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.

Mister Sinfonian's Neighborhood

I've mentioned before that Palm Beach County attracts some real winners -- I share my home county with Ann Coulter, Mark Foley, and Rush Limbaugh, for example -- but I didn't realize until yesterday that it also is the center of a talk radio battleground of sorts. Not only does Limbaugh live here, but so does Randi Rhodes, formerly of Air America Radio.

For example, Rhodes, who calls Lake Worth home and worked for WJNO locally for 10 years before she signed with Air America in 2004, just brought her newly syndicated show to satellite broadcaster XM Radio this week.

[...]

Consider that other nationally syndicated talk host who lives in our back yard: conservative pundit and Palm Beach resident Rush Limbaugh (heard midday locally on WJNO). He not only commands a weekly audience of 14 million-plus, largest in the industry, but he also is widely credited with helping to bring the conservative cause to the fore in the post-Ronald Reagan era.

Limbaugh's latest effort: "Operation Chaos," a plan to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton in states and territories where they are eligible to participate in Democratic primaries. The goal is to keep the Democrats divided for as long as possible, thereby boosting Republicans' chances in the fall.

If Limbaugh represents the old guard of talk radio, there's a sizable new guard, and many of them are branching out beyond radio.

Take Glenn Beck, a conservative who's heard weekday mornings on WJNO. He hosts a show on CNN's Headline News. He has written two books, including the recent best-seller An Inconvenient Book.

[...]

But talk radio has remained strong. In many ways, the format can credit its existence to the 1987 repeal of the FCC "fairness doctrine," which meant opinions could now run wild without a need for a response.

In an instant, the big-mouth era was born.

Beck, who started as a music DJ, says the most successful talkers understand that the format is driven by the need to entertain, not necessarily to inform. "It's got to be bigger than politics," he says.

Rhodes agrees that talk radio is more about provocation than promoting a cause.

"People listen to me even if they disagree with me. ... It has to do with the question of can you evoke emotion?" says the controversial host, who came under fire from New York-based Air America for referring to Hillary Clinton as a "(expletive) whore."

(Rhodes resigned after being suspended, but she insists her problems with the network were related more to contract discussions.)

The best two reasons for reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine? Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

Any questions?

In which I meet Lizz Winstead and Ed Schultz

Hi again from midtown Manhattan. The following is no April Fool, I assure you.

Tonight, on the recommendation of res ipsa loquitur and after dinner with watertiger, Culture of Truth, HoneyBearKelly, and Bunter, racymind and I went to Shoot the Messenger, a terrific "two-in-one" show that combines a caustic-yet-frighteningly-accurate morning show parody with an interview session. Tonight, the "star" and co-creator of StM, Lizz Winstead, interviewed Air America Radio host Ed Schultz.

What a terrific show. The first half, the morning show parody, was a riot. My favorite part was when they interviewed the author of a book exploring why Barack Obama was going to have trouble reaching out to "middle America" (remember, this is a parody, folks). The title of the book: Oreo Nation: Campaigning for the Creamy Middle. Ouch.

But it was Winstead's interview with Schultz that was most enlightening. The two covered a lot of topics, even spending a good bit of time on my question regarding the impact of the blogosphere on mainstream media (naturally, I mentioned Eschacon, and Lizz also mentioned Atrios in her response to my question). Schultz won't endorse a candidate, but he said that from where he sits, he doesn't understand why Hillary Clinton remains in the race. He also told a few anecdotes from his dinner last night with Terry McAuliffe, to which Winstead asked, "Did you lose a bet and have to have dinner with Terry McAuliffe? Was it like, 'You either have to go to Guantanamo or have dinner with Terry McAuliffe?' "

According to Schultz, Obama is making great strides with the superdelegates, a situation he called "the untold story from the media." Bill Richardson noted this, Schultz said, when he endorsed Obama -- that Clinton seems to have an unpalatable sense of entitlement in this campaign, a "strange definition of loyalty," as Schultz put it. "Barack really wants to attempt to bring people together; Hillary doesn't think you can bring people together -- you only have to win by one and then beat the shit out of them."

Schultz believes that if Clinton takes the nomination through "arm-twisting" of superdelegates at the convention, "there's going to be hell to pay in November." People, especially African-Americans, will feel disenfranchised. The money quote: "Catholics voted for John F. Kennedy. Evangelicals voted for Bush. What's wrong with black people voting for Barack Obama, or women voting for Hillary Clinton?"

There was much, much more but that's basically what I remember. It was a special event and I'm thrilled to have attended. Oh, yeah, then there's this:

Yeah, that's me, the Z-lister DFH from Florida with Schultz and Winstead. That pretty much kicked ass.

I think I might have to hang out in NYC more often ...