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-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Well, that didn't take long
Posted by Jill | 6:46 PM
As the indispensable Liberal Talk Radio blog (which you should read instead of that wingnut Maloney if you are interested in such things; after all, how can you trust someone who defends a man who wants the economy to collapse because he thinks that will make people vote Republican?) is reporting, Sheldon and Anita Drobny's second experiment in progressive talk radio, NovaM, is no more. And if you go to the network's web site, you'll see that already there's a new banner for "On Second Thought: Talk Radio for Independent Minds" and a message from "Chief Technical Officer" Ben Burch, which makes him sound a bit like one of the guys in red shirts from Star Trek.

From what I can gather, after searching through various and sundry screeds (it seems there are a lot of people who don't like this guy), Ben Burch runs the White Rose Society, which archives progressive radio shows and he seems to have had some kind of volunteer connection to NovaM. What this means for subscribers, I have no idea, but I hope they aren't planning to automatically renew memberships until we know exactly what the product is going to be.

The full update and straight poop about the Randi Rhodes/NovaM situation is here.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like Mike Newcomb, who started out as CEO of NovaM and apparently left after a falling out with the Drobnys, has come back to take over the scraps. The entire lineup now consists of Newcomb, Nancy Skinner, who was subbing for Randi Rhodes, and Mike Malloy. So unless they were to do something like bring Maron and Seder into the fold, means I won't be renewing my subscription.

At one time I would have been begging for an upstart broadcasting outfit to hire these two guys, but they seem to be doing fine right where they are. Sam is in a fight-to-the-death battle with Cenk Uygur, now also "banished" to the Web, lobbying for the 10 PM MSNBC slot (and I can think of worse things than for the two of them to work together, with Maron as roving correspondent), but Break Room Live is starting to get its sea legs, and is even getting some press attention:
Fairly Aggressive Jews
Radio’s next great duo isn’t on the radio at all

[snip]

Along with Maron and Seder, the film’s cast reads like a who’s who of alternative comedy, including Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo and Jon Benjamin. Like most of Seder’s forays into the entertainment industry, however, the movie’s destiny was ill-fated.The words, “This film was entirely written and shot by June of 2001” grace the back—a sad but necessary disclaimer. Three months later, few would be jumping at the chance to distribute a comedy that opened on its protagonist aiming a rocket launcher at a New York skyscraper.

Both men also did time in Air America’s radio studio during the station’s heyday. Maron co-hosted Morning Sedition with radio vet Mark Riley. Seder, meanwhile, did The Majority Report with Garofalo. After a fair deal of shifting, Seder and Maron ultimately left the station. And now, five years after first helping the station get off the ground, both men have returned to Air America—or Air America’s kitchen.

[snip]

After introductory statements, which find Maron declaring his hate—and then love—for Seder (“let’s not rebound too far to the other side,” retorts Seder), things take a turn for the serious.The interplay between the somber and the comedic is another balancing act in the hour-long show. For a new program, however, Break Room Live has done a good job maintaining stasis. “A lot of people are active and a lot of people are progressive, but a lot of people don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Maron explains to me after the show. “And I think our dynamic speaks to that.”


Here's Maron flying solo in yesterday's show. He's GOOD at this. It isn't every day you see cogent political commentary about Afghanistan coming from a guy who looks like the homeless man on the subway distributing 9/11 truth tracts.

Webcasting allows people like Maron (and I would guess someday, Randi Rhodes), who have this peculiar kind of genius, to have an outlet that doesn't involve trying to satisfy guys in suits who have to worry about whether the SelectQuote guys are going to continue feeding Dan Tullis and Joel Clark to us.

The problem with Web-based broadcasting, however, is that it isn't Right There yet. If I want to watch or listen to a radio broadcast or video, I have to turn on the PC, launch the browser, and navigate to the site. If I'm on our desktop PC, I'm confined to our home office. If I want satellite radio, I have to buy a receiver, pay a subscription fee, and if I want to listen in the house, it's highly likely that I'll need an antenna, which takes us back to the days of analog TV. Terrestrial radio, however, is Right There. And until Web radio is Right There, it's always going to be the Designated Family Shithead of radio, despite the ads for Select Quote, and listening to Thom Hartmann shill for some dentist, and Rachel Maddow selling face cream, and various penis enlargers and anti-anxiety tape courses, and the rest of the snake oil that does its marketing on AM radio.

However, Melina sent me this post by Darren Murph at Engadget, pointing out that $7.2 billion in the stimulus package is dedicated to expanding broadband internet access, with the FCC being instructed to create a national broadband plan to ensure that everyone in the U.S. has broadband access. The question about this, however, is how this access is going to be delivered. Of course what I would like to see is a the economies of scale that would come with ubiquitous, taxpayer-financed wireless access, but somehow I don't think the telecom and cable companies are going to allow Congress to go along with that idea, and as we know, money talks and we as citizens don't. But ubiquitous Wifi and internet radios on every kitchen countertop would certainly make AM radio, and the limited access that alternative voices have to it, the equivalent of a black-and-white set with rabbit ears after the whole thing goes digital.

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Friday, April 04, 2008

Mike Malloy Explains It All For You
Posted by Jill | 10:17 AM
Whether you are an Air America listener or have been rubbing your hands together waiting for the final death-gasp, you will want to hear the inimitable Mike Malloy's history of the network, and perspective on the latest foofarah involving Randi Rhodes.

And while you're over there, pop in and give Sam Seder some moral support. He's over in that madhouse trying to hang onto his health insurance for his kid, and he could use it.

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Saturday, February 17, 2007

The Greening of Air America Radio
Posted by Jill | 8:08 AM
You may have thought that there wasn't on the face of the earth a bigger booster of Air America Radio than Your Humble Blogger, but that's only because you don't know Melina. She is the gal I go to for all the latest scoop, and this week she posted her thoughts on the sale of AAR to Stephen and Mark Green and a link to this at best pointless and at worst ominous article from the New York Observer about the new owners, for yesterday, the hopefully not clairvoyantly named bankruptcy court judge, Robert Drain approved the sale.

For a rather small but vocal, persistent, and some might say pathologically loyal army, Air America's future is about three things: Marc Maron, Marc Maron, and Marc Maron. Some believe that the sale is a Harbinger of Healing for those of us who had the proverbial rug yanked out from under us when Danny Goldberg, a.k.a. The Man Who Destroyed AAR For Good, cancelled Morning Sedition. I am somewhat less sanguine about the whole thing, partially because Goldberg, a man who wrote a book called "How the Left Lost Teen Spirit" and then cancelled the show with the potential to harvest the young demographic with the departure of Howard Stern for Sirius, is a good friend of Mark Green, who is going to be running the network; but also because, well, Mark Green is going to be running the network.

In the 1980's, Nelson Doubleday of the New York Mets organization knew that the way to build a winning team is to hire good smart baseball people, give them the money they needed to work with, and leave them alone. When Doubleday was bought out by the Wilpon family, Fred Wilpon essentially gave the team to his son as a plaything, and the latter brought us Vince Coleman, Eddie Murray, and a flock of forgettables that very nearly made 1962 look like the good old days. Finally, the Wilpons got smart and returned to the Doubleday Philosophy, hired Omar Minaya, and have mostly left him alone to build a winning team.

Particularly with Air America's checkered history, it's important for the network to bring in good radio people and then leave them alone. The company's initial instincts in terms of talent were mostly correct, aside from the fish-out-of-water Sue Ellicott, Lizz Winstead, whose form of humor doesn't really work well on radio, and Janeane Garofalo, who may have been the marquee name, but never really took to the medium. But because AAR has been largely run as "Hey, kids, let's put on a radio network", one mistake after another has been made, culminating with the Era of Disastrous Danny, whose idea of improving the product was to cancel Morning Sedition and give the woefully uninspired without his cohorts Mark Riley two solo hours in the morning, cancel Unfiltered and replace it with Jerry Springer, and replace Mike Malloy in New York with the offensively bourgeois Satellite Sisters. If you want to identify the point at which Air America went on life support, it was the day some suit with some money invested decided Danny Goldberg, a record company executive, knew anything about radio. For that matter, I'd like to know who decided that Danny Goldberg knew anything about anything. Here's a sample of Danny Goldberg about John Kerry, from 2004:

Many of my progressive friends want to prod John Kerry . I agree that he needs to more clearly differentiate himself from Bush and he must not take for granted the votes of veryone fed up with the current regime. Young people and other undecided voters particularly need clarity or else they will be tempted not to vote or to vote for Nader.

However I cant help bt be optimisitc (sic) about Kerry. I think he has more of a common touch that his overly formal speaking style owuld indicate. I like the old photos with John Lennon. I like the emotiuonsl (sic) connection he has to many fellow veterans, and I thought his silent dignififed(sic) appearence at the Reagan library was exactly the right touch.


I guess that's why he thought Jerry Springer was a better fit for AAR than the Presidential Palm Pilot, Morning Remembrance, and Rapture Watch.

Jon Larsen, former Morning Sedition producer, weighed in on the Goldberg/Green connection upon announcement of Morning Sedition's cancellation:

Rather than more of Sedition's comedy, Goldberg wanted the show to interview former NYC mayoral candidate Mark Green.

After I was gone, Green started showing up on Sedition with such frequency that it led the consistently-favorable magazine TimeOut NY to make its first negative comments about the show, with a dig about Green's frequency as a guest.


Larsen's remarks, written long before Mark Green figured into the Air America ownership equation, are ominous, particularly given Danny Goldberg's status as a donor to Green's 1998 Senate campaign.

I hate to give axe-grinder Brian Maloney of Radio Equalizer any credit for anything, and I'm not going to give him the dignity of a link (you can look it up for yourself), but he did have some information in April 2006 about the amount of money Goldberg stood to receive after destroying AAR's programming and then jumping ship:

While exiting day-to-day operations at Air America, Goldberg will continue in a minor, contractually-based role, working one day a week from home. Through the end of 2006, he'll be paid $400,000 on an annualized basis for his temporary role as "Vice-Chair".

In addition, he'll receive $400,000 in deferred compensation covering 2005, $100,000 to cover 2006 travel and entertainment, plus ongoing clerical support. An initial share award representing 2% of the company will now become fully vested.


Which just goes to show you that it isn't just good staunch Republicans like Lee Raymond and William Nardelli who can wreck a company and then ride off with a nice golden parachute.

So given the history of mutual back-scratching between Mark Green and Danny Goldberg, and given the fact that Mark Green has zero radio operations experience and is, like Jeff Wilpon and indeed George W. Bush before him, being given a company by a wealthy relative to use as a plaything, you'll forgive me for being less than optimistic that the new owners are a harbinger of a return to the Golden Days of the Milfingtons, Lawton Smalls, and the days when we really believed Air America would make a difference.

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