3/31/2005 10:58:00 PM|||Dave|||I just watched Left of the Dial, HBO’s documentary about Air America radio (AA). The airing of the documentary, timed for the first-year anniversary of AA’s airtime, is ironically also timed on the heels of successful elections in Iraq and the flowering of democracy in the middle east. Listening to AA shrieks from a year ago about how disaster in Iraq was all but assured, that it was all about oil, lies, etc., re-emphasizes just how insulated from world realities New York's liberal elite are.

Watching AA unfold as a corporate entity is a bit like watching the Keystone Cops, if the latter were comprised almost entirely of Brooklyn-based, NYC, neurotic, liberal, jewish comics. If you watch closely, you might get a glimmer of a gentile now and then amidst Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, Marc Maron, corporate heads and staffers. Janeane Garofalo (who, with a father named Carmine, I’m guessing is Italian) is all but of this stereotype in ethnicity only.

It stands to reason that if you put together a bunch of latte-sipping, bleeding hearts into an office building and ask them to form an efficiently operated business, chaos will ensue. Which is what happens as parties scramble to be ready for airtime.

Founding investor Evan Cohen comes off as a weasely, double-talking dirtbag, whose misleading statements and behavior brought AA that close to folding within its first few weeks. They had spent all their cash, made promises to investors they couldn't keep, and yet still had bills that had to be paid. Many staffers has yet to recieve their first paycheck.

At one point, AA’s health insurance gets cancelled because there has been no payment of the premium. When an AA executive tells staff this, one writer (Jim Earl) goes on a rant about insurance companies, implying it’s their fault AA employees now have no health insurance. Speaking volumes about the liberal mindset, this writer bellows “Who the f*ck are they?! They’re millionaires! How can they do this to us?! It’s thievery!”

Some other highlights of the documentary for me were:

Financially, AA is on life support (er, perhaps a bad analogy given liberals’ penchant for pulling the plug). It will last perhaps another year or two and will then fold. Why? Because AA is not offering anything new to the marketplace. Persons can turn to NPR on the radio; the NYT, The Washington Post, and hundreds of other city newspapers; and CBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC on cable to get liberal news and interpretation.

Liberals bemoan conservatives’ total dominance of talk radio but obviously do not understand why this is so. Until recently, conservatives had no other place to go to get conservative opinion and news analysis. The success of Rush Limbaugh was not manufactured in a few weeks by a group of investors, but was an organic process stemming back from Limbaugh’s days as a smaller-time radio voice in Sacramento CA.

That AA expects to waltz onto the scene with a slew of comics, most of whom have zero radio experience and have a typical comic’s depth of political understanding, and present a credible challenge to conservative radio is as quixotic a dream as they come. At their flagship station, WLIB in New York City, AA’s ratings are currently a 1.1 share of the audience, about what WLIB had for ratings when it was a niche, Caribbean radio station. Not exactly gangbusters for a network that in the past year received plenty of free advertising by an infatuated MSM with its fingers crossed.

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