Air America - Going Down

Earlier, I noted why "Air America isn't taking off." Now, it appears they are headed toward a crash landing.

On DrudgeReport today, I found these ratings for hosts in New York City:

LIMBAUGH 144,100
HANNITY 113,500
CURTIS/KUBY 109,500
GAMBLING 104,700
IMUS 93,800
JOY BROWNE 76,200
MARK LEVIN 74,200
OPIE/ANTHONY 74,000
O'REILLY 64,900
SAVAGE 64,300
AL FRANKEN 47,300
LIONEL 38,400
RANDI RHODES 38,200
BATCHELOR 36,900

Now, lets analyze these figures. While I am not familiar with all these names, I did look at all of them. One one of those figures whose name appears before Al Franken is a leftwing pundit (Kuby). While some of those before Al Franken may be liberals, they are not exclusively liberal pundits, and focus on other things. That means that in the top half of these ratings, only 1/2 a show is one devoted to leftwing punditry.

Lets look further. New York City is a heavily Democrat city. So you would figure that Air America would have been number 1 by now, right? So why is Al Franken near the bottom - and way, way behind the next person in the ratings, Michael Savage?

Furthermore, many of these conservative hosts are just plain boring. Sean Hannity, Marc Levin, and O'Reilly - are they worth listening to? Well, not really.

And surprisingly, despite the fact that O'Reilly competes directly against Limbaugh, and for the same audience, he still has way more listeners than Al Franken. That one I can't figure out.

Also, is there any mention of any NPR hosts? I don't see any.

The problem with Air America, is, well, a few. First, they got into this long after talk radio was taken over by conservatives. Indeed, they got involved long after talk radio lost much of it's audience - Limbaugh's weekly audience fell from 22 million in 1993 to about 14 million today (despite the introduction of millions of new listeners) - yet he is still way ahead of the pack. It would appear that his audience got bored and didn't change the station - they turned off the radio.

Indeed, the radio is a much more old fashioned medium than it was in 1993. There are very few programs people specifically take the time to listen to. Most people today turn on the radio only if they are in their cars, or if they have it set to a station on their alarm clocks.

That is because of not only improved mediums of preserving information, but also due to streaming. People will now get their information off the computer by streaming it. Or, if they need news, they go to a news site.

Indeed, many formats are losing audience share. For example, the old Rock, or alternative, or country, formats are losing audiences. That is because they have to represent many aspects of a genre. And people may like one aspect of a genre, but not all aspects of that genre. Thus, who wants to listen to a Rock station, that plays music that is largely crappy, when Sirius offers God-knows-how-many stations devoted to the various sub-genres of metal?

And even if some forward-thinking entrepeneuer thought of starting Air America in 1991, he would never have gotten the audience that Limbaugh got. That is because there were several sources at that time where one could get liberal opinion. People get set in their ways and do not switch unless there is a need to. They are not going to switch away from their NPR (at a much higher intellectual level than Air America, by the way) to listen to some pip-squeeks muse on day after day on the same thing. Conservatives did go to Limbaugh because there was a general lack of conservative opinion in 1991 - indeed, even the hard news had a lot of commentary.

Entertainment, which radio is, may not cost money, but it more importantly costs time. Most people have much more limited time than money. One can always but junk and throw it in a closet - they can get more money. But one cannot really regain lost time. So in an entertainment saturated world, they have to pick their sources carefully. Air America got too late into the game not only after the talk format died down (indeed, some called the popularity of talk radio in the mid-1990's as the "talk radio craze"), but long after the internet took over news and entertainment functions that radio used to fill. Indeed, in 1991, there was already much more entertainment to satisfy a liberal's palette than there was for a conservative - which is one reason why Rush Limbaugh became so huge, while these hosts never did.

In fact, as I mentioned before, Air America hired some bozos to represent them. Both Al Franken and Ganine Garafallo (I don't know how to spell her name, but it really doesn't matter) are failed SNL stars. Didn't Al Franken hang around that set for 20 years - long after many a star from that show already had much of their careers behind them (like Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, or Eddie Murphy)? Starting a network with SNL flunkies is not a good way to get going.

And also, having Jerry Springer as one of your programs does not aid in credibility, either.

Air America has been on a long time - nearly three years. So everyone knows about it. Despite this, however, it still has very low ratings. Ann Coulter might be right when she wrote that radio enables Randi Rhodes to literally reach hundreds of listeners every day.

I need not devote any more time or bandwidth on my blog to discussing Air America, so I will not do so anymore. That is because as the low ratings, for a highly Democrat city, show, Air America is nothing more than a laughingstock. I have successfully predicted failures before, so I will stick out my neck and do so again. Though that may not be hard in this case. I predict that it will not be the powerhouse it was intended to be, and the advertisers are clearly correct - from a business standpoint - when they shift their advertising dollars away from it.