Bye Bye Air American Pie

So is this left wing talk radio network going down the tubes for the final time, despite the valiant efforts of liberal politicians to keep them on a taxpayer-funded ventilator?

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

Can you say “catastrophic fail”? Can they be honest and say “despite the efforts of our crony friends in Congress we’re forced to bail“? Would someone please hang a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) sign on this botched effort?

The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.

Remember when Air America claimed it was going to destroy Rush Limbaugh? Unh huh, sure. Blogger Werewolf in Exile (who speaks of himself in the third person…don’t touch that) offers a cogent explanation for their current failure:

From its very inception, Air America struck him as an unviable business operation because it wasn’t founded to fulfill a legitimate market need.

Beyond all other things, business is only worth pursuing if there is demonstrable market demand for it on some level. Air America spat in face of common business sense and the marketplace and was founded because a few liberals, accustomed to their inherited print and television media monopolies, couldn’t figure out why they didn’t have a stronger radio format presence. First of all, the fact that these investors were blind to the publicly subsidized presence of NPR as the 800lb gorilla of liberal radio makes the fact that they got cleaned out and lost their money very amusing.

So how is Rush Limbaugh doing? Fox News? Are they seeking “bankruptcy protection” in this “very difficult economic environment”? Or does their program content fulfill a need?

Why hasn’t President Obama’s public ridicule of these two villains sent them reeling off to bankruptcy court?

Air America continues excusing its failure:
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Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success.

Great wording: “…but ultimately fell short of success.” What they mean is that their “painstaking search” was an exercise in futility because they don’t draw enough listeners. Human nature being what it is, even liberal investors won’t continue to throw good money after bad no matter how much they like the message. Air America’s ratings were in the toilet and mean old capitalism flushed them down the memory hole.

This is a good example of a bad business model with a negative mission statement, a recipe for failure. While the Left continues to berate the rest of us for their own mistakes, thus ending up in the Bankruptcy Court of Bad Ideas, life moves on without them.

Here you can find a whole gaggle of failed Lib Radio ideas. Scroll down the page to the subtitle: “Graveyard of left-wing radio failures”, and be sure to check out the related posts on the sidebar. Good ol’ Barney Frank can always be found when there is something shady going on.

Bye, y’all. Drive your Chevy to the levee and just keep going.


[Try googling either of these search strings: Obama hates Fox News or Obama hates Rush Limbaugh. When I did this, my search led not to what I asked for but to stories about how Fox hates Obama and Rush Limbaugh was targeting Obama. On the former search string, two hits actually supplied what I put in, the rest were about Fox’s racism, etc. These were just first page results, however. Perhaps if I’d drilled down to second and third pages they would’ve targeted what I asked for?

Can anyone tell me how to build a search string that actually supplies the information requested?]