Monday, November 13, 2006

Liberal Talk Radio Continues to Fail


Over at The Radio Equalizer, Brian Maloney notes a couple more stations abandoning Air America due to paltry ratings.

Already, left-wing activists are crying foul and cooking up particularly kooky conspiracy theories to explain away the bad news.

Making the moves particularly hard to swallow for so-called "progressives" is the fact that both markets are considered to be very liberal, with Madison about as far to the left as a city can be.

If the format isn't viable in these places, then where can it work?

Some in the Wisconsin capital city are pointing to recent ratings gains scored by WXXM-FM, but one can imagine the station's owners expected it to fare far better than eleventh place in such a hotbed of liberalism.


This comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody.

Liberal talk radio fails for a myriad of reasons. The media is already saturated by the left, their talent base is pretty weak, and they simply are not entertaining.

The Left will never quite grasp why conservative talk radio succeeds: it's entertaining, informative and funny.

Air America will continue to pour money into the sinking franchise, but it never will challenge the dominant names in the medium. The Democrats may manage to win some elections now and then, but they will never win the battle of the radio airwaves.

4 comments:

Joey_jojo_jr said...

is Air America, or whatever it's called, even on in the NY area? It's so far below the radar I have no idea.

Urban Infidel said...

A couple of years ago I listened to Air America once for about 3 minutes. Sounded like a bunch of amateurs with no plan.

Kinda like the DNC, eh?

lowandslow said...

If they couldn't find an audience when the Republicans held the congress it is only going to get worse with the Dems in charge.

Aussiemagpie said...

G'day JWF

Just to let you know it's much the same here in Sydney

One station always wins - accused of inciting the Cronulla riots, accused of racism etc but they're No 1 (2GB which I listen to)

One bloke Alan Jones always wins by a huge margin and most of the other announcers win their timeslots too

Alan Jones is hated because he's rich, he is friends with the PM and he's gay and always gets the most audience numbers - over and over again - for 20 years!

And as you know only lefties are allowed to be gay so they hate him even more

Meanwhile the taxpayer funded ABC supports the left and never wins in the ratings - if they were privately owned they would bite the dust I reckon like Air America