Air America
 

Nothing new here. Democrats (liberals) want yet another program, but this time, they couldn't force the taxpayers to pay for it.

Is there anyone out there who would like to make a contribution?

What? Since when was air-america publically funded? :confused:

GF: I think he's trying to say that democrats always want programs that they cannot pay for; the difference is that since Air America is not publically funded, it is being forced to file for bankruptcy, rather than merely overburdening the taxpayers.

As a conservative I find this a bad thing for my viewpoint.

The more liberals talk freely, the more you get to hear what they say, the better.

Well that's an extremely partisan idea. I'm sure companies run by conservatives go under all the time. :|

I'm a conservative, but really, that kinda talk's not necessary...

Neither is a great deal of what Al Franken says. Remember "Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot?" That wasn't terribly constructive.

Rush has had less than stellar moments as well, but it would seem that Air America was putting out a message that few supported.

That being the case, the upcoming election will be interesting, because many polls have found that the populace is disgusted with Congress, but it thinks their own rep or senator is okay. That, coupled with the inherent advantages enjoyed by incumbents, is likely to make many of the races exceedingly close. Whether those are enough to overcome the Foley factor, who can say?

Perhaps some of us would like to express their opinion of the reason for Air America's apparent demise: Unpopular ideas, or other factors?

We just have to convince america bill o'reilly has wmd. Then america would easily pay for it.

Nice troll. Plus, you're obviously misinformed, as several have pointed out already: taxpayers have nothing to do with whatever it is you're going on about.

Perhaps you hit the "submit reply" button a little too hastily. I said they COULDN"T make the taxpayers pay for the program. Therefore, Air America is dying a timely death due to lack of funding, unlike the NEA, the "war on poverty," block grants, Americorps, et. al.

You should read before trolling.

Democracy Now is still quickly growing. Free Speech TV is still quickly growing. Link TV is still quickly growing. All liberal, all funded by viewers and not corporations. Fox News should switch over to funding by viewers and let's see how quickly it goes bankrupt. I'd love to see Bill O'reilly on a street corner holding one of those signs and dancing.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking. Or maybe BOR in Guantanamo.

This thread should win an award for being the biggest waist of time. Why do we allow flame bait like this?

this thread seems to come framed by elements of the limbaugh set.
and here i thought that limbaugh had faded into a richly deserved irrelevance---one more example of the extent to which american conservatism is something of a jurassic park of otherwise discredited ideological formations.

i listened to air america once or twice and found it really tedious.
i understand why it was formed--but i never understood why the organization decided that it needed to play the same flintstone radiogame as the limbaugh set played.

i would have thought that it made more sense to support the expansion of democracy now or other such programming that pulverize the conservative worldview by exposing its manifest limitations in terms of information, which in turn undermines the one-dimensional interpretations that the conservative set seems to gravitate toward. given that the weakness above all others of contemporary conservatism is its refusal to deal with complexity, the proliferation of sources of information would seem its worst nightmare.

besides, regardless of the legion problems with the planet limbaugh, the show was an interesting and effective strategic development during the clinton period--but the effectiveness of the format dissolved quite rapidly once the conservative set came out from under its cultural rock.
the tactics of the planet limbaugh are played out.
air america had nothing to do with this---the tactics are played out due to overexposure.
right talk radio is the p-diddy american politics.

but we'll see what the far right comes up with this time, once they pass into a richly deserved oppositional position again, prelude to their slide back into the ooze of the american backwater, where strange fish like ustwo swim in dank waters that admit only indirectly of information, and where coherence cannot survive because of the intense pressure directed against it.

Can we start a thread talking about the enron colapse and how it shows that republicans are currupt and steal money from hard working people? I think that has the same "correlations" that the OP has....

I think its more a result of deregulation than anything else. Prior to the passage of the Telecomm Act of '96, there were limits on radio station ownership, both totally and within a particular market, and there was a commitment to local ownership.

Since then, a small number of national telecomm companies now own a larger share of radio stations and programming is packaged, with little local input. Clear Channel, which some would describe as having a conservative bias, went from owning 40 stations in the 90s to over 1,200 stations now, including owning multiple stations in a single market

The bottom line is that radio programming has become homoginized and increasingly difficult to find a station willing or able to take a risk on something new.

An interesting article on radio ownership consolidation:

http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/n...?cat=5&media=8

i think you are right, dc....

the deregulation of media ownership has been a catastrophe--at the seemingly benign level, it was the explanation for a strange state of affairs in philadelphia, where clear channel is an overwhelming broadcast radio presence with the results that boradcast radio is a wasteland--the strange thing was the you could not hear air america in philly, a city that voted something like 80% democrat in the last presidential election. it is also one of the top 10 media markets in the country. this state of affairs was very strange indeed.

on the other hand, there are hearings going on now (i think they are still happening) within the fcc that are designed as a review of this deregulation idea. part of the explanation for this is the case brought by prometheus, which is a west philadelphia based group of media activists that include several close friends. so this provides a chance to cheerlead for them. go hannah. anyway, here is a link to the fcc' page about the hearings:

http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/

and here to the prometheus project:

http://www.prometheusradio.org/

these folk are doing great work out there and are a quite amazing group, particularly as a grassroots operation that has come to be a significant force, one which is changing the terms of debate about media ownership patterns in general.
they are also a great source of information about low powered radio stations, how to set them up, etc.

they particularly despise clear channel, as i think most people do, or would if they understood what these folk are about and what they do.

http://prometheusradio.org/media_own...clear_channel/

As "god" suggests, the OP begs an issue worthy of discussion, which is what the reasons were that led to the necessity for Air America to opt for Chapter 11. I listen to lots of talk radio, and if Air America programming is an offering in these parts, I've missed it. The midwest is pretty conservative, so I end up hearing the likes of Rush, Sean et al. While I disagree with a lot of what I hear, the programs are interesting. Enough listener interest = favorable ratings = ad revenues = successful business model. Listening to the "other" side of an issue tests the soundness of one's own beliefs, so I would give equal time to Air America programming, if it were offered here, assuming it held my interest.

Take the TV show "Will and Grace". What could be more liberal than normalizing homosexual behavior? Even so, it was hugely popular and successful because it was funny, ie, entertaining. Was that where Air America has failed? Maybe they've just come to the party late, after radio listeners have already picked the radio personalities they like and the shows they'll listen to, in the time available to them. Maybe liberals prefer music to talk radio. Even assuming the adverse influence of these factors, however, I think it's not just that no one wants to hear the message, but rather that it hasn't been presented in a sufficiently marketable manner. If a show can demonstrate that it will generate tons of ad revenue, we'll be hearing it all over the radio, whether the program's slant is conservative or liberal.

Yea Air America failed because of deregulation, not because no one listened to it :rolleyes:

Nothing to do with overpaying celebs, and attempting to create something the market wasn't interested in.

well, ustwo, were you to actually think about it for a minute.....i'll wait here.....there is a correlation between the concentration of ownership in philadelphia radio and the inability of air america to get any access at all.

if your one-dimensional non-model of market relations obtained--you know, if supply really did follow demand--you would think air america would be all over philadelphia, which voted something like 80% for kerry last election and is one of the strongest democrat cities on the east coast. the reason there may be a linkage is the extensive support clear channel provides to republican politicians, including extensive financial support for the bush people. to wit:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtm...nnel_Worldwide

but i do not expect you to even wonder about such things, insofar your political position benefits from such arrangements--and were you bothered by media monotony and if you did think about it, you might be driven to say something dimly critical of the capitalist order. which seems like something i should not hold my breath waiting for.

I can't imagine that we could have a realistically well-informed conversation that established exactly why Air America is filing Chapter 11. It could be limited access, poor business model, terrible leadership, bad decisions, bad management, talent issues, marketing, technical problems, or regulatory issues.

I think it is more interesting to look at the situation from the other direction, as roachboy has hinted. If Philly's market (like NYC's) is overwhelmingly democratic (sympathetic to liberal causes?), then why isn't this theoretical demand reflected in the media?

AAR has indeed suffered from bad management, but it is the insufficient advertising revenue that has brought it to filing a Chapter 11. I don't have the search skills needed to see if AAR has published revenue sources by city, but I believe we can all agree that AAR doesn't have the deep pockets for penetrating a market place as does Clear Channel. If AAR isn't financially able to bring in a high number of listeners due to it's absence in large segments of the market place, advertisers will look elsewhere to make the best bang for their buck. AAR needs more revenue to create a larger audience, but it's current audience size isn't attractive to advertisers.

Seattle has a progressive talk station (AM 1090) that takes feeds from AAR, and other syndicated talk hosts. If AAR ultimately fails, AM 1090 will continue to broadcast because of the political demographics of the city. I can't answer as to why Philly hasn't done something similar, but I think it fair to say that a Democrat does not necessarily represent a progressive.

i was thinking about elphaba's last point--contrary to what the right likes to pretend is the case, what exactly constitutes "a liberal"? is there "a" liberal position? is there "a" liberal market?

most of the left folk that i know--and i know alot of them--do not define themselves around the conservative notion of what their opposite is. most use the word "liberal" with a degree of contempt. and none of them listen to air america--they know about it, but--i dont know,maybe it's the format. most listen to democracy now, bbc, to a lesser extent npr (which they complain about for its ineffectual coverage and blandness). most read though. you know, newspapers and books and other such. i dont know if talk radio functions in the same way for folk who take in lots of different kinds of information--the folk i know (fewer) who listened to limbaugh et al seemed to do it FOR the information first and the political gloss second... so i dont know.

gotta go

I agree with roachboy that a single source of information, whether it AAR or Fox News, will offer little to the broader understanding of a subject or event. Multiple sources of information, without partisan selection, are best (imo) in forming an opinion.

Maybe it AAR failed because there are fewer liberals than conservatives in the "we want to have our opinions spoon-fed to us" category. I didn't really care for AAR because whenever i listened to it i just heard all the shit that i hate about conservative talk radio with liberal-centric details.

Nice dig. And total bullshit.

Eh, it's a plausible-enough counterexplanation to "they're bankrupt because liberal viewpoints require government subsidies". I doubt it's most or all of the reason, but I wouldn't be surprised if it explained a part of the revenue problem. Filtherton could've phrased it a bit more diplomatically, like "liberals aren't as interested in the Limbaugh/Savage/O'Reilly temperament/format, that's why Air America failed", but I can buy his basic point.

If Liberals didn't like spoon feeding the Daily Show wouldn't be so political these days. I'll ignore that sillyness.

Air America was created for political purposes. The left hated talk radio for the conservative nature and wanted in on it. Rather then letting the talkers develop slowly on their own and gain audiance naturally, they tried to create their own Limbaughs et al, over night, before there was an audiance.

They would have been better off with no-names and find out who people like to listen to. Of course that implies people wanted to listen to them, liberal talk shows don't tend to last long in my experiance, you can only bottle 'angry' and 'Bush/republicans suck/s' with 'well I dont' have any ideas' for so long.

I have to agree with this statement. In this area the demand was and is there for some liberal radio. However, the Radio America station was a low wattage station that static was heard more than the station. They had signs all over advertising it and people wanted it, but the bandwidth was shit.

If it had been or was on a better amplified station, they may have had more loyal listeners here. They put too much into advertising the commodity here, but not enough money into making sure the commodity had quality (i.e. bandwidth frequency).

But that is just the example here

edit: this is in response to Ustwo.

Huh. Daily Show. Good point. Perhaps my "liberals aren't as interested in the Limbaugh/Savage/O'Reilly temperament/format, that's why Air America failed" phrasing is a better way to put it, then... but I'll stop putting words in filtherton's mouth.

At any rate, there's also the Philadelphia situation that roachboy raised as a possibility.

Who's to say there aren't multiple reasons for the failure?

fta: you dont actually think ustwo is making a serious or informed point about "liberals" above, do you?

all he does above is reiterate in a backhanded kinda way the extent to which "liberal" is a conservative projection, a fantasy that circulates within conservativeland as the mirror image of the right---it has no content independently of a series of minus signs stuck in front of attributes that conservatives claim for themselves.

so in conservativeland, and this despite all evidence, folk like ustwo fancy themselves as "having ideas" and so it follows that the inverse, the "liberal" does not....in the end all he is saying is that in conservativeland, other rightwingers are "us" and those who do not agree are not us, or "them"--there is nothing more to it.
there is never much more to ustwo's positions....the same crude procedure is repeated ad infinitum.


the talk format worked pretty well for the right during the clinton period. its central function really was the framing of information around conservative talking points, the collapsing of the latter into the former; the endless repetition of the same memes, the illusion of interaction generated by the call-in segments, the illusion of unanimity as a function of the meager amount of dissenting calls allowed past the screeners---these general features would be streamed toward ends that were often wholly absurd---remember the far right's vince foster paroxyms?---that in the end were little more than radio orwell type group hate opportunities directed not only at clinton but at everyone and everything that opposed the extreme right. strangely, talk radio from rightwingland also benefitted from much wider distrubtion than did any other political media format at the time, conservative paranoid drivel about the "liberal media" not withstanding.

air america was formed to counter this kind of thing, but i think it had a number of problems, not least of which was that air america is not trafficking in an ideology predicated on identification with the "us" with a hallucination of "nation" with the person of the Leader like that which is central to conservativeland, so the other tricks that radioheads like limbaugh worked out to use talk radio as to reinforce a sense of identification were not in place or functional-nor could they have been.

short version: air america was set up AS IF the conservative fantasy about the political context it operated in was an actual description of that context, as a weapon in a trench war against the right that was close to doomed from the outset because it was set up on the wrong strategic grounds.

one thing that the difficulties air america is having demonstrates is the arbitrariness of the conservative construction of american politics beyond ever-shrinking borders of conservativeland.

Whatever. Let me know when you have something substantive to say. I know you think we're all idiots in here, so why don't you enlighten us with your no doubt completely watertight reasoning abilities.

Only to the extent that liberals aren't immune to the love of spoonfed viewpoints. In my own anecdotal experience, there have been plenty of Daily Show viewers whose lack of critical thought mirrored the Hannity/Limbaugh apologists on the other side. That's what I considered his good point.

I do agree that he hasn't given enough creedence to alternate/additional explanations of the bankruptcy, particularly yours.

Welcome to capitalism. Blame what you want, but if people listened to Air America they would have made money. This money would in turn prevent Chapter 11.

No listeners, no advertisements. No advertisements, no money. No money, no talk show.

Say what you want about deregulation, about static, about how evil Fox News is. What it boils down to is no one was interested in listening.

Nothing to see here...


2004

http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200504261400.asp

2005
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/001631.htm

2006
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-04-29ba.html

No special theories are needed for why it failed in even the most liberal of areas. No one listened to it, I think the last article really summed it up nicely....

But even hard-core liberals (who make up only about one-fifth of the American electorate, it’s important to remember) must find Air America’s incessant and often moronic Bush bashing monotonous and unentertaining—the kiss of death for talk radio.

There are plenty of more indepth pieces out there (you can all google it yourself I'm sure).

It didn't fail because someone in philly didn't want to put this programming nightmare on the radio, if failed because it was bad radio.

I dont doubt that it failed in part because it was "bad" radio, or the result of bad management, bad business model. technical difficulties, etc.

But to ignore the impact of ownership consolidation is to ignore a legitimate reason in addition to the above.

From a speech by an FCC Commissioner in 2003:
If Clear Channel (or any national media company) owns mulitple stations in a market and receive nearly 1/2 to 3/4 of the ad revenue in the market, doesnt that make access a little difficult for a new venture?

If Clear Channel (or any national media company) makes the programming decisions at the corporate level, doesnt that make access a little difficult for a new venture?

The FCC hid a more recent study on radio consolidation than the one referred to in the above remarks.

http://reclaimthemedia.org/legislati...comes_to_light

Do me a favor and scan your AM channels. This is the region in which the Conservative talk shows are, this is also where (I believe) where Air America is. There are VERY few AM channels in comparison with FM, it's not hard to get access to one of them. It's even easier with deregulation (less government interfereance), not harder. The only hard part is raising the cash for towers and expenses in which every station deals with. Fortunately for Air America, they are not the poor helpless, they have millions upon millions donated by George Soros and other contributers.

This is not David being held down in his fight against Goliath. This is people complaining that they can't sell ice to eskimos during the winter.

I actually agree with this statement. I am a liberal. I don't listen to Air America. It's never held any appeal to me. Personally, when I listen to the radio, I don't want to hear my own viewpoint coming back to me. I want to hear diverse opinions about diverse topics--not just politics.

Usually, though, I just listen to public radio or the college radio station. One of the most interesting things I've heard on NPR in the past few weeks was an interview with former Secretary of State James Baker on Fresh Air about his new book. Another one was an interview on NPR Weekend Edition with a Democratic political consultant and a Republican political consultant about the chances for the Democrats in the upcoming election. Interestingly enough, they agreed that the Dems have a good chance of winning a significant number of seats this fall. A non political topic I found interesting that they discussed on Talk of the Nation was cochlear implants. Even human interest topics have controversy sometimes.

Things like that interest me--not my political platform repeated back to me over and over.

Excellent point, Ms. Snowy. :)

The last I heard, the FCC regulates and licenses the AM spectrum. You cant just put up a tower and start broadcasting.

In recent years, the FCC has issues very few new licenses.

I may be wrong, but I believe the FCC is trying to reallocate the low end of the AM spectrum for emergency use by first responders (a recommendation of the 9/11 commission).

BTW, I was never a big fan of Air America myself, but I'm less of a fan of deregulation of the public airwaves to the benefit of a few national telecomm companies.

No where did I say that you can simply start broadcasting. The FCC regulates according to stations in certain areas which are within certain frequency (or in AM the Amplitude) ranges. With fewer channels being used in AM (due to less demand), aquiring a liscence for it would in turn be much easier. It's not as if they failed to get liscenses for stations around the country, it's simply that said stations did not get listeners.

They got California, New York, and pretty much all the liberal states and it failed there. If they went bankrupt because they could not access said areas this argument would hold water. It would be as if you offered free UT/A&M game coverage in Pittsburg but not being able to offer it in Texas. Instead the opportunities were there but the demand was not.

I dont think they acquired licences in NY, LA, SF, Wash, Philly, etc.....they offered their programming to existing station owners.

In many cases, they were limited to smaller stations with the weakest output because the largest stations in these (and most) markets are owned by the national (or regional) telcomm companies who already control the major ad revenue in the market with their existing national programming.

It makes for tough competition.

I agree the fact that they put out a lousy product made it even more doomed to fail, but they certainly werent playing on a level field with Clear Channel.

If Air America had less of a market share in their flagship station in NYC than the Caribbean talk/music station that it replaced, that doesn't say to me the problem had anything to do with regulations and everything to do with no one wanted to listen.

Perhaps the NYC station is like the one in DC that carries Air America (along with Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller). It has one of the weakest signals in the market. I can listen in my midtown condo, but I cant pick the station up in my downtown office unless I am working at night and my brother in the near suburbs cant hear it at all.

But now we're getting repetitive. You dont seem to think national ownership of multiple stations in a market is a problem or that it has a negative impact on revenue and programming.

I do....so we'll just have to leave it at that.

The problem I always suspected with air america was threefold:

1) [Snowy alluded to this] "liberal" in so far as the definition implies are interested in diversity of opinion. Conservatives, by definition, are interested in encapsulation of ideas. While single persons might differ from these broader defintions, they are both definitionally and anecdotally true in my experience. I find more people on my "side" within this matrix as willing to at least be entertained by the other side, and even to listen to it on occasion. and this far more than I find the broad category identifying all over the place but mostly as "independent" as willing to listen to "those liberals." but at least the "conservatives" are entertaining (point 3 coming up)

That is, while I personally know people from all stripes of political affiliation willing to listen to one another and discuss ideas, they in no way comprise what I would consider the base. Since we have no firm definition of a cohesive liberal, I have to hinge my description on the classical usage of the term. And the only reason I feel more comfortable with stuffing "conservatives" into a descriptive category as a cohesive unit is due to the fact that they themselves constructed that category. It was, after all, their intention to set up a cohesive unit that would engage with "the enemy" of the cohesive liberal category (which may or may not exist as cohesively as is argued) which leads me to point 2)

2) [and roachboy alluded to this] that the right-wing radio personas were constructed around a reactive paradigm. And this reactionary politics feel empowering and increasingly so when the group represented feels disempowered. but when the "liberals" felt disempowered, they fantasized that they could muster a counter-counter-argument that was appealing to their own group...

3) however, the basic problem with this is that the conservative positions as evinced in the major media, are highly hyperbolic, outright disinformative, and generally entertaining rather than informative.

we can see the opposite of this in the likes of linktv (which I suspect "conservatives" of at least the academic kind and information seeking kind) and Charlie Rose watching, and New York Times/ LA Times reading or numerous international reportings/BBC products are informative without the ludicrous infotainment of staged "debates"/shoutfests, bloviating, pontificating, and etc. that the right employs in their programming but is so damn interesting to watch in the car wreck/survivor/BigBrother-esqe programming era we all operate within.

While those informative programs continue to plug away, I doubt they will gain market share on any magnitude since the slice they aim for is limited--from both liberals and conservatives. Information seeking peoples in our society seem to be a smaller share of the population than ready-to-consume types. and when these other types find themselves ready to consume, they want it to be sensational, tantilizing, and generally the opposite of their shadow cubicle lives they find themselves locked-into during the 9-5 before primetime entertainment they can't wait to sit in front of.


But if I were to say anything in a nutshell, it's quite late/early at this point, it's that I never thought the market would be realized because the format was wrong--not necessarily the material. The same as the rightwing talk infotainment. I do not find the notion of ideas problematic so much as I grow tiresome of he faux-presentation of ideas. And so air america fantasized that if they could only get enough people to listen to them, by reproducing a format that is popular in average society, then the ideas would be heard. whereas, the entire program of commerce has been to meld populism with commerce (and this apparent contradiction has been managed oh so well so far and been realied by the likes of limbaugh who is more skilled in hegemony than I think so many people who might consider themselves democratic party adherents) and being as this is a mere means to an ends to garner more revenue, no moral flex must be accomplished. whereas for a liberal to listen to the same blather from their own side, constitutes a compromise of Liberal values--to sully information with entertainment of the vlugar kind.

I haven't met a well-reasoned conservative repeating Coulterism or Oreillyisms. I haven't met a well-reasoned leftists who would repeat Frankenisms. But I have met a whole slew of people in the middle who fantasize the the hannity, oreillys, and coulter are in line with those in power--when in fact I think the old school conservatives find them as repugnant as the old school liberals find vulgar liberalism on air america antithetical to what occurs on BBC or linktv.

:lol:

Yes that its, lies sell but the TRUTH of left, not so much.

:lol:

Whats ironic is that when lefty talkers like Franken get cornered by an untruth they retreat to the realm of 'its just comedy'.

What this all boils down to, as usual, is the left somehow assumes they fail because they are superior. What an odd concept but typical.

:lol:

The AA apologists and their supposedly "non interrested" ilk has made this thread pretty comedic. It never seems to occur to liberals that they're pushing a shit product that nobody wants.

I suppose it's more comfortable to suck each other off with bullshit polls and take refuge in moronic conspiracy theories than to pull their heads out of their asses and confront reality.

So, who here is looking forward to Al Gore's liberal cable TV channel? ;)

Why post in a thread that you obviously haven't read?

I was speaking in generalities, not specific people here.

why I even bother to respond is beyond me...but perhaps it's more interesting to me the irony of what I posted: that conservatives regularly engage in bullshitting to make a point...and that ustwo feels compelled to replicate that point even here directly under my post......

for the simple fact is that the next sentence he quotes from me is thus:

so strange that I find linktv and charlie rose the opposite of the o'reilly, hannity&combes, and ann coulter in format....

and that I end my points with this:
(and perhaps I should have qualified this to indicate I'm speaking of people IRL so as not to offend other tfp members)


And that all of "our" collective leftists posts, which all pretty much summarily dismiss air america's attempt as juvenile at best, somehow can't be made consumable to NCB. It pretty much becomes obvious to me at least that a number of people who simply can't respect other people for whatever reason and apparently lack real world social skills to the point of not being able to even carry a virual conversation, and so operate in non-reality social groups such as these.

Sorry, even over the internet speaking such things does not lend itself to very good discussions.

I ignored it when you posted this the first time, but this whole idea you are putting out is rediculous. According to your theory liberals want to discuss ideas and feel the desire to know the whole story, while conservatives simply want to hear back-and-forth bickering and refuse to listen to facts. For every Coulter or O'Riley (sp?) out there, there are pleny of liberals who spew the same amount of crap.

The fact is Air America failed, it failed because not enough people listened to it. Debate all you want about what conservatives listen to all you want, but that does not aid itself in this discussion. In reality it ranks on the same level as those who proclaim only trailer trash and rednecks voted for Bush.

Sorry smooth didn't have my coffee this morning and I only glanced at your post. I think its fundamentally flawed on many levels of course, but its deeper than my surface scan allowed for.

actually, seaver, it doesn't.

what smooth is talking about is a simple matter of respect at the interpersonal level....indications that folk on the right actually read what the rest of us post, a kind of minimal quid pro quo given the fact that "the left" in here does bother to read conservative posts.


second--the air america failure is more interesting than it is complex--at the simple level they didn't make enough money to cover their debts. this was apparently more an organizational problem from the outset than an advertising revenue problem generated by low listenership. but obviously low listenership didnt help.

and again for the record, i did not and do not listen to air america.
it does not interest me.
it is the mirror image of conservative radio, which also is not interesting at the level of content.

HOWEVER:
both are kinda interesting at the level of tactics.
because both are about trying to fashion and maintain what you could think of as a discursive space--they are adaptation machines that take the general political line of the moment and bend it around to encompass shifting information.
so listening to conservative radio--which at one point i did quite intensively (though i confess that i preferred the really whacked out conservative stuff like militia and/or christian identity programming you can hear still on shortwave, mostly because it was like watching a really bad horror film as opposed to watching a consistently mediocre film, which would be analogous to limbaugh--this despite the fact that limbaugh was much more important analytically) was interesting an an ongoing experiment in ideological adjustment.
a highly centralized type of ideological adjustment no less--within which it was required that reference be made to how indepedent minded everyone is. it was--and remains--kind of surreal.

you can listen to this stuff and think about it without bothering to try to figure out why individual conservatives listen--it almost doesn't matter why, simply because the relevant motivations were provided by the adjustment procedures themselves.
limbaugh would give you a good idea of what the assumed motives were. that he had a listenership indicated that some of these motives resonated somewhere.
but you can have complexity at the level of audience motives and real simplicity at the level of ideological claims without any contradiction.
it's kind of a routine feature of thinking about a mass media operation.

air america was set up on conservative ideological grounds, as a response that from the outset conceded the framing of its politics (liberal) as conservative radio/media outlined it and tried to "fight back" from within that framework.
to my mind, that is a big reason why it failed--the folk who got it up and running actually believed that conservative ideology was an accurate index for thinking about politics beyond its borders.
well, it isnt.
at one level the failure of air america proves that it isnt.

so what i think is that the failure of air america shows that conservative politics does not even provide an accurate description of the reality it is part of. "liberal" in conservativeland is a projection, a fantasy. "liberal" denotes a unified group in conservativeland, a discrete position. "liberal" is the reverse of conservative, which would mean that "liberals" are as centrally organized as conservatives are in ideological terms.

and that is nothing more than projection, and one way of seeing the failure of air america is as a confirmation of that.

i know this does not fit into the ultra-simplistic take that you would prefer to have of this, but frankly, it is not important to me that it does. in fact, i would obviously concede your point and would then argue that it is so obvious as to be thoroughly banal and from there i would ask you what makes you think that folk who oppose you politically are so stupid that they cannot see the obvious--particularly when you have post after post from them above that say air america is not interesting, i do not listen to it, it says nothing to or for me or anyone that i know.

and i would also ask you, seaver, why it is that you cannot seem to process what the actual arguments in the posts from "the left" in tfp land above really are about this.

Sometimes I wonder if people indulge in vulgarity because they think it spares them the effort of expressing themselves eloquently. Or maybe it's just the best they can do? I can't tell the difference.

That story is two years old. The channel has been on for a while.

Roachboy thank you for more eliquently making that statement. I disagree with your assessment (popular as it is) that conservatives are more closely centralized while liberals have too many diversions in priorities.

I've NEVER listened to Limbaugh/Coulter, and I've only seen one or two episodes of O'Riley (out of curiosity). I dont find their discussions interesting, and if I hear "Culture War" I'm going to slap someone. There are MANY people like me who are socially liberal while governmentally and monetarily conservative. For me ensuring prosperity and military strength ranks higher than environmentalism and gay rights. While I support gay rights to marriage, it does not rank as highly to me therefore takes a back seat.

Liberals proclaim the same thing for themselves, while painting conservatives with one big goosestepping brush (not in Nazi terms, but as marching completely in step).

I agree that management and business model of Air America was completely botched. I disagree, though, that it was is because liberals do not like the yelling as on many conservative shows. I simply hope that this will signal the end to the bickering "conversational" news.

seaver:

you can have a highly coordinated political apparatus on the one hand and a huge diversity of positions amongst the population that is addresses at the same time.

it is not like politics/information routed through politics represents the totality of what anyone thinks or is.

it seems that at its most successful, a highly coordinated political apparatus can manage to shape discourse in particular regions--they can shape the terms of debate and/or interpretation--and people can pick up that discourse as if it was a kind of algorithm and effectively just run it.
what an apparatus can do to increase the uniformity of usage--not attitudes about usage, but usage of these frameworks/algorithms---is to create a separate media environment that folk can choose to enter into and which can (if it works) provide a fairly complete, mobile description of the world.

the american right has set up a version of such a system over the past 20 years or so, but it remains relatively open-ended--its borders are porous and people can shift in and out of it pretty easily because the american right does not dominate the media they work in, they simply have carved out a space within them--and frankly, they are pikers when compared with what the old school communist parties managed to do back when they were viable. i am not a fan of the american right---but i haven't seen anything quite as bizarre from them as the international celebration of stalin's 70th birthday (in 1949).
now *that* merited the "what the fuck?" response...

i might be drifting off point here: what i am arguing here is that to say there is a fairly centralized media apparatus that the right has set up==at great expense and as a function of considerable labor (it is quite an organizational accomplishment, no matter what you think of it) is not to say that everyone who finds what that apparatus says or shows to be compelling thinks in the same way.

on the other hand, when you find yourself in debates in a space like tfp (or any messageboard) on political matters, it often seems like all you see of more conservative people is the algorithms. but that's more the form, the boards, than anything else i think.

you know, this is bullshit and I don't see any reason to be any more eloquent than that given you couldn't give me the simple respect of reading my post without projecting your own view of what liberals say/mean into what I actually wrote.

And no, roachboy, I'm not going to slough this off as format issues, because it's repetative and consistently pointed out enough that if it did matter, that is if these people we correspond with did care enough to actually discuss matters rationally, then they'd take the time--the same time we take to read their poorly worded and logically flawed arguments ad infinitum--to at least try and get the gist of what we type out. But they don't, pure and simple, instead preferring to mischaracterize much of what is laid out...that said, I don't spend my time here any longer in the same way as you so I can appreciate your attempt to mediate what you probably recognize with the pragmatic shift to just let shit lie and so write it off as function of the structure of internet discussion rather than some personal defecit ;)


That said, being as I've not been here in a while, I forgot one of the most important lessons I gleaned from this forum: a lot of readers here can't/won't handle more than short sentences.

so grade school it is, seaver:


I know intelligent conservatives
I know intelligent liberals
Neither enjoy the infotainment that passes for news from bill oreilly, hannity, or coulter shows.
Neither enjoy the infotainment that passes for news from franken-esqe sources.

Both seem to drink beers while ENJOYING Bill Mahrer or Daily Show-esqe poltical commentary.
Both seem to derive their NEWS from major newspapers, BBC, Weekly Standard, international sources, and etc.
Both like to watch and discuss TOGETHER merits of topics brought up in Charlie Rose-esqe interview formats, or even Chris Matthews types. Not so much so the Hannity/Colmbes or Oreilly type interview/shoutfests.

These people seem to comprise the minority of TV watchers.

The majority of TV watchers seem to me to be interested in ENTERTAINMENT.
These TV watchers consume the infotainment that is passed off as news, and these same people don't seem to have the time or inclination to get outside corroberation of what they see passed off as news.


/gradeschool mode


Now, if you want to conflate the notion that conservative handlers and participants on these show seem to enjoy shouting at one another and the viewers who enjoy that kind of shit are the same people voting for Bush--well, that's pretty much where I can just figure your analysis is batshit and you didn't pay enough attention to what I wrote.

Because the closest thing I guess I could be accused of writing toward that end was the notion that CORPORATE values trump truth values when it comes to mainstream entertainment. That the corporate domain is dominated by conservatives is no secret to me, maybe to you, but also that other conservatives leeched into the corprorate domain purely with the notion that they could turn the tide of the so-called culture war. And so they did and it appears are succeeding due to gaining popularity with people who were feeling disenfranchised. But maybe you fantasize that outsourcing jobs and fucking people's hardearned money off in economic schemes are dandy and popular positions. I happen to disagree and so I'm left thinking that the resulting political platform that melds populism with corporatism is at its core contradictory and strange.

Basically all I was saying was that corporate values allow subordinating truth to profit, whereas liberal values don't. It so happens that conservatives are in charge of huge chunks of corporate media right now, and the definition of conservatism is to retain power whereas the definition of classical liberalism is to deconsolidate power so perhaps that explains why these people are willing to engage in what I see are vulgar politics. The air america crew thought it best to emulate that, and I suggest that their audience thinks its no good in the same way that we thought the other side's was no good.

Given the growing illiteracy, obesity, and poverty issues in our modern society, I don't see why any of this would be particularly shocking to anyone.
That is, it seems to me that a growing segment of our population is content to forget their shitty days while consuming goods and ideas from something like a TV that they can control with an on/off button. And that's the extent of the conclusions I'd draw from that statistical data--nothing about their voting habits (other than to state that more often than not they DONT vote, rather than attaching them to any particular party or Bush as you put it), nothing about their intelligence (although their time seems at this point to be better spent than mine repeating myself to people in this thread), and certainly nothing about where these people live (except that I would venture the grandaddy of them all, Jerry Springer from whom all this shit seemed to sprout and was realized its popularity from, seemed to be rooted in "trailer trash" exploitation).

Ok, I read your post. I understand your post. I don't agree with said post or your aggressive and arrogant tones. Therefore I am stupid, family-ruining, money-grubbing, child who only takes up your precious time.

http://141.157.157.99/Gary/Troll.jpg

Hear me roar?

With all due respect, I have found the same in return. I have posted somewhat lengthy replies, and what I get is pretty much dismissal of what I had to say.

Two-way street, buddy. Climb down off of that horse.

smooth I'm glad I have your not so subtle arrogance to tell me what makes someone smart because they like the kind of things you do :thumbsup:

You are quite eloquent is really saying nothing at all, congratulations, you would fit in nicely at any liberal dinner party where you can lament the poor state of the average american who only wants entertainment and doesn’t understand the refined things in life.

I find Bill Myer dull, the BBC biased, and Chris Matthews a hack, and in the past have enjoyed Limbaugh who I have found to be very insightful.

Oh no, I must not be intelligent!

Liberal values? What would those be exactly? I’ve never seen liberal values in the parties that claim to represent Liberals, they seem to enjoy playing with the truth, so what are these ‘liberal values’?

Why are you using classic definitions that have no bearing on the current usage? By the classic definitions many of todays conservatives are liberals, and liberals are conservative. It bears no meaning to ‘liberal’ radio as those are not liberals who wish to deconsolidate power. Do you use this to confuse the issue or are you trying to equate todays ‘liberal’ with the classic idea of liberal?

Translated, liberals are not going to listen to liberal ‘shock jocks’ like the stupid conservatives do.

I don’t know if Frank Herbert took this from somewhere else or not, but one line from his works always stood out in my mind because it seems to be true. It seems very fitting for your postings.

"The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it's that patterns are repeated."

Edit: and if I may add the Daily-show isn't really high commedy, its liberal commedy. I think what you really wanted to say was that 'conservatives who like my liberal sources of entertainment and news are smart.'.

I wasn't going to respond to this thread anymore, but I ran a search on all posts of yours in politics since you joined. Now, unless you've been here under a different name, I'm trying to find where you've been participating in a thoughtful, polite, and constructive manner yet still being summarily dismissed by liberals or anyone else for that matter.

I am going to take the time to post every single one of your replies so people can judge for themselves if what I'm saying about conservatives on this board making things up to prove a point (which is what you just did to chastise my responses) and pretty much playing the victim when they called out on their shit (like the ludicrous assertion that I'm a trolll for pointing out that constructive participation on this board lacks in no small part due to unwillingness to engage with one anothers' posts, which would be the opposite of trolling).

Starting earliest first (ie, your first post in politics out of 27 total), here are your posts in their entirety:


-- http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/search.php?searchid=723022

Now, these are all of your posts and everyone curious can go to the link I provided to read them for one's self and make a decision.


That said, this is way off track and I apologize for that to people still interested in participating and other lurkers. BUT I saw it as necessary becaues the problem with trolls is that they drive away positive contributors and lurkers (who don't know the context within which arguments like this erupt). I would guess that if someone were reading this, he or she might be a bit baffled as to where I was coming from. And for that reader, I've been here for years...longer than my account reflects due to multiple crashes. I no longer post here frequently, and now you have some insight as to why that might be the case.

You mixed cause and effect.
I never wrote that someone is intelligent because of his or her entertainment/news sources, just that most TV watchers don't sit around the TV thinking about political affiliation or ideology. They just want to be entertained.

I think that smart people know the difference between entertainment and news.
Air america struck me as neither.

I'd like to go to one and I hope they're half the fun as the conservative dinner parties I've attended where we lamented the poor state of the average american who only wants entertainment and doesn't udnerstand the refined things in life (whatever those may be...I guess in this context substantive news is a refined thing in life...I don't feel ashamed for desiring it)

As stated, what you find interesting doesn't speak to me about your intelligence level.

I like your qualifier! :thumbsup:
I've never seen a party claiming to represent Liberals hold liberal values either ;)

Rather than speculate on what constitutes a monolithic value system, I'd have to say that one value corporate acculturated people possess is drive for profit. Seems straightforward there.
One value classical liberals have is positivism. I thought that was straightforward, too. But I guess I caught you off-guard with my notion that positivists would find people who play fast and loose with the truth to be counter-productive in a political domain.

And I hearkened to the classical term because a lot of people in academia (from both sides of the political spectrum) adhere or fashion they adhere to that standard.

But as I'm not a positivist, I can't speculate much more on their value system. I can only suspect that if they were to be true to the standard of finding fundamental Truth that shock jockeys stretching Truth for entertainment would turn them from listening to it as a serious news forum.

Well, I guess. But I'd think my position was more along the lines that intelligent people aren't going to derive their political opinions from shock jockeys whose sole purpose is to entertain.

I have no idea what stupid conservatives do in their spare time as I don't know any. Perhaps they bang out inane responses on internet forums.

If you find that interesting, you'd probably find Weber's notion of the Iron Cage and Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy interesting, as well.


I find it absotlutely fucking hilarious that as soon as I put something in paragraph form, that's where ustwo's comprehension level falls to abysmal levels. I mean, I didn't call you stupid, ustwo, but your responses are illustrating an uncanny (and by that I suspect intentional) obtuseness...

I'll break it apart for you:

Here's what I wrote:

So despite your best attempts to the contrary, everyone can see plain as the text of my own I'm quoting, that I'm not remarking on anyone's political affiliation or intelligence level based on the entertainment they consume.

And rather than risking a problematic parapraph...

I know smart people who watch and laugh at dumb shit...

but they don't take it as news.


I guess people watch and laugh at dumb shit because it takes their mind off the hard shit they have to deal with day in, day out.


If you can't get that point by now, then I don't really have to comment on your intelligence level, I just have to make sure I find out your real name before I have any dental work done in the Chicago area.

Wait, didn't Roger Ailes and Rupert "deh debil" Murdoch lose an average of $90 million a year for about the first 5 years before Fox News became profitable? And the Washington Times STILL isn't turning a profit, meaning that RReverand Moon is shoveling wads of cash?

The reason Air America is failing is that Al Franken isn't a billionare.

Sorry, Will, but I believe that the only reason that Air America didn't survive is that not enough people were willing to fork over the bucks to support it. I mean, aren't there enough celebs in Hollywood who are mega millionaires who could slip some bucks toward Air America to keep it viable? Why didn't they? Is it because they knew it was a lost cause?

The reason Air America went belly up wasn't because Al Franken wasn't a billionaire, but because he couldn't get enough of his friends to get on board.

There's enough money on the left - they just didn't want to support this outlet.

smooth, probably because there are <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/search.php?searchid=724552">27 posts</a>, many of them recent, where I mentioned Brent Bozell and/or his CnsNews.com and mrc.org .....

.....my suspicion was that xxsquirtxx was merely posting links that were mocking my points about the unreliability of sites that solely appeal to conservatives.

Please do not post lengthy diatribes that threaten my belief systems, with regard to the sincereity of xxsquirtxx. It is much less work...dismissing xxsquirtxx's "efforts" here as mocking humor, than it would be to take them seriously and respond to them.

I read an article today that AAR's biggest challenge was going head-to-head with the extremely loyal and long tenured NPR listeners. That makes marketing sense to me, in that AAR was certainly not going to draw conservative listeners, and needed to draw progressives from NPR to succeed.

NPR depends upon public donations for the most part, and AAR depends upon advertising revenue.

I am starting to give more credit to the poster that suggested that progressives look for more depth in political discussions, rather than the drama performances of the conservative party, or liberal wannabe's.

I belive that you're totally mistaken. Fox News and the Wash Times didn't survive because of celebrity donations, their corporate masters simply decided to pour money into them as an investment in control. Why would Goerge Cloony or Jessica Alba care about a liberal radio station? Answer? They wouldn't. It's not an investment for them at all. Their money goes into one of a few things: lifestyle, lifestyle, or lifestyle. Their ability to make money revolves around their ability to be bankable stars. I'm not sure where you get the idea that hollywood stars would fund a radiostation. What I was hinting at was that there are huge conservative pockets that fund conservative media, but there is no equilibrium at the liberal side of the spectrum. There is no liberal Murdoch pouring money into Olbermann or Stewart.

If Fox News would have been liberal, or if the conservatives didn't have the murdoch fortune, Fox News would have dies in a year or two, and Bush would have lost in 2004.