive talk. It thus becomes the sixth -- SIXTH!! -- sports talk station in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market.

This is ridiculous. First of all, why the hell does any market, even one as large as Miami, need six sports-talk radio stations? Secondly, how is it that the most progressive region in Florida can't sustain an Air America station?

I've long lamented the dearth of progressive voices in American mainstream media, even though I know what causes it: the corporations and conglomerates who control the media outlets -- e.g., ClearChannel, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, GE, WaPo, and so on -- have their collective mouths clenched firmly around the dicks of the right wing, specifically the Republican Party. I get that.

But what I don't get is why one start-up network can't gain a foothold in a presumably liberal-oriented market. Did WINZ's bosses (it's a ClearChannel station) hand down the orders to get the DFHs off the air? Did the advertising revenue dry up? Or was it really that the message just isn't one that translates well to radio? (I don't buy that last one; radio is not the sole domain of the Right.)

Then again, maybe it's the prevailing attitude represented in the very blog post to which I've linked, wherein the Sun-Sentinel's Tom Jicha commented:

Conservatives have few places to hear their views ratified and discussed. This isn't the case with liberals, who have the network newscasts, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and most mainstream newspapers in synch with them. They also have the White House and both houses of Congress. They don't need a radio network.

What an utter crock of flaming dogshit. But as long as that "liberal media" meme survives, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, progressive media outlets are likely to struggle.