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Thursday, December 01, 2005

Hopefully I won't have to take this one down
Posted by Jill | 12:35 PM

Jonathan "Clutch" Larsen, who was one of the original creators of Morning Sedition, has a blog (which is the latest addition to our blogroll), and gives us the inside scoop into the mind of Danny Goldberg and why the show has been cancelled.

If you're a Seditionista, or if you are just wondering what the fuss is about, go read Larsen's blog entry in its entirety. Here's just a snippet:

Maron is pretty damn close to a national treasure. His level of emotional intelligence is off the charts and he applies it to issues of politics and society in ways that make his work the comedic equivalent of "Freakonomics" or "Tipping Point," his synthesis of insights (his own and others) into how people work individually and societally is just about that revolutionary.

And it's piss-your-pants funny. The New Haven Advocate came pretty close, I think, to nailing what made Sedition good and valuable to AAR, and in general. When Goldberg arrived at Air America, everyone -- including him -- acknowledged that Morning Sedition had been neglected by the network.

[snip]

Sedition had a couple strikes against it -- it started off with a mismatched team and only really took off once one of the three initial hosts left the program. Also, Maron had never done radio before and Riley had only done local radio. Maron was the lead host and needed a few months to find his groove -- which he did in preternaturally quick time.

The biggest strike against us, though, was that we were operating in the most competitive daypart -- morning drive. And no one knew we existed. Despite that, however, and despite Goldberg's public rationales, Sedition usually did relatively okay in the ratings. When it stumbled, there was usually some clear reason for it or it was part of a larger pattern (affecting AAR or talk-radio overall). So, we needed to let people know our show existed. And this wasn't another case of a show feeling neglected and making excuses; all the executives agreed, and said, in essence, that it wasn't possible to put a show on in the nation's number-one market, in the most competitive daypart and expect it to succeed without spending a single dollar to let people know it existed. To his credit, Goldberg brought in people to remedy that. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my ken, the additional staff didn't yield any additional attention for or promotion of the show. We were, in fact, told to wait. First a new logo had to be developed. Then an overall network-marketing plan would have to be developed. Only then, finally, would the network be able to market Morning Sedition properly. If that was true, why cancel the show before allowing the still-unseen marketing to debut? If it wasn't true, why should we believe what we're being told now?

Goldberg's claim that he's dividing the morning-drive slot into two shows of radically different sensibilities rather than retain a sharp, critically acclaimed comedian at a time when fans of Howard Stern (some of whom had already discovered us and joined the ranks of our listeners) would be looking at alternatives, is both laughable and transparently false. The reality is he dislikes Air America's comedic elements.


Remember when you first started hearing that Shel and Anita Drobny were working on a progressive alternative to conservative talk radio, and everyone said it wouldn't work, because liberals have no sense of humor and liberal talk radio is invariably as dull as dishwater?

The Morning Sedition crew proved that this need not be the case. I don't include Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo in that category, because Franken has been just awful without a straight foil, and Garofalo isn't funny at all on the air; she just screams and rants -- and sounds less intelligent than she is.

All you have to do to see the Goldberg imprimatur on Air America radio is listen to WLIB in New York on a weekend these days. The soon-to-be-gone Morning Sedition is repeated for only an hour. Then you get an almost uniterrupted snoozefest including the horrifyingly chickish and unlistenable Satellite Sisters, The Sporting Blues, Eco Talk, Politically Direct with David Bender, and Ring of Fire -- all well-intentioned, informative programs; all of them dull as dishwater, just as the wingnuts predicted.

Air America could have been the Daily Show of the radio airwaves, and for a while, it was. Now, because of a CEO who thinks that people will switch from NPR and sit through the ghastly ads that AAR runs, to listen to Mark Riley and Rachel Maddow -- who are fine, professional broadcasters -- something fresh and new has become just another droning voice of the mushy middle. It isn't just right-wing executives who can run a company into the ground.
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