One of the ways I know I'm an old fart is that I still listen to terrestrial radio. I don't listen much, usually only when I'm driving to or from work. On the way TO work, I often find myself listening to Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton's morning sports talk on WFAN. I don't know why I do this. It isn't that I'm such a sports junkie, and after Carton's ignominious firing from his previous radio show following unconscionable remarks he made about former New Jersey Acting Governor Richard Codey's wife's postpartum depression, no self-respecting feminist should ever listen to this man again. And yet I do, and I'm not the only one (though I think this woman's Carton fetish is a little bit weird -- the man may be an entertaining asshole, but he's still an asshole).

It's probably because in the morning, what you need is a zoo. I'm really not up to learning the minutiae about what's going on in Turkey, and the NPR morning crew isn't exactly designed to get you going when you're on the road at 6:15 AM in the dark on the way to a 7:00 teleconference. It's like drinking chamomile tea when what you really need is dark roast with an extra shot of espresso. And Carton is that extra dose. Sometimes I listen to Mark Riley on WWRL, the last voice of progressive talk radio in New York, but frankly, I'm really not that interested in the New York City school bus drivers' strike, and Riley's show is more often than not about topics of interest primarily to New York city residents. So it's to WFAN I turn, for Carton shrieking about the Jets, or Al Dukes' off-key songs, or Boomer Esiason trying to inject some gravitas into a show that isn't about gravitas at all. And all of this is punctuated by commercials for ex-NFL-er Brad Benson's Hyundai dealership, which are so dumbassedly funny that they almost make me want to shlep down there to buy an Accent. It's sort of like listening to The Odd Couple with crazy sports callers. Clearly the formula works, because "Boomer and Carton" is the #1 show among men in the age group 25-54.

How the mighty (meaning me) have fallen.

The "Felix Unger and Oscar Madison" dynamic just plain works on morning talk radio. There was a time when I could turn on the radio at 6 AM and listen to three hours of smart comedy, incisive interviews, and just plain lunacy. That time lasted from April 1, 2004 until December 2005, when the then-current suits at Air America Radio pulled Morning Sedition off the air. I've spilled plenty of keystrokes here about Morning Sedition, and if you'd like to read them, just type "Morning Sedition" into the search box in the left-side menubar and you'll find plenty of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go here and start listening. This brilliant radio show, misunderstood and mismanaged by the people who were supposed to bring progressive talk radio into the mainstream, has just an early canary in the coal mine for what has transpired since then.

Peter B. Collins, a long-standing prog-talk guy, laments the devolution of progressive talk radio at Truth-Out:

Despite the sharp decline in the progressive radio business, we all hoped that the end of the Bush presidency and the 2008 elections would produce new growth in lib talk. With the protracted primary battle between Obama and Clinton, and Obama's inspiring campaign against McCain, we expected to see a spike in ratings and affiliates and hoped the Obama campaign and other Democrats would spend money to reach our listeners, their voters. There was no measurable audience growth and only a precious few campaign dollars were spent on our programs and our affiliate stations.

In August of 2008, all of the progressive shows converged on the Obama coronation in Denver, but we were ignored by the Obama campaign. We were assigned a radio row in the basement of the convention hall, under an escalator. All the delegates and dignitaries whisked past us on the escalator, and when they reached the main floor, the first radio booth they saw was FOX News. Team Obama mostly declined our requests for interviews and we ended up mostly talking with Team Hillary. Schultz was so pissed that he pulled out after the second day and returned to his base in Fargo.

By March, 2009, I had to make the difficult choice to end my syndicated show. There was no path to profitability and the Bush recession didn't help. Indeed, it lowered the tide for all radio boats, and it also sharply cut the revenues to my personal business that had helped subsidize my radio show. After several years of financial losses, I signed off and launched my net-only podcast in June 2009 which now attracts more listeners than I was reaching with ten AM affiliates. The roster of surviving liberal and progressive talk radio shows is facing a similar set of dynamics, even more dire. With Monterey and Eureka as the only remaining full-time progressive outlets on the West Coast, progressive talk does not have national distribution and can't compete for most national ad buys. A year ago, Clear Channel renamed the San Francisco station KNEW and bumped Stephanie Miller in favor of Glenn Beck, Thom Hartmann in favor of money-talker Dave Ramsey. At about the same time, the company dropped Hartmann in Los Angeles for a local show that was intended to defuse community protests of racist comments by "John and Ken" on co-owned KFI.

Ratings range from flat to flat-lined: in 2012, Clear Channel-owned KPOJ in Portland and CBS-owned KPTK in Seattle showed audience numbers so low that they were not listed by Arbitron; Clear Channel's WDTW in Detroit barely showed a pulse at .1 percent, and the once-powerhouse, now-struggling media conglomerate recently agreed to donate WDTW to a local community group. In his second attempt at WVKO in Columbus, Ohio, Gary Richards was forced to sign off just before Christmas 2012. Progressive talker Jeff Santos waged a valiant four-year struggle in Boston, and I was a consultant in his effort last year to add eight new markets in battleground states; we had no choice but to lease air time, and once again the Democrats who had the most to gain failed to support the effort. The only exception I've found is Madison, Wisconsin, market #100, where Clear Channel's WXXM-FM, "The Mic" jumped a full share point to a respectable 3.3 this fall. Back in 2006, a local group led by activist Aldous Tyler rallied support, and a planned format change was halted. Similar efforts are underway in Seattle and in Portland, where longtime KPOJ morning host Carl Wolfson has just launched a live webstream show weekday mornings 7-9 AM Pacific. It's worth noting that Arbitron has switched to a "people meter" system that has produced lower numbers for talk programming in general and progressive talk in particular. Al Franken is in the Senate, Ed Schultz appears to be doing well on MSNBC, Thom Hartmann has a nightly TV show on the RT network, Bill Press and Stephanie Miller are simulcast on Current TV (which has just been sold to Al Jazeera). But their radio shows face tough sledding and possible elimination in 2013. Dial Global, the company that syndicates these programs (along with NFL football and a variety of music formats), is in deep financial trouble, and its stock was recently voluntarily delisted from the NASDAQ when the share price dropped below $1. Ironically, the company blames the progressive-driven advertiser boycott in 2012 aimed at Rush Limbaugh for his misogynist comments about attorney and birth-control advocate Sandra Fluke, which appears to have caused many national advertisers to stop advertising on all talk radio programs - both right and left - to avoid controversy.

Some observers see the long arm of Mitt Romney's Bain Capital (which took Clear Channel private in 2008) and other right-wing forces as the causes of lib talk's travails. While it's true that progressive programs were consigned to weaker stations in many markets - often programmed by conservatives who didn't believe in the product - and never got the kind of advertising support needed to develop the brand properly, it's clear that the progressive community and its political leaders have simply not supported the format in the same way that the right has. This includes listeners, (who seem to prefer the measured tone of NPR to the rough and tumble of AM talk, in markets where they are able to hear both) advertisers owned by progressives, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Some labor unions have advertised on progressive shows, but their financial support is no match for the profits of conservative stations and programs. As someone who took substantial personal risk in syndication and station ownership, I can tell you that progressive talk has not panned out as a viable business. Clinton's 1996 deregulation of broadcasting and the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 didn't help. I do think the FCC should require some balance of viewpoints on the stations it regulates, through the license renewal process, but there is simply no interest on the part of Obama and his appointees in regulatory reform - even as the president is pilloried by right-wing radio on a daily basis. Air America's parade of management blunders produced the downward spiral that brought us to this tipping point for progressive talk radio, and most station owners, rightly or wrongly, see that failure as an indication that audiences won't support liberal talk radio.

In radio, we always like to end on an upbeat note. Here's the best I can muster: if you want to help keep the surviving progressive talk shows alive, subscribe to the podcasts of your favorite progressive hosts - it's a critical stream of revenue as these programs fight for survival.

So the question is: Is this a BAD thing? Or is it just a natural evolution of communications media? Right-wing talk radio and even sports talk radio thrive because its audience skews old -- the people for whom terrestrial radio is omnipresent. For younger generations, AM radio isn't even on their radar.

A few years ago, when Air America was still viable and still had a reasonably strong signal, I went to a meeting at the campaign headquarters of Dennis Shulman, a blind rabbi who had embarked on a quixotic quest to unseat our wingnut Congressman, E. Scott Garrett. Shulman had a compelling personal story, and I suggested to the campaign manager that they try to get him on some Air America shows. The campaign manager, a kid in his 20s, had no idea what I was talking about.

Thom Hartmann is still out there, Randi Rhodes is still fighting the good fight, albeit on ever-fewer stations, Stephanie Miller is getting harder to find (and will be even harder to find after Current TV leaves the airwaves) and Ed Schultz somehow manages to do three hours of radio every day and an hour of television. But when I think of the days when I could turn on WLIB and listen to Morning Sedition, followed by Unfiltered (which gave birth to the phenomenon that is Rachel Maddow), followed by The O'Franken Factor, then Randi Rhodes, then The Majority Report, and never once change the station, it reminds me just how much has disappeared.

In the short run, I suppose the wingnuts can crow about how they once again "own the airwaves." But the airwaves that don't have video attached to them have become increasingly less important. Yes, the call-in format is dying on the progressive side, but once you get past Morning Schmoe, MSNBC boasts a pretty impressive prog-news lineup. Taken in conjunction with the phenomenal success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, it becomes clear that progressive media isn't dying, it's just changing form. Sam Seder is still out there with The Majority Report. Cenk Uygur has been from podcasting to terrestrial radio to podcasting to TV and back to podcasting. We Act Radio has a full lineup and is available on TuneIn Radio. And with Blog Talk Radio, anyone who has the time can create a podcast (even my cousin Dan).

Just as self-publishing is making the publication of reading materials no longer the province of rich publishing houses, so is podcasting making terrestrial radio obsolete. Until we have ubiquitous wifi, podcasting and internet radio doesn't have the "turn it on and it's there" immediacy of terrestrial radio. But in the not-too-distant future, it won't matter.

Labels: Air America, Cenk Uygur, Morning Sedition, podcasts, Randi Rhodes, Sam Seder, talk radio

The Current TV lineup is starting to take shape, with another MSNBC alum joining up:

Cenk Uygur, the television and Web show host who left MSNBC in a messy public separation this summer, is joining MSNBC’s fledgling competitor, Current TV.

Starting sometime in the fourth quarter of the year, Mr. Uygur will host a show called “The Young Turks” at 7 p.m., serving as the lead-in for “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” the 8 p.m. liberal newscast that had its premiere on Current three months ago.

The move is the first by Current since it hired David Bohrman, a prominent former CNN executive, as the new head of programming and production last month. Current has been seeking like-minded programs to surround Mr. Olbermann’s in an effort to create a rival to the stable of liberal shows on the cable news channel MSNBC.

MSNBC’s 7 p.m. time slot is currently filled by replays of “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” an hour of political talk that is first shown at 5 p.m. MSNBC had no comment about Mr. Uygur’s hiring.

Is it my imagination, or has Rachel Maddow been even more awesomely geeky than usual recently? I suppose being a network's major star, combined with having a place to go if they lose their nerve and decide once again that Alan Keyes Is Making Sense is a great idea to bring in those oh-so-desirable teabagger viewers, gives one a great sense of freedom. And for the viewers, it gives us an even larger assortment of quality news/opinion programming. This is all good news in the age of the DVR.

So....with one web program moving to Current, how about this one being next?

Labels: Cenk Uygur, Current TV, MSNBC, progressive media

If it seems like I haven't written much lately, it's not your imagination. Lately I just don't have it in me. There are a number of reasons for this. Part of it is the ridiculous hours I'm working, which has been seven days a week, 65-80 hours over those seven days. Some of it is outrage fatigue. After all, there's only so much internal resources that one has at the ripe old age of 55, and I have to keep my priorities straight in the age of American Diminishment. Since it looks like the guy we put into the White House is getting ready to fulfull the Republican dream of pulling the rug out from under the Social Security system into which I've been paying for thirty-eight years, if working seven days a week is what I have to do in order to have a roof over my head and some mac and cheese on the table in my old age, well, that's what I do. But some days I have to conserve my internal resources for work, and I don't have the luxury of expending it on the State of the World.

As Ian Holm says as Bilbo Baggins in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, "I feel thin, sort of stretched... like butter spread over too much bread." Well, I can't remember the last time I felt thin, but you get what I mean. The way it's manifested over the last couple of weeks is a kind of hair-trigger emotionality.

It really started with the Tucson shootings. For two weeks I simply could not look at a photograph of Christina Taylor-Green, or even THINK about her, without bursting into tears. Every step that Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat who had I known more about her, might have been the focus of one of my anti-DINO rants, makes towards recovery, brings me a kind of joy that only comes from a small beacon of light shining on an otherwise dark, dark world.

Here in the New York area, it's Jets Fever, as the boisterous, goofy, brash, perhaps overachieving New York Jets prepare to take on Ben "Sexual Assault" Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, and the rest of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship game tomorrow. For those who hate the Jets, Rex Ryan is an ass, Mark Sanchez is a pretty boy hype machine who doesn't have the goods, and the assortment of scrap heap cast-offs who have found new life with this team are a bunch of scrubs. But for those of us who have been captivated by this team, this asshole of a coach, for whom everyone in the NFL seems to want to play because he seems to galvanize a team the way no "gentleman coach" can, there's something endearing about this bunch of cast-offs like Santonio Holmes and LaDainian Tomlinson and Jason Taylor, this Byronesque quarterback who befriends dying children and loves musical theatre. I won't cry into my beer if the Jets lose tomorrow (or maybe I will, who knows?) because it's been a good long run for them. But a win would again send me off into a transcendent joy that far outweighs any degree of football fandom I might have.

Yesterday I was reading Roger Ebert describing his new chin prosthesis, which he will wear in his segment on a new At the Movies (which premiered last night on PBS). Ebert is such an American institution, and his very public journey with a disfiguring salivary gland cancer has been such a moving one, that simply having him back in the balcony (if in a limited capacity) is a cause for celebration. Again -- something far more significant to Ebert than to those who don't know him, but a small beam of light just the same. (Note: You'll be able to stream the show soon here.)

And then last night we lost Countdown, and it's all part of the same thing. I didn't know Christina-Taylor Green. I don't know Gabrielle Giffords, or Roger Ebert, or Keith Olbermann. And unlike people like, say, Rich Lowry, I do know the difference between actual people and images on a TV screen. But whatever happened to push Keith Olbermann off the air (and despite some rumblings that he just quit, whenever I hear "mutual agreement", you know it always means "asked him to resign"); whether it was outrage fatigue, grief over losing his father last year, an inability to conceive of how to keep the show sharp while "dialing it back a notch", the fact is that many of us invited this man into our living rooms every night for eight years. If it's eight o'clock, it's Olbermann. And now it isn't.

It isn't that we LIKED him, not in the way we LIKE, say, Rachel Maddow. Keith Olbermann never came across as someone you'd actually want to know. Those of us who watched every night knew that he was a bombastic, egotistical ass. But he was OUR bombastic, egotistical ass, and we loved him warts and all. When he was suspended for making the same kind of political contributions that everyone at Fox does (and even Joe Scarborough at MSNBC does), over 250,000 viewers signed a petition for reinstatement. We recognized his faults, but he wasn't our friend. He was the guy we turned to for a voice of sanity in a world full of climate change deniers and Christofascist zombies and ignoramuses who regard facts as just other opinions. At first it was just Keith Olbermann, but he's also the guy who gave us Rachel Maddow in prime time -- a gift for which we can never hope to repay him. And if you saw Rachel refuse to capitulate to the inevitable and ubiquitous filibustering of Club for Growth shill Stephen Moore on Real Time last night you too will be grateful to Olbermann for giving her a well-deserved break:

Olbermann was important to us, but despite his good work in setting up free health care clinics and making it possible for Americans to donate to help provide transplants to Arizona residents doomed by Jan Brewer's REAL death panel, he kept us at a distance. Rachel is more like the big sister of the narrator in a Carson McCullers story -- the happy, athletic, popular big sister who is always there for you when your parents don't understand you because you're nerdy, bookish, and anxious. Her success has allowed her to be filmed doing segments and promos without full makeup, in the blue nerd glasses and the Converse All-Stars. And the fact that she exudes passion and unabashed liberalism, and then puts on Kent Jones in a funny costume, may help insulate her somewhat from the kind of controversy that has always shadowed Olbermann.

But as much as we adore Rachel, it's Keith Olbermann who has been the pioneer, the voice cursing the darkness when no one else could have. Without Keith Olbermann, there's no Rachel Maddow. There's no Ed Show. There's no Sam Seder in front of the cameras in prime time. There's no Cenk Uygur forcing Republican former Congressman Bob McEwen to admit that there's no money in the Social Security trust fund because they stole it and we have to just suck it up. Without Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell (who is still too "centrist" for my taste) is still an occasional third banana on Morning Schmoe. Without Keith Olbermann, the only voices of opinion journalism on the medium in which most people still get their news are the reality-challenged hatemeisters on Fox News.

Who knows...perhaps with the "friendlier faces of liberalism" that now constitute the MSNBC lineup (because Cenk Uygur's seat-warming at 6 PM is still only filler), the "both sides do it" claim will be mitigated. But for those of us who invited Keith Olbermann into our homes at 8 PM every weeknight for eight years, there's a big empty chair today. And just another weepy-trigger for an exhausted blogger.

More on Olbermann:

Greg Sargent
Steve Benen
Nicole Belle, focusing on the crowing of the right.
Brad Friedman
John Aravosis
Justin Rosario
Steve Kornacki
Some speculation about what's next (I'm not buying it.)
Adrastos
Richard Bey (with some inside dirt)

Labels: America Gone Mad, Big Blue Smurf Blogging, Cenk Uygur, Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Real Time with Bill Maher, Roger Ebert, Sam Seder

I've always found Cenk Uygur to be a bit of a blowhard. It's one thing for me to set up a blog because I need to blow off steam, and rant and rave in print. It's quite another to do it as a broadcaster. I'm not one for yelling on radio, which is one reason I'm not crazy about Ed Schultz. It tends to become a question of who yells the loudest, and whoever loses their head loses the argument. I do enough yelling myself, thank you very much. And talking about defense spending only leaves the door open for Republicans to say that you oppose national security and don't respect our troops.

But when it comes to the Republican (and yes, the White House) plans to gut Social Security, only yelling is going to get through to people.




It's really too bad that Cenk loses it here, because he really gets to the crux of what has happened to the American people: We paid into Social Security assuming the good faith of the government to pay Social Security benefits, and now we're being told, "Sorry...we spent it all and we can't pay it back. Tough shit. You fucked up...you trusted us."

I wouldn't have gone right to defense spending, not without concrete examples such as the $9 billion that went completely missing in Iraq and no one in our government -- not one Republican, not one Democrat, certainly not the Bush Administration -- seemed to care. Because without concrete examples of the waste and corruption that pervades our military contracting, you leave the door open to the Republican reptilian brain pokes of "You want to leave us vulnerable" and "You don't support our troops." There's a good way to demolish those arguments too, but you can't do it while you're yelling. And Cenk really blew it here. After all, these stories may be just breaking now, but there's plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting.

But the fact that he's used to a Webcast, where he can do pretty much whatever he wants and may not be ready for prime time doesn't change the very valid and important point that he made: that when the government borrows from China, it's expected to pay it back. But when it borrows from its own people, there's no obligation.

The answer is not to privatize Social Security. After all, the guys into whose hands they want to deliver it are the very same ones who developed the practices that ran the country into the ground, then said they needed a government bailout, and are now spending the money on bonuses...and they say THEY can't pay it back either. As everyone who has an IRA or 401(k) knows, not only are returns not guaranteed, but hanging onto principal is not guaranteed. Unless watched like a hawk, these guys will churn an investment account, charging commissions and fees every step of the way, buying and selling things that most of us don't understand, until you find that not only has your account not made a dime in ten years, but that you have less than you had before. And this is what they want to do with Social Security?

The whole "We can't pay it back" argument demonstrates the contempt that our government, ever since Ronald Reagan started raiding Social Security to pay for tax cuts, has for its own people. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 raised the withholding taxes paid by employees and employers, for the express purpose of funding baby boomer retirement. WE paid that increased tax, even as we knew that they were just going to steal it. And steal it they did.

In 2000, Al Gore talked about a "lockbox." The only thing that made the concept ridiculous was that the money was already gone, and had been for years. But the idea that the Social Security surplus should sit there and be used for the purpose for which it was collected received nothing but laughs from the media and from Republicans, who knew that whatever was in there could very easily be distributed to Bush family cronies and the rest of the 1% who already have almost half the wealth in this country. If the lockbox idea wasn't already dead when Sandra Day O'Connor handed the presidency to George W. Bush on December 12, 2000, it was dead the evening of September 11, 2001. Because that night, in the face of a tragedy, that cokehead Larry Kudlow, who to that network's eternal shame, has a show on MSNBC's sister station, CNBC, was on TV grinning from ear to ear and crowing happily that this meant an end to any and all talk of a Social Security lockbox.

ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE to address ANY long-term problems with Social Security funding (which don't kick in for another thirty years under the WORST of circumstances), is to lift the cap. Or RAISE the cap. Right now, Social Security is only withheld on the first $106,000 of income. Raise it to even $250,000 and the problem is solved. But of course then those who already have more money than they can spend in twelve lifetimes might have to pay a bit more for the benefits of being able to live and be rich in America. And we can't have that, now, can we.

The other day I was talking to a colleague who had just returned from a month visiting her parents in China. She told me how much corruption there is in China. She said that there are the very rich and the very poor, and the government is entirely in the pocket of the very rich. She said the deterioration has largely occurred in the last ten years. It is in those ten years that China has been accelerating its march from communism to socialism and now towards capitalism. She said capitalism has NOT been good for her country outside of the very rich. Newsweek reported in June that China has a growing white-collar underclass of educated young people who can't find jobs. We like to crow in this country that as China has moved away from Marxism, it looks more like us. If life was better in China under even the last vestiges of Maoism than it does now in a more American-looking capitalist system, what does that say for that system?

We're seeing it in the faces of people like Congressman McEwen and would-be Senators Joe Miller and Sharron Angle -- a society in which the rich live in armed fortresses to protect themselves from an increasingly large, increasingly poor, increasingly desperate rabble.

I'm going to post this video from George Carlin as often as it takes and as long as I can find it on YouTube without it being taken down:

Labels: Cenk Uygur, China, Greedy Republican Bastards, social Darwinism, Social Security

Well, well, well...look who was subbing on the Ed Schultz show:

Now, I've never been a big Young Turks fan, and the extent of my familiarity with Cenk Uygur was him strutting around Yearly Kos 2007 with the other Big Boiz of Blogging. But I have to admit to feeling thrilled at seeing another veteran of progressive talk radio get some TeeVee exposure. More importantly, Cenk takes on that sleazy weasel Chris Van Hollen after NAILING the Social Security lie. As Gaius Publius notes, Van Hollen talks about opposing benefit cuts, but he doesn't say a thing about raising the age to the ridiculous levels adovcated by John Boehner. At a time when people over 50 constitute a large proportion of the "99-ers", deemed unhirable because of myths about our inability to learn and our health care expenses, I have to wonder at what jobs these corporate whores and bankster fellators expect us to work.

Good on Cenk here. More like this, please.

Labels: Cenk Uygur, progressive media, social Darwinism, Social Security